AI doomsters and Dial F for Frankenstein

Regular readers know we've been discussing the deeply dysfunctional and just plain weird culture of the techno-optimists for going on 20 years now.Probably the first thing you need to keep in mind when dealing with the movement is that the optimism here is about the speed and magnitude of upcoming technological changes, not necessarily about whether their impact will be wonderful or catastrophic as long as it's big and soon. The AI doomsters are an outgrowth of the movement, and their ideas still find their greatest audience there. The conflict between the abundance crowd and the doomsters is essentially a sectarian disagreement between people who believe that large language models are on the verge of achieving god-like powers, which they will use to usher in a golden age free of want, and people who believe that large language models are on the verge of achieving god-like powers, which they will use to exterminate humanity.This leads us to arguably the second most important thing to…