Only thing more toxic is... corporations.

Yeah this is a perfect example of the behaviour OP is talking about I think (no direct experience). Just general arsehole behaviour, ultimatums to your employer (!!! ultimatums to your boss FFS! Unbelievable!), sending out shitograms to broad audiences that are furthering their own agenda and trying to force and assert their views/narrative etc.

"I got sacked because of my views/because I spoke up/because my employer is racist" Vs "I got myself sacked because I was an asshat".

Of course, who do you believe?

I think in life, I've found that on the whole (but not always) the more crazy and hysterical someone sounds, the less likely I am to believe them.

When I was at Google I was only worried about becoming that kind of Googler. I think if you stay past 5 years you lose all ambition.

They use words like "moralistic", "trouble makers", "opinionated", "agitators"..

All very useful framing to discredit the actitivists without actually addressing the issues.

It's a way to distract and defuse the situation by ad hominem attacks, typical strategy for suppressing workers' rights or anything that inconveniences the status quo.

...what?

What part of the post was ultra-nationalistic?

if you read the article it actually outlines that this is happening in the UK, where whistleblowers are legally protected if what they choose to blow the whistle on is _in the public interest_ so actually this comment does seem pretty spot on: They don't have anything beyond moral disagreements on what the company is working on (the article mentions military applications of AI), and are thus taking a moralistic standpoint on applications which are otherwise within the laws of the UK. Otherwise they would be able to (and would legally be protected) if they spoke out.

I used to work at Google and I know exactly what they're talking about lol

Oh I'm sure that many of the current predictions on the future are absolutely wrong in many ways; I'm just stating the fact that the technology itself is certainly having an impact and will have a much greater impact into the future.

Even if it hits the wall today and no further progress toward general AI is made for decades, as the current technology is applied in more areas and expertise with it is gained it would still have enormous social and economic impacts over the next few decades.

I mean I'd wager even most people who utilize AI on a regular basis don't take time to ponder the implications if progress continues at the current rate.

Lots of armchair psychologists in this thread.

> If people actually did appreciate it the economy would collapse immediately long before we've adequately "replaced"

You will need to explain that one. Becauase if economy colapses before the singularity, there will be no singularity.

There will be no datacenters, no ai, none of that super expensive stuff dependent on debt and disposable money.

The automatic loom wasn’t AGI either, but it replaced a lot of jobs.

It doesn't have to be

AGI can define goalposts that move every time A not-G I achieves a new milestone. That's fine. No matter what acronym you use to define it, artificial intelligence is objectively augmenting humans at the very edge of technology and science.

I’m mostly bearish on AI, but this is flat wrong. The vast majority of CVEs that have been discovered with AI assistance were in code written long before AIs arrived on the scene.

> “We’re all going to die, but I really need my bonus this year” seems like a parody rather than a real strongly held position.

We have been living in a parody for some time now, so it feels normal.

I suppose there may be a bit of a prisoner's dilemma to it. Single voices can be discredited. It would take a coordinated disclosure to actually make the message stick.

Ok, but maybe an employee isn't 100% sure that this will happen. They then have to weigh letting the world know about a risk against the certainty that their career will be damaged.

“We’re all going to die, but I really need my bonus this year”

Is probably the best description of the state of engineering today

Sorry bro, we live in a sci-fi world. I don't know what you think recursive improvement is, but we've been doing it for some time with models making synthetic data models and using it to train the next model. This is being done inside the labs intentionally to avoid as many employees and humans in post training. Works very well for things like math and cyber-sec.

LLMs today are improved by experiments that assay their performance, changes to architecture, pretraining, and post-training. None of those steps necessarily require humans. Welcome to your sci fi future.

Wouldn't the ability of a model to edit and refine the weights of another model count as part of the recursion if that can span any model?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50355251

You'd be willing to destroy your career to publish a warning no one will need?

Maybe they are willing to break the NDA and they're just trying to go this route first.

Look what happened to many people who broke NDAs or helped to do so. Snowden is stuck in Russia. Assange got holed up in an embassy for years. Sarah Wynn-Williams, the Facebook/Meta whistleblower, got an insane court order against her [1].

Theoretically, retaliating against whistleblowers is seriously illegal stuff. But in practice these regulations are seldom enforced. And even if your (former) employer does not retaliate openly, there might still be "invisible" retaliation, or the risk of other large employers just blacklisting you by default.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy42xgeq9vpo

Why would I display a modicum of good faith and grace when google has actively, at every chance, shown that they don't act in good faith. Hell today they announced if school districts turn off Google's ai for students they won't let them use google search either.

What if we displayed a modicum of truth and stopped pretending that Google employees don’t work there for the money? That is faithful and gracious to reality.

They work for Google.

Awareness is not change. What we've really seen is the incredibly high cost of true patriotism and the absence of action from government and citizens alike. And not just absence of action, but also rhetorical responses ranging anywhere from deflection to character assassination.