"AI researchers such as Timnit Gebru affirm that longtermism is everywhere in Silicon Valley. The current race to create advanced AI by companies like OpenAI and DeepMind is driven in part by the longtermist ideology. Longtermists believe that if we create a “friendly” AI, it will solve all our problems and usher in a utopia, but if the AI is “misaligned”, it will destroy humanity...."
It reminds me of casting a golden calf and then worshipping it as a god. There aren’t even the seeds of the solution to any social problem in LLMs. It’s the classic issue of being knowledgeable about one thing and assuming they are knowledgeable about all things.
I think we agree. LLMs and automation in general have a massive labor saving potential, but because of the way our economic systems are structured this could actually lead in the opposite direction of a Utopia instead of toward one as was suggested by the “longtermists” (weird to type that out). The seeds as you suggest are very different than towards the end of conflict and want.
"We need to make room for misinformation on our platforms otherwise we won't have mass appeal. A lot of people love to scapegoat populations who can't effectively defend themselves, and leaving them out just because they're contributing to creeping fascism and multiple ongoing genocides is just petty."
I will never participate in an instance which is federated with Meta or any other profit-driven instance. If profit is more important than responsibility and safety, then irresponsibility and danger can be the only consequence.
I live around it. I know plenty of people who aren't all the way in the deep end but could eventually go all the way into the deep end. What really helps them not make that final leap is that there is an extremely well deserved stigma against Nazi ideology, the most notorious strain of fascism. There is a gradient and there are plenty of secondary believers whose minds are primed to support a strongman on the elimination of all the bad people keeping society down but would use nicer words to describe it, but tertiary believers who have just been immersed in a deluge of contradictory information can be reasoned with. On this instance at least there is not a lot of tolerance for appeals to popular prejudices which may work out in a general crowd where there isn't a sufficient challenge to it.