AI Safety Is Mostly a Sex Cult
3 hours ago
- AI Safety discourse is heavily influenced by Eliezer Yudkowsky and the rationalist/Effective Altruism community, which the author argues originated as a sex cult built around Harry Potter fan fiction.
- Yudkowsky helped connect DeepMind's founders with Peter Thiel, popularized the term 'AI alignment,' and shaped how modern AI risk is discussed.
- The rationalist and Effective Altruist communities deeply overlap, especially in San Francisco, with many members working at major AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
- The movement is centered around communal living in Berkeley, with properties like Lighthaven funded by FTX money and hosting events including SlutCon and orgies.
- Core beliefs treat AI doom as an apocalyptic inevitability, which the author describes as functioning more like a religious millenarian cult than a rational or empirical framework.
- The author argues that financial and sexual incentives keep leaders preaching doom regardless of evidence, making the movement a 'cult factory' that recruits idealists.
- AI industry leaders recently proposed waiving antitrust laws to slow research, which the author compares to forming a dangerous cartel against progress, including medical research.
- The author concludes that these people should not be making AI policy.