I think this is entirely legitimate criticism. It's not at all clear to me that the net impact of Effective Altruism, from end to end, has even been positive. And if it has been negative, it has been negative BECAUSE of the impact the movement has had on AI timelines.
This should prompt FAR more reflection than I have seen within the community. People should be racking their brains for what went wrong and crying mea culpa. And working for OpenAI/Anthropic/etc/etc should not be seen as "effective". (Well, maybe now it's okay. Cat's out of the bag. But certainly being an AI capabilities researcher in 2020 did a lot of harm.)
As far as I can tell, the "Don't Build the Torment Nexus" community went ahead and built the Torment Nexus because it was both intellectually interesting and a path for individuals to acquire more power. Oops.
And to be clear, this pales in comparison - in my mind at least - to any harms done from the FTX debacle or the sexual abuse scandals. And that is not in any way a trivialization of either of those harms, both of which were also pretty severe. "Accelerate AI timelines" is just that bad.
I think this is entirely legitimate criticism. It's not at all clear to me that the net impact of Effective Altruism, from end to end, has even been positive. And if it has been negative, it has been negative BECAUSE of the impact the movement has had on AI timelines.
This should prompt FAR more reflection than I have seen within the community. People should be racking their brains for what went wrong and crying mea culpa. And working for OpenAI/Anthropic/etc/etc should not be seen as "effective". (Well, maybe now it's okay. Cat's out of the bag. But certainly being an AI capabilities researcher in 2020 did a lot of harm.)
As far as I can tell, the "Don't Build the Torment Nexus" community went ahead and built the Torment Nexus because it was both intellectually interesting and a path for individuals to acquire more power. Oops.
And to be clear, this pales in comparison - in my mind at least - to any harms done from the FTX debacle or the sexual abuse scandals. And that is not in any way a trivialization of either of those harms, both of which were also pretty severe. "Accelerate AI timelines" is just that bad.