bro what are we doing with these fucking labs "The woman was identified as Daria Sh., a 27- or 28-year-old employee of the Irkutsk anti-plague institute [...]. She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing." "Media reports have described the suspected infection as pneumonic plague, which affects the lungs and can spread between humans through respiratory droplets."

have insect bros considered what kinds of atrocities might be happening inside of dark matter which is 5x more abundant than regular matter? why would it be dark if sketchy stuff wasn't happening in there

The idea that capitalism is natively aligned is naïveté of the first degree. It conveniently overlaps a lot with things that benefit humans because humans fuel the system, run the system, and most humans are mostly good Where humans have faults, so too does capitalism

Actively wanting and choosing to be triggered by stuff is a type of mental illness I don’t feel like it’s well accounted for in psychology and I wonder if that’s because it’s a relatively new thing, especially at the current scale

In all of this we have forgotten to discuss the fact that people *get high* on the idea of the apocalypse. There is a reverie the human organism finds in it, which wells up and recurs throughout history. Of course this doesn't mean that next time isn't different. It could be. Total nuclear war was actually dangerous. But we shouldn't lose sight of the psychology here. People get high on doom.

AI doom usually imagines AI evolutionary fitness going to infinity, with human fitness staying fixed. From this comes "we need to merge", etc. But there are many ways we can increase our effective relative fitness without drastic changes to neural architecture. This is what culture does, for example. This is what engineering does, for example. And even if your framing is this evolutionary one, and you're thinking about longer timescales, we have a huge head start. Greater intelligence doesn't computationally necessitate greater fitness. We have to figure out how to disentangle these more than we currently know how, yes, but they aren't totally and perfectly entangled in all worlds. Insofar as it's something we have to deal with at scale, which there is mounting evidence we do, strong instrumental convergence is ultimately an engineering skill issue. We will be able to simply program these systems much better than we can today.

There are real and potentially fundamental technical problems to solve with respect to building AI systems we actually want and can trust. There is also something in this fact, when you get up close and look at it clearly, that seems to break people's psychology.