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TK-421's avatar

Von Neumann was indeed awake: "Yet it would be impossible not to see it through."

The relevant fact to extract from the man who could conceive of the universal replicator in the 40s isn't that he was aware of some form of existential risk from AI. It's that he saw the risk _and kept moving the work forward_.

That's the same man who advocated preemptively nuking the Soviets before they could build a bomb. Yet he continued his work on computing. If his genius is going to be used as an example of a smart person perceiving existential risk from AI then his actions should receive equivalent weight.

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Miles's avatar

Those emails were indeed worth reading. I'm just a random guy, but I came away with a very positive opinion of Ilya - though it kind of reinforced my feeling that maybe he's a really smart guy who doesn't belong in the hard-knuckled power competitions of corporate work.

I had a positive read on Elon there, though obviously Elon behaves in a way that looks out for Elon. But I think he behaved sincerely, especially in the bits that are basically saying to go start a private company if you want to be a private company.

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