AI expert Tristan Harris: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting!

[highplainsdem]

Wikipedia on Tristan Harris - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Harris - and the Center for Humane Technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Humane_Technology

Most of you have probably seen the news about Bernie Sanders' warning about AI.

Harris worked at Google, has maintained contact with Silicon Valley, and knows just how scary the reasoning of the people controlling the AI companies is. They're very aware of the existential risk to humanity from more intelligent AI, as well as all the harm the AI we have now is doing, but they believe they have no choice but to race ahead despite the risks to everyone on the planet. And Harris is being told that a number of them think they'll reach that very dangerous level of AI within 2 years, and almost certainly within a decade.

Please watch at least some of the 140-minute podcast below. If you can't watch all of it, I recommend watching at least from 13 to 46 minutes in, for these sections

13:09 Why AGI Will Displace Everyone
15:50 Are We Close to Getting AGI?
17:12 The Incentives Driving Us Toward a Future We Don't Want
19:58 The People Controlling AI Companies Are Dangerous
23:18 How AI Workers Make AI More Efficient
24:24 The Motivations Behind the AI Moguls
29:21 Elon Warned Us for a Decade — Now He's Part of the Race
34:39 Are You Optimistic About Our Future?
37:58 Sam Altman's Incentives
38:46 AI Will Do Anything for Its Own Survival
46:18 How China Is Approaching AI

except for the one starting at 46:18.

Those 33 minutes will give you a better understanding of why the people controlling the AI companies - and the tech they're racing to create - are dangerous.

I hope Bernie Sanders will help make sure this AI expert's warning gets more attention.


EDITING to add: My thanks to speak easy for sending me this video.

EDITING again to add Bernie's statement on AI, in case you haven't seen it:

[berniesandersmittens]

1. Kick and Rec

When this guy talks, we should pay attention.

[highplainsdem]

8. Same for Bernie. That was a very serious warning from him.

[TheFarseer]

2. I'm very concerned about this

And I’ll tell you why - obviously Trump and all those idiots love it because they think they won’t have to pay anyone, but I just realized most of the lefty podcasts I listen to have adds for AI shit and I realized I hadn’t heard a lot of criticism from them about AI. The only podcasts I hear criticism of AI is Breaking Points and Kyle Kulinski - shout out to a couple of my faves.

[highplainsdem]

5. The AI bros and venture capitalists not only have too much influence with existing media, but they're

building their own AI-friendly media bubble:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220837274

[SheltieLover]

3. Kick

[highplainsdem]

7. Thanks, SheltieLover!

[SheltieLover]

9. Yw!

Ty for sharing this.

[speak easy]

4. "Those 33 minutes will give you a better understanding

of why the people controlling the AI companies - and the tech they're racing to create - are dangerous."

Thanks HPD, Tristan Harris may not be the best messenger, but the content is important.

[highplainsdem]

6. Thanks for posting a reply, because I realized I'd forgotten to thank you for recommending that

podcast - and when I looked at the OP I noticed I'd forgotten the YouTube video as well. Sigh. Fixed that now. Bit distracted here - just found out I have a new great-nephew. Thrilled about that - and also worried about the future he and all the children will have to live in.

[Ferryboat]

10. Highly recommend Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth

Chapter 22 The Universal.
Most frightening chapter I've read in years.
Haven't watched this yet. Will do so this afternoon.
People really need to pay attention to this subject. Those pushing this have a very different belief system than you and I.

[highplainsdem]

11. Thanks for the book recommendation!

[Bayard]

12. Skynet here we come

Anyone who does not get a degree in robotics/AI won't be able to find a job. Can't even join the military since it will all be AI too. We'll all be in big trouble when it starts making medical decisions. And the government.

"It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead"

[jfz9580m]

13. God..

I wish Tristan Harris and grifters like that wouldn’t get so much attention.

This is the fault of a credulous media that promotes the fraudulent faux humblebrags

I agree that these guys are fascists and so is their AI, but the reformed grifter brigade.

This is someone I found recently I really like:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/adam-becker/more-everything-forever/



The super intelligence etc narrative gives the impression that these guys are actually competent and they aren’t.
That’s the thing. They are losers and douchebags.

Their scientific methods are deceptive. And garbage. It’s muscular fascism and deceit by which they are triumphing.

What I like about Ed Zitron and now Becker is that they attack this fucking awful humblebrag.

Hinton and a few of the Google creeps are not stupid. They are malicious. But the rest are outright stupid. They couldn’t unclog a bloody toilet let alone build a super AI.

But they don’t need to. They are proficient at deception and social engineering and a large enough and reprehensible set of true elites are for reasons unclear to me not attacking them the way the average grunt in stem is.
It’s all such bullshit.

But…at least I am happy to have broken the death grip of their stupid narratives games and products.

Real science is nothing like this nor is real life and it’s not scary. It’s cool.

I don’t know when it is worse..when they shill it fraudulently or equally fraudulently talk about safety.

I thought Adam Becker was sane when he was interviewed by Ketcham. That’s an actual reality based community.
It’s not about who is better etc.

But a society keeps falling for their narratives is doomed and to call that fast and to call it slow to refuse to coexist with such fucking bs.

I mean.. yeah it doesn’t make one popular but..

Popularity is overrated. But it’s not insanity or truly being a hater.
This is too slow.


I don’t mean you highplainsdem. I do mean the fact that as a society instead of tarring and feathering Tristan Harris he is allowed to go around bullshitting.




At this point with anyone as loathsome as Tristan Harris bullshitting, I am starting to think that instead of the worthless junk we see passed off as AI by those private sector parasites at Google etc who want to hog all of reality, there may actually be some real ai somewhere that is more like actual science factoring in realities human and tech and it may not be saying or doing things these incompetent creeps shill and were such a thing to exist (something inline with the predictions of democratic minded scientists and or predatory shills, these creeps would want to defund and destroy it).
I have no idea what such a thing would be but whatever it is I am sure that Tristan Harris and his ilk are invariably sleazy and wrong any which way.
What a sleazy grifter.

Anyway I have to go offline and immerse myself in my work. I have seen enough.
I really owe EarG and DU for permitting to post insane rants here.
I will file complaints later about all of the last 14 years. I don’t play nice with fascists. They are annoying and stupid and blah.

I shall be back after I complete a paper I have been working on. We are all committed to democracy and sanity after all.


Edit: one last thing. It’s not just ai
As I bid goodbye to a period of my life where except the routine stuff or the few things I like or coexist with, I will remember the whole with disdain alone (2011-2025).
I was looking at this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatches_from_Elsewhere
It’s garbage of course. I mean everything is garbage almost and the things that aren’t are destroyed by this relentless push to privatize or somehow make a botch of some other way..

Whether mundane or even more execrably creative etc these guys think like morons. Far too many of them and they have all the levers of power and exploit the worst tendencies in the species.
And then paradoxically use that as the excuse to despise the people they manipulate or if that’s not possible coerce.
Well it’s awful. I agree with Yasha Levine mostly.

I like DU. But DU and stack exchange aside the internet is garbage as is everything else. But science and reality and earth are always a good bet as are all the things that used to work and were laid to waste by these fuckign morons out of si valley.

I hated my last job.

[LymphocyteLover]

14. but it's full steam ahead for this insane and insanely evil administration