A rationalist, a cynic and an anthropologist walk into a bar...

it's weird that ai got too dangerous to keep advancing right around the time money got more expensive to borrow— dr. rich traditions, JD (@helldude.bsky.social) September 22, 2026 at 11:37 AMAt a time when everybody seems to be criticizing AI and particularly the large frontier LLM base models of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, it is helpful to distinguish between the different schools of arguments.The group which initially dominated the coverage but which seems to be losing ground is the apocalyptic rationalists. They generally argue that recursive self-improvement and artificial general intelligence within the next year or two could cause the extinction of humanity. These statements are not really a response to recent events; they predate them by a decade or more.The non-believers can generally be split into two camps. Let's call them the anthropologists (they ground their position on an in depth study of Silicon Valley culture) and the cynics. The first, represented by people…