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Risto_Saarelma comments on Open thread, March 17-31, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

1 Post author: David_Gerard 17 March 2013 03:37PM

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Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 19 March 2013 07:30:49PM 13 points [-]

Total, abject failure. Mental illness. Sometimes leading to suicide. Having the most talented of their peer group switch to something they are less likely to waste their whole life on with nothing to show, and the next most talented switch to something else because they are frustrated with the incompetence of the people who remain. Turning into cranks with a 24/7 vanity google alert so that they can instantly show up to spam time cube esque nonsense whenever someone makes the mistake of mentioning them by name. Mail bombs from anarchoprimitivist math PhDs.

Comment author: Epiphany 26 March 2013 08:05:08AM 0 points [-]

Wow. Okay. That's not what I expected, but it does sound like a plausible depiction of reality.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 26 March 2013 09:34:04AM 2 points [-]

There are different groups of AGI programmers though. That's my impression of the group who write "Hello, I work on AGI" on their home page. Then there are the research people at big companies who talk little about the problems they run into, but you notice that they exist when they release the occasional borderline scary thing. Then there are the people working at military research agencies who are very careful to not even make it known that they exist, but who you can kinda assume might be involved with technologies for potentially controlling the world and have nontrivial resources to throw at them.