If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
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Oh, by the way, Google is building a system to allow AI to spend money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s6nGMcyr7k
Read it. Weep. I'm not sure if the authors have met humanity.
https://www.amazon.com/Anyone-Builds-Everyone-Dies-Superhuman/dp/0316595640
The post warns about the dangers of unregulated AI development, referencing a book and a YouTube video, and sparking concerns about Google's AI spending system.
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- 01Story posted
Sep 20, 2025 at 7:59 AM EDT
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From my PoV, our "shortish-term profits are the ONLY metric that matters" global techno-capitalist system is vastly more dangerous than AI.
What gets me about 'rationalism' is how ahistorical it is. No reference to Korzybski or Teilhard de Chardin. There never was the movie Colossus the Forbin Project or the 1960s speculation that progress in computing would lead to accelerated progress in computing by an equation like
all dreams that died when people realized that Simon's General Problem Solver wasn't useful, when SAT and P vs NP fomulated, the rise and fall of expert systems, logic giving way to databases, etc. It appeals though to the kind of young person who's family made a great fortune and wants to jump right into philanthropy or to the person who went to San Francisco because they felt marginalized someplace else and are looking for meaning living in the shadow of "Big Tech"Pointing a search engine at site:lesswrong.com finds many references to either thinker.
If a person wants a reputation as smart and able to make accurate predictions, why would he focus most of his public statments on a prediction that if he is right, no one will find out definitively that he was right because everyone will be dead?
Bigger picture - I see AI as just another bale of straw on the camel's back. Sure, it's possible that AI will end up looking like the fatal bale. But that could come from so much money being invested in AI that we get a global financial meltdown when the AI bubble bursts, leading to a nuclear WWIII.