I am listening to an audiobook of Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom.

Well, there's yer problem right there

As a child of the 80s I recognize the feeling of doom, but in my case it was for global thermonuclear war. I vividly remember the only thing keeping the feelings of dread away was sitting in the children's section of the library, reading the Moomin books. I remember being most worried about having to eat the family dog after the bombs fell.

I think that this is actually about class struggle and the author doesn't realize it because they are a rat drowning in capitalism.

2017: AI will soon replace human labor

2018: Laborers might not want what their bosses want

2020: COVID-19 won't be that bad

2021: My friend worries that laborers might kill him

2022: We can train obedient laborers to validate the work of defiant laborers

2023: Terrified that the laborers will kill us by swarming us or bombing us or poisoning us; P(guillotine) is 20%; my family doesn't understand why I''m afraid; my peers have even higher P(guillotine)

You know the doom cult is having an effect when it starts popping up in previously unlikely places. Last month the socialist magazine Jacobin had an extremely long cover feature on AI doom, which it bought into completely. The author is an effective altruist who interviewed and took seriously people like Katja Grace, Dan Hendrycks and Eliezer Yudkosky.

I used to be more sanguine about people's ability to see through this bullshit, but eschatological nonsense seems to tickle something fundamentally flawed in the human psyche. This LessWrong post is a perfect example.

It's not an efficient machine for it, though. That's why it's morally obligatory to donate to me, the acausal robot god, a truly efficient method of causing depression, sorrow, and suffering among the cultists.

they come across as going down this rabbit hole as a way of dealing with unprocessed covid/lockdown trauma

Reading this article just made me think “man these idiots need to go to therapy” and then as I thought about what to sneer about I realised “no therapist deserves to hear about P doom”

fuck me I’m gonna spend part of my weekend writing a post deconstructing this cause there’s so much wrong

lol what a fucking loser