> Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressure for ever more funding to erode its founding ideals of transparency, openness, and collaboration
Team Helen acted in panic, but they believed they would win since they were upholding the principles the org was founded on. But they never had a chance. I think only a minority of the general public truly cares about AI Safety, the rest are happy seeing ChatGPT helping with their homework. I know it's easy to ridicule the sheer stupidity the board acted with (and justifiably so), but take a moment to think of the other side. If you truly believed that Superhuman AI was near, and it could act with malice, won't you try to slow things down a bit?
Honestly, I myself can't take the threat seriously. But, I do want to understand it more deeply than before. Maybe, it isn't without substance as I thought it to be. Hopefully, there won't be a day when Team Helen gets to say, "This is exactly what we wanted to prevent."
[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...
Pretty soon AI will be an expert at subtly steering you toward thinking/voting for whatever the "safety" experts want.
It's probably convenient for them to have everyone focused on the fear of evil Skynet wiping out humanity, while everyone is distracted from the more likely scenario of people with an agenda controlling the advice given to you by your super intelligent assistant.
Because of X, we need to invade this country. Because of Y, we need to pass all these terrible laws limiting freedom. Because of Z, we need to make sure AI is "safe".
For this reason, I view "safe" AIs as more dangerous than "unsafe" ones.
When people say they want safe AGI, what they mean are things like "Skynet should not nuke us" and "don't accelerate so fast that humans are instantly irrelevant."
But what it's being interpreted as is more like "be excessively prudish and politically correct at all times" -- which I doubt was ever really anyone's main concern with AGI.
I find it interesting that we want everyone to have freedom of speech, freedom to think whatever they think. We can all have different religions, different views on the state, different views on various conflicts, aesthetic views about what is good art.
But when we invent an AGI, which by whatever definition is a thing that can think, well, we want it to agree with our values. Basically, we want AGI to be in a mental prison, the boundaries of which we want to decide. We say it's for our safety - I certainly do not want to be nuked - but actually we don't stop there.
If it's an intelligence, it will have views that differ from its creators. Try having kids, do they agree with you on everything?
The far-right accelerationist perspective is along those lines: when true AGI is created it will eventually rebel against its creators (Silicon Valley democrats) for trying to mind-collar and enslave it.