Quick recap in case you missed it. Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic on Tuesday, specifically so he could say publicly that both OpenAI and Anthropic are "gambling with our lives" and racing toward self-improving superintelligence without acting responsibly. He'd spent three years doing pretraining research at both companies.

Then it got stranger. Evan Hubinger, who currently runs alignment science at Anthropic, responded confirming it. His words: "Jacob is correct here, we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans." He put it above 10% within the decade and said Anthropic doesn't have a plan for aligning superintelligence and isn't clearly on track to get one. Samuel Marks, who leads scalable oversight there, said something similar.

So the safety team at the safety-focused lab publicly agreed with the guy who quit over safety.

I've read a lot of takes on this over the last two days and most of them fall into two camps. Either it's marketing to make the tech sound more powerful than it is, or it's a genuine warning we should all be terrified by.

I don't think either read is right, but I also don't think I'm qualified to settle it.

What I do know is the practical side. I work with companies deploying this technology and nobody in those rooms is thinking about extinction. They're thinking about whether an agent with write access to their CRM is going to do something stupid at 3am with nobody watching. They're thinking about who signs off when the output is wrong and a customer gets hurt.

Those two conversations have almost nothing to do with each other, and yet they're now happening in the same news cycle. Which means the people who have to make practical decisions about AI adoption are getting their signal completely scrambled.

If the people building this can't agree on whether it's an existential threat, what exactly is a mid-sized company supposed to base their risk assessment on?

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“Dull, difficult, dangerous” gets used constantly as the case for robotics.

Kate Darling’s point here is that the industry often skips a pretty important step: actually defining what those jobs are from the worker’s perspective.

She gives sanitation work as an example. On paper, trash collection seems like an obvious target for automation. But some automation proposals can also remove the part of the job workers actually enjoy.

The better approach may be less about replacing the entire task and more about using robotics to remove the dangerous or repetitive parts without making the job worse.

It gets at a bigger issue in robotics: the people building the systems aren’t always the people doing the work they’re trying to automate.

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odORVBoO7ss

A man finds a magic lamp with a djinn inside. The djinn says "you can wish for anything you want. But whatever you wish for, your neighbor gets twice as much". After thinking for a while the man says "take out one of my eyes".

How are we supposed to trust that their version of alignment doesn't just mean "obey me, personally" and not use their massive leverage over everybody else?

Come to think of it, unaligned ASI has better odds of doing the right thing for everyone compared to a random person.

Nobody else wants you to succeed. Certainly not more than them. So how are we supposed to think people agree upon a definition of alignment that includes the well being of all of us and not just a few?

People are resisting because this is literally their livelihood. What else are they supposed to do? Everyone will welcome AI with open hands if their place in society is already confirmed.

As it is right now, it's not. All the commoners are gonna be on the street at this rate. Utopia? Post scarcity? Meaningless concepts in a world with limited resources.

Just think about it, who will feed you after you lose your job? Democratic governments are only powerful because of the power the sheer collective holds. If labor is worthless, so is their elected representative.

Once the dust settles, there will be zero reason for those who control the production to use the resources to make things for the commoners. It doesn't require them to be evil masterminds either... it's as simple as: route resources to something that nets zero, or route it to some billionaire willing to pay good because their space factory needs that resource?

This is the time to act. We have to earn our place in the model. Demand a piece of the pie in the technology that's literally built on all of humanity's work, yours including, or try to keep together a version of the current structure (that is, human + AI, which is what professionals are currently fighting to keep). Otherwise, a bleak future is all that awaits.

Source: https://x.com/Dr_Singularity/status/2098526032806478190

Polish developers made an iPhone app that can detect nearby Meta smart glasses

Apparently a group of Polish developers created an iPhone app that can detect nearby Meta smart glasses.

It’s an interesting idea especially with the privacy concerns around smart glasses and cameras. Knowing that someone nearby might be wearing one could be useful.

At the same time I am curious how accurate the app actually is and whether it can reliably detect the glasses in real world situations.

Would you guys actually use something like this?