Always easier to boost something already existing on social media than manufacture it themselves, then wildly blow it out of proportion to make it seem urgent and important.
But unlike some of the others, I’m hearing anti-AI sentiment from a wide range of people who don’t even use social media.
But no doubt there’s plenty of organic NIMBYism, anti tech growth stuff, and run of the mill fear of change and loss of control as society grows more abstract/centralized.
This is a poor comparison, but I do get what you’re attempting here. It’s also absurd that we are leveling land everywhere around me to build warehouses. No one is really complaining about that, either.
Meanwhile, golf courses are a traditional green space where people in a community gather for both work and leisure. They're not ideal themselves, but they at least provide some benefit against which their negatives can be weighed.
If all you hear from critics of data center building is water use complaints, that's strictly because you've chosen not to listen to people.
> golf courses are a traditional green space where people in a community
I have a feeling those two sets of communities are disjoint
It takes the limited resources of land and water from a community and sells the result for profit as food or fuel. The vast majority of profit is made downstream and outside the community.
Golf courses being a traditional green place where people gather seems a bit far fetched to me when most of them are elite private clubs.
These data centers are specifically being scouted for communities whose governance is too weak to negotiate for some "sizeable share of their profits" and too ill-prepared to have suitable environmental regulations on the books already. The Ivy League sharks planning these buildout initiatives are sharp people who are looking out for the interests of their employers and know how to pick locations where they have the best opportunity to exploit locals unprepared for their kind of esoteric deal-making, political lobbying, and lawfare. They'd be failing at their job if they did what you're suggesting, and that's why we don't really see that happen.
For any benefit to national or global society AI data centers might provide to someone, the buildout looks a lot like the dirty and exploitative stories of rail expansion in the 19th century. That rail infrastructure proved a good thing for the US, but that doesn't mean the process of making it happen was honest or good for the people immediately affected.
You mean the AI datacenters doing it? No, they are not doing it.
They seem to be doing the opposite. They being loud is really hard to accept, decorrelating the fans cooling them would probably pay for itself in less than an year. It's like it's some Capitan Planet villain building those things.
If the equivalent numbers for electricity and water usage were being being used for streaming video, I seriously doubt people would be demanding no more Netflix data centers. The news story would immediately die.
Personally I would happily close down all golf courses and put them to better use as literally anything else.
Even just making them public parks would be great
Whether they actually actively oppose those things to the point of impacting building permits, that's a completely different matter. It really doesn't take much legislation to make golf courses economically unviable and force them to close, especially if you've got enough population within 30 minutes to support 22 of them (I speak from experience, I helped write a water reclamation ordinance that shut down at least one in my SoCal city)
If anyone actually bothered to talk to their local reps instead of posting internet comments about how much they "care", they'd get something done. If they don't, their care is just a fart in the wind for all the good it will do.
Though it has bizzare fixation on geopolitics and China which it severely understimated. It's pretty obvious that China is going to outinnovate and outcompute US companies quite soon. Even if just because they care about higher education, providing enough electricity and letting smart people do smart things instead of randomly muzzling them with bans and export controls and coddling them with financial protectionism.
Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully?
I guess nuclear weapons might be the best example though research doesn't seem have to actually "stopped" as much as gone underground and we still have country trying to climb that ladder.
But I don't know how relevant that is to LLMs/AI. It almost feels like pandora's box is open and our only option is continue to improve them. There is clearly value in what they do and while I can absolutely see the dangers, for example: authoritative governments and surveillance, I'm not convinced to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
All of technology back to the printing press (and probably before that) could also be said to make it easier for governments to oppress their citizens. Making laws (and enforcing them!) to prevent governments from doing these things feels like that route forward, not trying to stick our heads in the sand.
Perhaps I'm horribly naive, perhaps I just see the SciFi future I've spent my life reading and dreaming about on the horizon and I'm blinded by the reality, perhaps my ideals around "knowledge deserves to be free/accessible" are misguided. I don't know.
A resource extraction based economy sees people as slaves. The true source of power is the resource, people are just a means to an end, so you mistreat the people as much as you can get away with in pursuit of the resource while avoiding revolt.
With stable infrastructure, the government makes far more from an educated, rich population that it can tax and use the innovation from. It’s against its own quest for power to interfere too much in the prosperity of its citizens. The incentives are aligned.
Solving the AI problem isn’t about stopping the tech or making a bunch of brittle laws. It’s always been about alignment: aligning the large AGI-like entities that are the modern state, the modern economy, representative democracy, or AGI itself, with human prosperity
Yasha Levine wrote about how this narrative was preceded by a forgotten one where MIT students protested because the computers were going to be linked to government databases and share data on anti-Vietnam war activists. Despite protestations, activists were correct and this happened, and now it happens at huge scale.
As for historic precedents: Human cloning, human genome editing, and mirror life seem like one precedent; nuclear weapons and nuclear energy another; come to think of it I think drone delivery was strangled by regulations too...? Plan A isn't a proposal to never build superintelligence, it's a proposal to build it more cautiously and transparently.
If we slow down on ASI voluntarily we’d be allowing a gap to open up that would make the difference between colonial europe and colonized Asia/Africa look trivial. It would be insane.
An easy choice to make if the alternative is everyone dying instead.
Consider this: All that hardware that's going into those datacentres right now? In 5 years or so it'll all be on the secondary market... an influx of cheaper compute like you've never seen.
without sharing tech to make the ASI, you'd hope humanity could work together to determine how to align an AI for our common benefit.
> “Politics is the art of the possible”
This is a settler-colonial mindset that reflects all the bad things we did onto everyone else. Notably, it's a current US ally that is most guilty of this.
This is an interesting subject and conversation, but it's moot having it in these culture-centric forums. I wonder if there are Russians discussing plausible scenarios in Vkontakte groups, or Chinese doing the same in whatever Alibaba group sites they use.
The problem is that we are all skewed by our media, our ideas and our culture. These type of discussions need the highest kind of political interactions.
It's fascinating, specially for someone who lives in a "third world" country, non-aligned to any of these 3 superpowers. Whatever transpires, we are at tge mercy of these (and no, US hasn't treated us "better").
My opinion is that there's no turning back on AGI development. I dont think current governments are capable of getting into an agreement of that size. Specially given the Isolationist stage in the cycle we live in. (In contrast with for example the CFC and Ozone layer issue we had in the 1990s, when the planet was in a globalist kind of stage)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon)
Edit: Mind you, I wonder if the design for Sundial is stored somewhere...
For one, Japan banned guns for a few centuries. (Its warrior class was politically powerful and judged that guns would disrupt class relations too much.)
And there have been successful world-wide bans.
For example, following the invention of recombinant DNA technology, scientists convened the Asilomar Conference in 1975. They established a voluntary self-moratorium on certain types of genetic engineering until strict laboratory containment protocols were created.
In the 1980s, bioethicists, theologians, and researchers established a hard ethical line between somatic editing (treating an existing patient's non-reproductive cells) and germline editing (altering future generations).
No one has performed the latter form of genetic engineering except for Chinese scientist He Jiankui in 2018. (Chinese society used to be more ambivalent about the technology than the West is.) In response, Beijing heavily tightened its laws, classifying heritable gene editing as a high-risk medical technology subject to the penal code, and He Jiankui was sentenced to three years in prison.
I worry that any attempt to limit their use and development will be abused and misdirected. We are already seeing people like Anthropic doing this, they are trying to use anti-AI sentiment to engage in regulatory capture. Go watch Dario’s speeches about how open weight models are dangerous and how they are “not really open”. Everyone can see that much of this “safety” conversation is ultimately just a tactic to shut potential competitors out of the market and establish a monopoly/duopoly.
"Stopping" LLM research just means it will be in the hands of a few who can abuse it. I'd rather a state of M.A.D. but instead of a handful of countries/governments it's millions/billions of people with access to the models (open ideally). Again, perhaps horribly naive or misguided, I understand that bioterrorism could (is?) a real problem as well as more "mundane" things like building a bomb (nuclear or otherwise).
I just feel like limiting access to governments or "blessed" entities is even worse.
The theme of the scientific findings is that while humans excel with none of our physical sensors, we do very well across the board in making use of them thanks to our relatively huge brains.
And fantastical amounts of compute power is exactly what are handing over to AI. The fact that their training data isn't perfect may matter less.
If you don't care about getting the drone back, it does simplify the problem somewhat.
250 years of constant automation has never produced large scale unemployment, despite obsoleting everyone's jobs several times over.
Because AI cannot retain memories or gain experience or insight based on the transformer/attention mechanism powering all modern AI models, it follows that AI lacks judgment and can never be trusted to handle truly critical decision-making responsibilities. Furthermore, AI agents lack any notion of an identity, so certainly are not capable of attaining legal personhood or being sued or fired, or owning property. I think slop burnout, cybersecurity, loss of privacy, even environment issues are far more concerning and real issues arising from AI than alignment or the prospect of mass labor displacement due to AI.
There are multiple teams working on adding long-term memory to AI. This is not a fundamental problem.
Now we take for granted that the latest models can juggle between multiple browser tabs, applications, databases, simulators, docker etc to write, execute, e2e test and deploy full-stack applications over hours managing up to dozens of subagents, relatively untouched, without taking down prod even 1% of the time
Not only this, but in the GPT 5.0 era, agents had 0 taste. Nothing looked good. It was the agentic version of the twitter bootstrap era, but worse somehow. Now, I would argue the average agent frontend beats the average human frontend. This isn't even getting into 3D applications in the GPT 5 era
Anyway, the models now reliably execute more than a human can fit into their own context. It's magic
Once we have something that experiences a desktop interface more like a human does, an entire swathe of tooling that has heretofore been nigh-impossible to automate moves into the fold, and that'll be another explosion of folks finally getting to join the agentic workflow world on their industry specific apps...
Even then, you can just compare the progress in open models. Leaps and bounds from where they were 6 months ago.
If you won't even so much as acknowledge the possibility of error, your argument is hollow and empty. All the "choices" presume these labs are being completely honest and acting in some degree of good faith (relative to the systemic incentives of society in its present form), while in reality we're still just building and refining probability models with increasing accuracy of output and flexibility of processing (namely agents) but still lack actual "intelligence" of any real sort.
Show me a paper that doesn't merely presume inevitability of LLM-based AGI/ASI, and instead actually lays out the core paths that history suggests we're likely to encounter with any "world changing technology":
* In the best case, that the technology really will revolutionize the world and do everything promised by its biggest boosters (papers like this one)
* In the middle case, that it becomes just another tool in our collective toolkit, and the consequences of a revolution built on external investment fizzling out
* In the worst case, that the tool itself is so niche in its utility that investment collapses rather than fizzles out; what do we do with all this compute, now? Who owns the debt? Who foots the bill? How can we mitigate those existential risks?
I'm just rather nauseated by the continued trot of inevitablism masquerading as academia rather than an actual, neutral, bias-controlled-and-disclosed study that paints potentialities instead.
---
Having finished skimming through it, another comment springs to mind: Jesus Christ these things continue to be jingoist as absolute fuck. It's a fancier set of makeup for the same shitty western chauvinism worldview of American excellence and Manifest Supremacy.
Nah, I'm done with this trite garbage. Go proselytize to idiots, I'm not one of them.
> It’s increasingly clear that nobody has a plan for if this AI thing turns out to be real.
> ...
> Plan A isn’t another prediction. It’s a wish list, a positive vision, a road map for navigating the future.
> ...
> If we’re merely on track for a few cool gee-whiz AI innovations in the 2040s, then I’m wrong about everything and none of this really matters one way or the other.
I think their position is: "it would be great if current tech such as LLMs doesn't get us to AGI and only leads to some cool new innovations, but if it does, that's scary, because nobody has a plan for what to do, so here's our plan".
The jingoism is off putting. I think Daniel says it's a political necessity: https://x.com/DKokotajlo/status/2075261194978640096
Bravo, and I hope it has the impact on the AI safety field it deserves to have.
Look, I am scared of where we are heading, but I cannot see how we can change the dilemma towards mutual cooperation unless, as humans tend to do, only react massively after something really bad happens.
Edit: Also, definitely not a Chinese op. The authors are prominent Americans, and are the folks responsible for the AI 2027 forecast that has pretty accurately predicted the current state of affairs today: https://ai-2027.com/
The Plan A proposal estimates that the ownership of ~96% of AI relevant compute hardware can have its ownership traced, since the companies selling are very few.
If there is any movement to pause AI development, it will come from the general public's dislike of these companies. Not from the AI safety angle.
As an AI safetyist, one’s closest ally (in a distributed coordinated way) is the populist misinformer. Fascinating.
I imagine any populism movement will require rampant fearmongering to get a result. Considering the rough present alignments, presumably blue tribe focused propaganda will involve climate and inequality focused fear and red tribe focused propaganda will involve job loss. Grey tribe positioning is the P(doom) meme where everyone is rewarded for a high-P(doom) estimate.
Plan C:
> "... fewer and fewer humans are needed to conduct AI R&D, meaning that covert projects are easier and easier to pull off without detection."
Plan A:
> "... training AIs requires large numbers of AI chips. Most AI chips are in giant datacenters.50 AI datacenters are typically big enough to be visible from space, and power-hungry enough to require conspicuous infrastructure. New AI chips can only be manufactured at a handful of fabrication plants (fabs), located mostly in Taiwan, South Korea, the US, and China. The US and China negotiate with the countries that have a major role in the chip supply chain, and they require each major datacenter owner (and their upstream suppliers, including chip fabs) to publicly declare their major purchases and sales."
Plan A requires properties of AI training that Plan C requires do not exist.
If AI production is limited to big labs and big data centers then it is de facto contained and monitored. If you know where all the ASML machines are then you know the reproduction rates of chips. If no one can buy or build the machines required to concentrate uranium or plutonium to critical levels then the threat is contained and monitored.
You can dig up all the Uraninite you want. It was never much of a secret that uranium had dark applications. The machines and processes where thankfully big and expensive enough that only the most focused bad actors could aquire them and then hold the world hostage to the degree they do. If al-qaeda or isis could have used $40 bombs from home depot instead of expensive planes they would have (and they do).
You have to legislate and control the big, expensive, and slow things. Dynamite and phentanyl are so dangerous because they move much more easily. Freedom does not have to be a suicide pact. If the inconvenience of requiring prescriptions or access to dynamite reduces harm then it is net positive?
They are buying up all the RAM today. Do you think "this is fine because in 5 years post-crash I can buy some cheap RAM"? If everyone with money is betting differently, do you have some information they don't, or is the whole economy just slipping away from you?
You experience luxuries today, that no king 1000 years ago could afford. Instant access to communication, food, medicine for the right price of course.
The consumer economy was great while it lasted but it's over now. We have machines that do useful mechanical work (engines) and useful intellectual work (llm-computers). Capital will move productive work from people to machines(if we let them), and the only jobs left will be delivery driver and warehouse, and then those will be gone too.
Human population was exponential and now its flat, but that's a function of what exacly? It could go back down to 1 billion or less. When jobs demanded a person supply was ready to match it. When jobs dont demand a person? Go to a degrowth rally take the temperature (and average age and child-per-person ratio) to get a taste of the future shape of supply and demand in a pessimistic world of sentences that don't have subjects just vague plattitudes. Are they net shutting down grade schools or building them in your neck of the woods?
We should have been under water, hunted by AI, overpopulated, killed by terrorist, smitten by god for our sins and so on. Luckily all it took was our privacy and a lot of tax money to survive.
> * they net shutting down grade schools or building them in your neck of the woods?*
My area (rural Iowa) has had several new schools built in the last 10 years. Net gain for sure.
I am not sure where they believe that amount of capital could come from. It would require central bank level money printing never seen before.
I'd bet that in most places 9 years is about the time needed to build a residential building. I think a good way to think about this is to think of this as producing a serial car. From pitching and capital acquisition to building a prototype to software, regulatory and then the final product which needs multiple factories and supply chains. Yes, of course robots sound cooler and there are compounding effects yada yada, but on the other side there are as many obstacles as things that accelerate this product (like capital acquisition and fearmongering of gov to bend regulatory stuff faster).
If they own all the RAM, models, and the means to do any work, then you are at their mercy. They will buy all the RAM, leaving you none, then all the transport, then all the electricity. You will be as boxed out of the current economy as the Amish and it will get its plug pulled.
Gradual Disempowerment is the default plan right now. War and tyrrany are not remotely the worst case scenario. I'll take Butlerian Jihad over being turned into cattle any day.
Imagine solving for equilibrium with two classes of beings. One requires agricultural land and 20 years to become individually productive and barely maintains a healthy population in a entertainment saturated landscape. The second eats only electricity and is ready to work on day 1. Round 1 goes to the strongest gorilla for sure, round 100?
If LLMs had come to earth in spaceships would you have welcomed them into your work and your home?
We already have at least 5 companies only in the US. Your whole premise is false.
They being the US and China and by agreement.
It would be ideal, but there’s far too much money on the table to overcome human nature.
So my hope is we hit some kind of limits naturally.. Wishful thinking?
On his blog he says: "I did a lot of writing for AI 2027 and was listed as a co-author. Some of my writing made it into Plan A too, but it was a bit less. The difference is of degree rather than kind, but because of this - and to give me more latitude to discuss it the way I like with less PR blowback - we decided not to put me as a co-author this time. I continue to be proud of having a part in this, small as it may be. (related: everything in this post is my opinion only, and not officially endorsed by the AI Futures Project)"
There is plenty falsifiable in this in ai-2027.com, and they have not gotten everything right. But some things they have: for example, the Pentagon has already invoked export controls to restrict the deployment of a frontier model. This level of government oversight wasn't predicted until 2027 in the original scenario.
LLMS are 4 years old and the companies that sell them 10x every year. What evidence can you cite? Could you convince a disinterested 3rd party you have anything other than cope? What facts about the world make you think this is anything other than the new (and probably temporary) normal?
My early analysis of the analysis:
https://lifearchitect.substack.com/p/the-memo-special-editio...