Existential risk mongers are a small, very vocal cult with a lot of very clever online astroturfing skills. Politicians never waste a good f…

Existential risk mongers are a small, very vocal cult with a lot of very clever online astroturfing skills. Politicians never waste a good fake crisis, which is why they're perfect for Bernie to try to seize the means of production back from the private sphere. Imagine if a mainstream politician put the Heaven's Gate suicide cult on the platform in 1997? That's where we are in American politics at the edges today. We've jumped the shark into the absurd and we've completely lost the thread of reality in America today. And it isn't AI that caused this madness. It is good old fashioned human hallucination, story telling and delusion. Society should never make policy about imaginary future threats that have no actual basis in reality. AI is already used by billions and it is nothing like what people imagined it to be and we're all still here and the problems have been ridiculously minimal even by the standards of past tech revolutions. If I told you there was a technology where 1.5 million people would die every year and injure 50 million would you sign up for that tech? The answer is yes because it's cars. You probably got in one today and accepted that risk and never even thought about it. In contrast, the amount of people who died or were injured by AI is a tiny fraction of a percent and even those cases are probably specious at best. In fact, AI has actually saved countless lives. It's saved lives through drug discovery by helping create the COVID and flu vaccines. It's saved lives through anti-lock breaks. It's saved lives with self driving cars that are 10X safer than human drivers and yet the only thing you read about self driving cars in the news are the incredibly rare stories of the very few times it did actually kill a dog or injure someone. If that sounds irrational and insane that's because it is. We're worried about a technology with a nearly perfect track record of safety and are totally fine with a technology that kills people every day? Welcome to the irrationality of the human mind! If the pause AI cult had their way we'd still be stuck on GPT2 which was a hallucinating mess and we'd have made no progress to the much more sound and highly aligned and intelligent and useful models we have now. That's because you can't make progress by imagining it in your mind or writing idiotic essays on Less Wrong to other mental masturbators. You solve problems in the real world through trial and error. The way to make AI safe is by building it and iterating in the real world. There is no other way. What is the one thing that most worries you about AI? In a survey of 3,700 AI researchers, only 3% of respondents replied existential risk — despite “the prominence given to these risks in media. Far more researchers are worried aout malicious use, misinformation, job losses, bia…

Source: Yann LeCun (X) | 2026-04-26

Related