One way to understand this is that Dario was simply lying when he said he thinks AGI is close and carries non-negligible X-risk, and that he actually thinks we don’t need regulation yet because it is either far away or the risk is negligible. There have always been people who have claimed that labs simply hype X-risk concerns as a weird kind of marketing strategy. I am somewhat dubious of this claim, but Anthropic’s behaviour here would be well-explained by it being true.
Dr. David Mathers
Karma: 202
Shallow review of technical AI safety, 2024
People will sometimes invest if they think the expected return is high, even if they also think there is a non-trivial chance that the investment will go to zero. During the FTX collapse many people claimed that this is a common attitude amongst venture capitalists, although maybe Google and Amazon are more risk averse?
It’s pretty telling that you think there’s no chance that anyone who doesn’t like your arguments is acting in good faith. I say that as someone who actually agrees that we should (probably, pop. ethics is hard!) reject total utilitarianism on the grounds that bringing someone into existence is just obviously less important than preventing a death, and that this means that longtermist are calling for important resource to be misallocated. (That is true of any false view about how EA resources should be spent though!). But I find your general tone of ‘people have reasons to be biased against me so therefore nobody can possibly disagree with me in good faith or non-fanatically’ extraordinarily off-putting, and think it’s most likely effect is to cause a backfire where people in the middle move towards the simple total utilitarian view.
What would “ulterior motives” be here? Do you think Thorstad is consciously lying? That seems really weird to me.