You know what actually motivates founders day-to-day? The fear of failure. Even though they're doing this thing that if they succeed they'll be super rich. Um that does motivate them but the thing that motivates them at the at any given moment is the fear of like disaster or looking like a fool, the server crashing, right?
It is a quick read, an excellent book whose main virtue is not, in my opinion, direct analogy with the World War I, but a treatment of how in a multipolar world relatively small international events, misunderstandings, idiosyncratic fits of leaders, “hubris and fear” (as Westad often writes), resentment of the elite and of the public prodded by the media, can produce colossal miscalculations which then produce even more colossal wars and, in the era of the weapons of mass destruction, may end the civilization.
Frontier Labs are incented to be fearful as it provides a moral justification for staying closed.
Chinese Labs take the consistent position of doing what’s good for all and being open.
So the little guys find themselves in the uncomfortable position of rooting for the Chinese…
And once you look at the brain systems, they're distinct brain systems in this instance for fear to something out there in the world versus panic of something happening inside you like having a heart attack or not getting enough air.
The other kind of danger is in the name of agency and and uh and motivation the tools are denied to our students because we're worried you cheat or worry you only got your answer from Chad GBT. That is very bad as well
And just human organizations are complicated and it's very hard to have um to manage to aggressively prosecute 100 different priorities and to deal with all the issues and interference that arises among them and so forth. And so, you know, Google has done incredibly well in a bunch of specific places, but it's not like Google has done all the things even if in some kind of basic material sense, uh Google maybe, you know, had that ability.
But now now we have this repeating this repeating, "Hey, we get to get rid of all the programmers." Which it behooves us as programmers to think about why they keep wanting to get rid of us. Some of that's about us and some of it's not, but some of it is. So we should think about that. But also that ants amps up the fear factor that everybody is experiencing.
And so, um I'm seeing across at least a handful of companies that explicit exec sponsorship makes a huge difference in not just using them, but trying new things and feeling safe to fail within, you know, kind of guardrails.
so so some people are concerned, you know, what if the Riemann hypothesis is proved with a completely incomprehensible proof? I I think once you have the artifact of a proof, we can do a lot of of of of of analysis on it.
there’s like a line to walk between being seriously concerned, but not fearmongering because fearmongering destroys the possibility of creating something special with a thing.
people either like love it and they love it so much that they won't question it or it's like they're worried that thinking about that associating with it is a little bit too science fiction for kind of where it might be optimal for them to be focused.
With so many professional money managers afraid to act, with most of the public in the grip of fear and anger, you should put your cash and your courage to work.
It isn't easy dealing with peer pressure and a room of warm and friendly staff begging you say something, anything nice about their terrible product for fear of losing their jobs -- and realizing you must be brutal to their faces otherwise you're not helping the vendor or your own company.
Well, the biggest enemies of freedom are fear and greed, so you make sure that they don't stand in your way. If you imagine the worst thing that can happen to you and then make yourself be comfortable with it, there is nothing more left to be afraid of.
we often also have this mental model of like oh our managers are a judge and they're going to judge me on whether or not I got it I did well I should get a promotion I should be fired so there's this sometimes fear that people have but I think in the very best relationships the manager is like a guide
People who insist they're harmless aren't safe; they're naive. People who know exactly how dangerous they could become-and fear it-are the ones who deliberately yoke that force to good aims.
I would find it impossible to not pursue a discovery that I could imagine my way through, if I can really see how to get there. I cannot imagine abandoning it for some other reason, fear that it would be misused, which is a real fear.
I think a lot of the problems that come up with technology aren’t the technology itself, as much as the fact that people adapt to the technology in maladaptive ways. I mean, one of my fears about AI is not what AI will do, but what people will do.
The crisis occurred because of the nuclear weapons, because Khrushchev put them on Cuba, but the crisis was resolved and we didn’t end in the third World War because of the nuclear weapons, because people, leaders were afraid of them.
The thing about the far-right parties is that they are trying to get people to equate all foreigners in a country with a threat to our future, but they are only gaining ground because of their ability to generate fear.
What’s ironic about all these AI safety people is they’re going to build the exact thing they fear. We need to have one model that we control and align. This is the only way you end up paper clipped. There’s no way you end up paper clipped if everybody has an AI.
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