Broke: scared of cheaper Chinese competition

Woke: scared of runaway AGI

And who do we have here conducting the interview: Stuart Ritchie, anti-trans activist & one of the more 'deniable' eugenics types of the late 2010s. What an incredibly tight ecosystem our good friends inhabit indeed lol.

Of course The Economist (inherently derogatory) would criti-hype AI.

A magazine whose editorial line is confident cluelessness.

Many are contrasting the bsky response to harassment of trans users to the harassment of AI developers and users.

Many are contrasting the demand for gay marriage with the demand for human-animal marriage.

Same shit, but the lack of thinking your argument through yourself does fit with being a chatbot-enthusiast.

Have been using Tutanota for years. They took an anti-AI stance pretty early on as well.

Seems like he's very heavily professionally invested in the symbolic paradigm and given machine learning completely dominates AI at the moment he's taking the piss at them whenever he can. Given the fundamental limitations of ML he's probably right that any sincere attempt to improve on them requires a more symbolic approach, but talking specifically about AGI is getting into woo territory.

Was he promoting LLMs earlier on?

It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle

It should be said here again that these people don't even know what academic freedom means and are abusing the term. They mean it essentially as a synonym for free speech, but academic freedom has specifically do to with freedom from state interference in the affairs of the university born from the struggles over its sovereignty between the two in European history; it has nothing to do with academia itself having the means to proscribe the conduct of individual academics. If a geology department suspends a flat-earther, that is academic freedom (among other things) operating as intended. Ironically, the US ambassador directly intervening in the proceedings at Ghent is the actual violation of academic freedom here and these idiots are completely clueless about it.

It seems the Chinese government is quite sincere in its 'sci-tech' ambitions, which include AI. Though there doesn't seem to be the same levels of sci-fi fantasism as in Silicon Valley, just a more practical focus on seizing the high-tech global frontier and supertuning its surveillance-capitalist model.

Yeah OpenAI, this is what happens when you think you can trust Gandhi.

Mario Draghi, Italy’s (and the EU’s) éminence grise, Chicago boy Luis Garicano, and uh... Patrick Collison team up to overhaul Europe’s economy: https://www.rhinegroup.eu/

Other noteworthy members include noted investment-professional Leopold Aschenbrenner & Tobi Lütke, who may only be German-Canadian but is definitely no less a fashy techbro.

That Italy has been the west-European country most exposed to neoliberal medicine, ending up with a neo-fascist in power, seems to be no issue for deities like Draghi and the other assorted usual suspects here.

More seriously, add a third dimension, a Butlerian dimension, to the political compass: to what degree may your automated devices appear to be human? One extreme is Asimov-style transhumanism and the other extreme is Luddite loom-smashing.

The luddites smashed looms not because they were inherently anti-technology, but as a means of industrial action in a time when labour held no formal power at all. As you say yourself, the issue with AI is that it doesn't even work as advertised; industrial looms worked fine. «AI»'s biggest problems are the enormous waste, ecological damage, enshittification and labour discipline that it incurs. If Silicon Valley was actually building Data, the debate would be different, but this dimension seems mostly theoretical for now.