On one hand, VCs that fund thousands of early-stage startups are inevitably going to fund some bad stuff, even if they try hard to avoid it.
On the other, the older I get the more I worry about the decline of spirituality in the West. Especially in tech, I sometimes feel like I’m living in a hyper rational snowglobe of people optimizing a local maxima, not even considering (and often looking down on) the possibility that there are larger, more important games to play.
The thing is: a16z isn't even trying to avoid it, they are intentionally looking for questionable startups and cultivate a controversial reputation. They seem to have no moral filter whatsoever.
These same VCs have been pushing spirituality on the US via socially conservative politics. It's highly possible that they are only instrumentalizing a value system that they don't really personally buy into, but their strategy does beg a lot of questions. One of which is what role spirituality can actually play in helping here.
For example, Peter Thiel has gone out of his way to give something like sermons on "the anti-christ". At the same time, he hesitates when asked if the human race should survive. What's happening there?
Maybe it's not enough to just have values. Maybe they need to be a particular kind of values. Which is probably implicit in what you meant. I just think it's worth pointing out that a concept like spirituality itself doesn't necessarily mean "good" or pro-social.
To put it bluntly, weren't the people who sacrificed children to Moloc technically "spiritual"?
Yeah, I agree. I meant spirituality in the wholesome sense, not the spiritual bypass or Christian bc the party that supports my company is Christian sense.
I’m a dad who has struggled with this too. I’ve also had the privilege of getting to know a relatively large number of highly successful people.
One thing I’ve noticed is that, yes, to make it into the history books you likely have to pursue your career at the cost of everything else (and be insanely lucky).
But right below that degree of one in a billion success is a much larger group of very successful people who manage to achieve admirable balance in their lives. Their spouses love them, their kids want to spend time with them, and rhey might even have a hobby or two.
The thing is, these people tend to be quieter - a few I know are downright secretive. They aren’t constantly online or in the press seeking validation because they have achieved fulfillment at home and work.
The barrier to change is not just regulation. Regulation is downstream of public opinion. Compare China and the US. In China, public sentiment around AI seems to be a hunger to use it for fear of being left behind. Whereas in America, it's an apathetic pessimism around inequality and safety.
China has seen much faster growth in recent decades, which incentivizes people to work hard and have faith it will yield results. In America, the average standard of living has not improved for a long time, so instead of a desire to change things, like cutting regulation to speed up drug discovery, most Americans are quiet quitting.
In this climate, the unfortunate reality is that we're unlikely to see a popular revolution to drastically change things one way or another. Instead, we're much more likely to see regulatory capture by a small number of wealthy, powerful, motivated people. And everyone else will complain on social media, but that's about it.
we're at the stage of the cycle where we know things are wrong but we don't care enough to do anything about them. unfortunately, it might not be until we live through the consequences that we can muster the energy to care enough again.
This article would be more convincing if it focused on debunking the conspiracy instead of spending all but one hand wavy paragraph presenting a new conspiracy.
The single debunking claim says there are 700k "US top secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce" so normal mortality rates should be higher.
Were these people all part of the normal workforce or a smaller category? Are those death rates total deaths or deaths under suspicious circumstances?
Anecdotally, Amy Eskridge went on a podcast and texted friends saying she was at risk and had no intention of killing herself before supposedly killing herself. Will McCasland and others disappeared under strange circumstances and Will was clearly not just part of a 700k person workforce, he was a general who directed a largely classified $4B annual research budget.
I'm not saying there is a broad conspiracy here but it's worth exploring. I miss real journalism. What a waste of an opportunity to write a good story.
A lot of nonprofits could benefit from someone helping them implement AI and most are 1) competent enough to ensure the fellow hands off their projects before they leave, and 2) to decide if it’s worth continuing to pay for Claude or not.
It’s great the fellows are paid so they are at least somewhat accountable vs volunteers who are often unreliable.
All that said, I bet 80% of what these fellows end up doing is automating fundraising emails…
I'm negative on this proposal because it sounds like Anthropic put the cart before the horse. Today, at this very moment, 9 out of 10 non-profits and NGOs run of IT infrastructure wholly dependent on email servers, office software, and phone calls. For Anthropic to create a positive result from flooding the space with cut-rate FDEs, NGOS would need to have in-place the sort of infrastructure that could accommodate whatever widgets Sonnet generate, not to mention the right personnel to manage that infrastructure long-term. If an NGO's IT Department is already positioned properly to embrace a Claude Corps Missionary, they near-certainly wouldn't need a Claude Corps Missionary because they would need to publicly justify that department's existence year-after-year. So what does this actually look like for the chosen organizations, other than a sales pitch.
I'd argue we don't even know what "intelligence" or "self-awareness" mean.
Humans are conscious which means we experience things, then we develop preferences for certain experiences, then we develop skills for achieving those preferences.
Without consciousness, what is there to be aware of? And why would intelligence emerge and/or what end would it serve?
Intelligence is the ability to have an internal world model then run simulations on that model to choose an optimal course of action. This is true for humans down to flies. Most of what humans do is still the boring innate stuff; it's just that fancy abstract things like "skydiving" get the most attention.
Clearly other animals have "phenomenological experience" i.e. consciousness / qualia without being as intelligent as humans (or necessarily "self aware"). Many people believe consciousness is simply a side effect of intelligence rather than the other way around.
But your body is just a robot suit for replicating nucleic acids and you can follow an unbroken chain of those chemical reactions all the way to the first microbes. Which were still "optimizing for survival" without any intelligence beyond following chemical gradients.
If you say that means even microbes have some amount of qualia then I can't dispute it. Pure physicalism may necessitate panpsychism of some form.
Haha yeah, we're in "who knows" territory. It could just be a foundational truth that all life has an innate unconscious will to survive.
However, it makes more sense to me that consciousness precedes the will to survive. And that doesn't mean the way a microbe experiences life is the same as us. E.g. the fact that we have so much control over our environment might mean we have a much more sensitive and reactive way of engaging with consciousness, whereas maybe a microbe is like an enlightened monk, just chillin because it can't do much about what it experiences anyways.
My guess is that you need consciousness in order to develop preferences for certain experiences, then that pushes us to develop skills to achieve those preferences. AI has something that looks like intelligence but not consciousness or agency.
On the other, the older I get the more I worry about the decline of spirituality in the West. Especially in tech, I sometimes feel like I’m living in a hyper rational snowglobe of people optimizing a local maxima, not even considering (and often looking down on) the possibility that there are larger, more important games to play.