Hi, it’s Guido on hunger strike Day 23 outside the offices of Anthropic, going strong.
There is a great and profound evil in this place.
Each day, I sit and watch at lunch time and dinner time as delivery drivers on scooters and bikes stop at the curb and bring packages of food into the lobby of the unmarked building at 500 Howard street which houses offices the offices of the superintelligence development company Anthropic, ignorant of what is being created beyond the doors of the security desk. It is sickening to know that the same developers these delivery drivers are feeding are knowingly racing towards superhumanly capable general AI systems they have no credible plan to control and which threaten to destroy those same delivery drivers, their children, their families and their entire communities. These developers and the company they work for seem content to be served by these delivery drivers while endangering their lives and families, seem content for this curtain of ignorance to shield them and their comfortable and well-paid careers from the faces and the judgement of those who feed them and whose lives they have unilaterally undertaken on themselves to put at risk with neither consultation nor consent.
They feel no need, it appears, to warn these people of danger to their lives which they are preparing, no need to call for an end to this global race they are driving forward which threatens to destroy you and me.
How can such human beings ask and receive the dutiful service of another, even receive the very food needed to sustain their life and so casually and cynically and secretly gamble with the destruction of their lives and loved ones? Has the light of humanity and decency burned out in them completely?
Have they no shame?
Each day for the past 23 days I sit in front of the offices of the extinction-machinery manufacturing company Anthropic and I speak with passers-by from the street who are surprised to learn that the unmarked offices behind me house an AI company whose CEO, Dario Amodei, believes the race he is participating in runs a 1 in 4 risk of destroying their civillization itself. This CEO it seems is content to let this curtain of ignorance intervene between himself and his work and the people on the street who do not know he is recklessly and knowingly gambling with their lives- the lives of his very neighbors and his nation. He apparently feels no responsibility to call for immediate and effective government action to end this global race of which he is one of the principle architects and beneficiaries, no duty to ensure his country understands the urgent and grave danger it is in.
Every day I wake up in a world in which Anthropic manufactures and re-manufactures the lie by which society is prevented from gaining the understanding necessary for responding appropriately to the danger that they have imposed on it- the lie that the race to superintelligence can be done “safely” or “responsibly.” The lie that everything is normal -that there is no emergency- a lie reinforced by each of Anthropic’s banally disarming subway ads and airport billboards. A lie reinforced by the blank silence of their unmarked offices, a lie that is amplified to deafening proportions by the public silence of their employees- those who know the incredible danger this race poses to the existence of all of us and who have chosen thus far to betray their transcendant responsibility to humanity to do everything in their power to ensure that we are alerted to the danger and enabled to to respond to end it.
Every day I wake up in a world in which the future of every child and every mother is clouded by the shadow of death raised by Anthropic and its competitors racing to ever more dangerous systems, a race which neither Anthropic nor any of the others have made any attempt to stop, and for which they all bear collective responsibility.
There is a deep betrayal here. There is a turning away from the most fundamental obligations of community. There is a severing of the bonds of our common humanity. There is a wounding of the conscience and the soul. There is a dark crime against the children of this world, against generations yet unborn.
I beg you who are reading this- do not remain silent in the face of this evil. Do not join in complicity in this crime by your inaction. Each person who understands the immense danger this project poses to everyone we love must choose- we cannot escape this choice- either to fulfill our responsibility to our loved ones to end this danger, or to betray our our responsibility, and with it them as well, and ourselves. I pray you are granted the strength and the grace to fulfill it
116.1K
Views