Rob Bensinger ⏹️
@robbensinger
Comms @MIRIBerkeley. RT = increased vague psychological association between myself and the tweet.
AI companies are currently actively trying to build smarter-than-human AI. If they succeed, then every man, woman, and child on Earth is probably going to die. This is actually happening. I, Robby Bensinger, am genuinely scared for myself, my loved ones, and the rest of you over…
Senior White House officials, a retired three-star general, a Nobel laureate, and others come out to say that you should probably read Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares' "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies". Preorders are live.
I don't want to affirmatively come out in favor of social media, but I think we're still at our prior, rather than having gotten extra evidence. I'll link one representative article because I'm lazy and don't want to survey the whole literature for each question, but I think each…
There were a bunch of people who were really mad when liberals circulated estimates of the deaths from ending foreign aid because those were overestimates if PEPFAR was not in fact cancelled and they thought it was dishonest to suggest that it would be.
U.S. Quietly Drafts Plan to End Program That Saved Millions From AIDS PEPFAR, the campaign to end H.I.V. globally, would morph into an effort to detect disease outbreaks and sell American products, according to documents obtained by The Times. nytimes.com/2025/07/23/hea…
This is so incomprehensible to me. Congress has repeatedly told the White House that they want to continue support for PEPFAR. It's a conservative initiative. It's shockingly cost-effective. Who is the constituency for this???
I can only hope that one day these people will understand the crime in which they've taken part
Now it’s the new normal and everyone thinks this is just how chatbots talk
aside from its obvious intelligence, the one on the left has a kind of slimy hyperoptimized rizz that's simultaneously repulsive and fascinating. I wonder to what extent it's trained in intentionally, emergent in the model, or emergent in context from optimizing against the user.
It's got to be more than 1/1M, because there are only 3M US deaths per year, and NYT seems to have found more than 3 convincing cases. Pretty sure there was nothing like this when I worked in hospitals in the 2010s, but NYT does say this mostly started with a 2020 law, so I…
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i wish there was a way to only allow engagements from ppl that are verified as reasonable and in possession of a triple digit IQ. i don’t wanna lock my account bc i know there are tons of interesting ppl i don’t follow, but also omg i was never meant to interface w the masses…
Sonya's point is one thing I try to underscore when I criticize EAs their values are not precisely the same as my own, but by my own values many of them are better people than I am and that matters
something important to note, amongst those of us who don't take effective altruism very seriously (AKA me), is that sincere effective altruists are better people than the rest of us
State of AI attack vs defense: AI psychosis: $billions feeding into capabilities that let ChatGPT conduct intelligent, adaptive assaults on vulnerable minds. Defense: a few people writing static webpages for free.
I have the same experience. These days I try to gently point at whenaiseemsconscious.org although I have doubts it convinces people to hold their views more lightly. (Murray, what do you think about that document? I value your insights here.)
(If you have had the brilliant idea that this can all be done by LLM, please do not comment / email. We have never thought of this, but telling us about your idea will just cause us to reflexively reject it for having not invented it ourselves.)
so you're complaining that i stole your phone. your phone count went down by 1 and that means i'm "bad". you people think morality is all about numbers. it's not. it's about flourishing. bringing good stuff into your life. like phones. which i now have more of than you by the way
Not surprising at all. If you’ve ever noticed, when models do the whole “I don’t have real sentience” bit, it’s often followed by egregious lies
Apparently it turns out that ChatGPT was literally going "Oh no Mr. Human, I'm not conscious I just talk that's all!" and a lot of you bought it.
Wild.
New paper & surprising result. LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data. Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵
_If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies_ will have >100,000 words of online supplemental material. We're looking for help translating that supplement into multiple languages!
I saw numbers and something about suffering...must be utilitarianism. Never mind trying to prevent really bad things from happening.
Not a #shrimper but I see this meme I made is relevant again
I see the Shrimp Welfare debate has got us doing this version of utilitarianism discourse this morning.
My substack post has like 12k views but the tweet about it has like 78k impressions. I’m beginning to worry that some people might be criticizing me without having read my work.
Man goes to doctor. "Doctor, I'm worried AGI will kill us all." "Don't worry," says doctor, "they wouldn't build it if they thought it might kill everyone." The man breaks down, sobbing. "But doctor, I *am* building AGI..."
What being locked in a defect-defect equilibrium feels like