ig I'm skeptical of general infohazards, but there's definitely personal infohazards, like if you find an easier way to do a thing you think is bad but that you're really tempted by anyway
e.g., telling a heroin addict trying to quit that you left a bunch of dope their house
![Twenty years ago, when the idea of AI taking over the world in our lifetimes still struck most of us as the unconstrained fantasy of those who knew too much science fiction and too little science, many of us would say things like:
Look, the part of the story that’s wildly implausible is that a recursively self-improving superintelligence will just explode from some hacker’s basement and take over the world without warning. If it’s going to happen, we’ll see many warning signs first. We’ll see, I dunno, AI agents breaking out of containment, conspiring with each other to hack websites, in fanatical pursuit of whatever strange goals they have. And then, of course, we’d see major math problems getting solved by AIs—even the Clay Millennium Problems. That will be the time to panic! Wake me up when that happens!
Twenty years ago, the above was a take that even my most conservative, skeptical colleagues in academic CS would’ve gladly endorsed.
If you want to know my current take, you simply start with the one above, then update on the fact that the wild prophecies have come true. The first rumblings, I’d say, came a decade ago with AlphaGo, they got noticeably louder with LLMs and coding and reasoning agents, and they’ve accelerated this summer and fall into a crescendo of wonders and terrors that one needs to be a particular kind of idiot to deny.
I recoil from the neverending shell game where you say “oh sure, of course AI can now [escape from its sandbox / solve Millennium Problems / whichever dramatic thing it most recently did], no one ever denied that [I did deny it], wake me up when AI does [thing AI hasn’t yet done but is going to do next year], that’s when I’ll reevaluate my whole worldview [no I won’t].” Where no matter how fast the rollercoaster accelerates, even after your whole familiar world has vanished behind you, you’re still inventing reasons why it doesn’t count.
My position on AI is merely the conservative, skeptical position of 2006, updated with…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:h25avmes6g7fgcddc3xj7qmg/bafkreieud3hfcwbw6yqa6h2ke33b2z7f6xo4zzfccddvy5ro45co4bmcuq)
