Kinda, my current mainline-doom-case is "some AI gets controlled --> powerful people use it to prop themselves up --> world gets worse until AI gets uncontrollably bad --> doom". I would call it a different yet also-important doom case of "perpetual low-grade-AI dictatorship where the AI is controlled by humans in a surveillance state".

EDIT: Due to the incoming administration's ties to tech investors, I no longer think an AI crash is so likely. Several signs IMHO point to "they're gonna go all-in on racing for AI, regardless of how 'needed' it actually is".

For more details on (the business side of) a potential AI crash, see recent articles by the blog Where's Your Ed At, which wrote the sorta-well-known post "The Man Who Killed Google Search".

For his AI-crash posts, start here and here and click on links to his other posts. Sadly, the author falls into the trap of "LLMs will never get to reasoning because they don't, like, know stuff, man", but luckily his core competencies (the business side, analyzing reporting) show why an AI crash could still very much happen.

Further context on the Scott Adams thing lol: He claims to have taken hypnosis lessons decades ago and has referred to using it multiple times. His, uh, personality also seems to me like it'd be more susceptible to hypnosis than average (and even he'd probably admit this in a roundabout way).

Further observation about that second sentence.

I think deeply understanding top tier capabilities researchers' views on how to achieve AGI is actually extremely valuable for thinking about alignment. Even if you disagree on object level views, understanding how very smart people come to their conclusions is very valuable.

I think the first sentence is true (especially for alignment strategy), but the second sentence seems sort of... broad-life-advice-ish, instead of a specific tip? It's a pretty indirect help to most kinds of alignment.

Otherwise, this comment's points really do seem like empirical things that people could put odds or ratios on. Wondering if a more-specific version of those "AI Views Snapshots" would be warranted, for these sorts of "research meta-knowledge" cruxes. Heck, it might be good to have lots of AI Views Snapshot DLC Mini-Charts, from for-specific-research-agendas(?) to internal-to-organizations(?!?!?!?).

I can't make this one, but I'd love to be at future LessOnline events when I'm less time/budget-constrained! :)

How scarce are tickets/"seats"?