I think it gets the chronology wrong? Some of these AI safety orgs were around before Anthropic. AI safety concerns are not new.

Why do people focus so much on finding scapegoats? Finding someone to blame is neither necessary nor sufficient to fix a system so an accident doesn't happen again. It might act as as an incentive to fix a system, but it's less direct than actually working on fixing the system.

A starting note: I don't disagree with you (about systemic issues), but I want to explain what I understand as the perspective you are responding to.

A "scapegoat" is someone who is incorrectly blamed for someone else's errors or sins. The perspective you're responding to is this: They built the system, they run the system, they have continuously warned "This system is dangerous!", and yet persisted. That is not being incorrectly blamed, not being a scapegoat, and instead is a collaborator.

So I think you mean to ask: "Why do people focus so much on finding someone to blame?" It's not merely semantic, because the answer to that is more straightforward: Consistent accountability is a major factor in deterring bad behavior. It is not the only factor, but it is a major one.

That is my Steel Man understanding of the people searching for individual blame.

Sometimes in "normalization of deviance" situations, there isn't anyone specifically to blame. I wouldn't make an assumption that you can find anyone particularly blameworthy without doing an investigation first.

The rate at which these "labs" are creating these incidents is simply staggering.

Imagine we made nuclear weapons a private industry, had CEOs bragging how they have enough warheads to blow the Earth to smithereens, and then they "accidentally" nuked three cities over a short period of time each, saying they lost control, or rather couldn't contain their semi-autonomous weapon. All somehow managing to turn the PR around from their abject incompetence and towards SciFi visions of mankind hunted by self-replicating bombs.

Umm because it costs money to defend your companies servers when someone “accidentally” hacks them.

Countries demand reparation for damages in war. Citizens of those countries sue for damages and win.

Accountability is not a foreign concept. And the point is to disincentivize negligence. Because negligence is cheaper. And in this case, accidental hacks are marketing spend.

> Why do people focus so much on finding scapegoats?

I, for one, am not trying to find scapegoats or go on a witchhunt.

But managers are paid a lot of money to take responsibility. Yes, that's an old school thought, responsibility. But that's one big reason they get a big, fat paycheck.

Maybe, but do you need to prove intent? Of the people, not the AI.

Accidents often have penalties associated with them too, but usually there's a difference between accidents and purposeful actions.

Accidents could result in bioweapons falling into the wrong hands and killing more Americans than COVID has so far, and allowing for those types of accidents without effective regulation is a purposeful action.

Accidents that don't rise to the level of negligence can be excused. Letting your dangerous product escape the lab because of amateurish counter-measures is hardly an accident. It's a systemic failure within a company of novices with billions of dollars to blow and it's time we held them accountable for their lab leaks, just like we would if it was anthrax or smallpox. You don't get to be sloppy with dangerous things.

I think it's more like how anyone learning to play chess is going to use chess engines, but you can't learn to play by always asking the chess engine for the answer.

I expect that all mathematicians are going to be working with power tools, so they might as well learn about that. They will still need to do math exercises by hand to learn the material.

It will likely burn a lot of tokens, take a long time, and might not work, so hopefully they'll still ask if you really want to spend the money on the attempt.

In Rationalist circles, it's apparently common to share your p(doom) in casual conversation, with the understanding that it's putting a number on your hunch. Maybe it's not a good idea to post it on Twitter without elaborating?

On the other hand, in bookstores, you might see book titles like "The Uninhabitable Earth," "The Coming Civil War," and "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies." Doom-mongering is a common part of the culture!

So what makes this particular tweet irresponsible?

Timing, maybe? People are on edge due to the HuggingFace incident.

Those books are irresponsible too, but the authors aren't experts on what they're writing about. This 10% claim comes from employees at Anthropic. That's the whole point of the article: expert opinion carries weight, fear is contagious, and people have extreme reactions to extreme claims.

This is sort of like saying in response to an airplane crash, "who cares why it happened, we need to punish the company until it stops."

Nuts to that. We should be interested in why things happen, not just finding scapegoats.

Agreed. The whole pointing fingers bit is us wanting to distract ourselves from responsibility of either looking at how we enable the problem, or avoiding responsibility of taken action towards resolving it.

Also, it’s only true in the browser. Node and Deno have sync I/O.

You still end up having to make a choice about whether your function should be async.

Generating AI images is something we couldn’t do before. AI assistants are better at web search than anything that came before.

For software developers, the equivalent is writing software without beta testers. If you don’t seek out users, you will likely build something nobody else wants.

And, that’s what I do. I’m retired and I use AI to build websites for myself. If anyone else ends up using it, that will be a happy side-effect.

If we want to do collaboration, we are going to need to do it intentionally rather than relying on side effects like conversations with cab drivers.

Counterpoint: most Open Source projects are (or started off as) programs people built for themselves, and anyone else ending up using them was a happy side-effect.

And yet, many people have ambitions. They will put up a website about how great their software is and how everyone should use it.

I usually put a warning that it's experimental and might not be maintained. More users, more problems.

(And yet, I'll confess to be slightly disappointed that nobody is using software that I didn't promote.)