A Skeptic’s Reading Guide to AI Safety, AI Consciousness, and Technological Mass Delusion (Plus, Movies)

Five things to read to help defenestrate the dangerous AI fantasists

After a period of gladly diving head first into my glorious day job, I’m feeling pulled to give a little more oxygen to what appears likely to be a very important endeavour: debunking the “AI Safety” theorists and their blinkered ideas about humanity and technology.

In the month-plus since I wrote about disturbing doings at Stanford, they’ve gotten a few big media wins, and the impact on the general public is clearly only accelerating. Over the same period, we’ve learned disturbing new things about figures in the “effective altruist” movement, which shares a deep lineage with Elizer Yudkowsky’s AI Safety doomerism.

By way of that project, I’ve put together a (for now) short and focused starter reading list for understanding the debate and its stakes. These are five texts largely “of the moment,” a starting place, hopefully, for tracing the roots of the relevant ideas further back. I find the archaeology of knowledge to be the best way to approach ideas so clearly entangled in (and compromised by) the politics and economics of the real world.

Further down, the return of a lighter section, where I briefly recommend some films and books, most importantly Bertrand Mandico’s After Blue: Dirty Paradise, one of the most exciting new freakazoid art science-fantasy movies I’ve seen since Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy.

A Preliminary Reading List for Understanding the A.I. Safety Movement

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots – Emily Binder, Timnit Gebru, et. al.

Important both substantively and symbolically. Timnit Gebru, unlike Yudkowsky, is a rational and qualified artificial intelligence researcher who is concerned with what could broadly be termed AI safety. She was ultimately fired from Google, largely if not primarily because of the contents of this essay, which asks the very dangerous question “Should we actually do this,” and lays out a series of serious and more importantly imminent threats posed by AI. Much better to focus on the far future, clearly.

The Sequences – Eliezer Yudkowsky

Know your enemy. Yudkowsky is notably hard to pin down in certain ways, and this is reflected in the messy sprawl of the “work” that is purported to constitute his transformative ouvre. “The Sequences” are collections of his writings on specific topics. My plan (God give me strength) is to first tackle “From AI to Zombies,” which includes the broad foundations of Yud’s worldview, including his thoughts on consciousness, which I’m really curious to read. After that, I’ll be retracing “The AI-Foom Debate,” where Yudkowsky and an interlocutor tackle the Singularity.

Neoreaction: A Basilisk – El Sandifer

You may immediately balk at the idea that a book about neoreactionaries has anything to do with Eliezer Yudkowsky – but that’s exactly why it’s so important. The book does provide a killer analysis of “rationalism” and the tissue-thin, sci-fi inflected “Roko’s Basilisk” thought exercise that forms a bizarrely major pillar of the AI safety movement. She also delves into the movement’s intellectual common ground with longtermism – and by extension effective altruism.

But perhaps more important, Sandifer (who is, bonus, also a great writer) also clearly connects Yudkowsky’s co-development and concrete connections with intellectual fringedweller Nick Land and outright monarcho-fascist Curtis Yarvin. She further highlights some of Yudkowsky’s own writings that are extremely suspect, not just intellectually, but morally. Ultimately this is the nexus for the case that Yudkowsky’s “rationalism” is a roundabout mask for something much darker, and always has been.

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness – Peter Godfrey-Smith

A book Eliezer Yudkowsky could benefit from getting bonked over the head with. As I wrote in my March newsletter, rhetoric about AI gaining “consciousness” is a big element of the AI safety grift. This has already led, incredibly, to the draft publication of criminally incompetent research by a Stanford professor arguing that LLMs like ChatGPT are “demonstrating consciousness.”

This sort of assertion is incredibly dangerous – but it’s also easily revealed as incoherent if you’ve done any serious thinking or reading about what ‘consciousness’ actually is. This is a particularly accessible, entertaining, and insightful entry point to discussions of the nature of consciousness.

What We Owe the Future – William MacAskill

Frankly, I’m putting this here as a placeholder until a hopefully much, much better alternative presents itself. Because while looking at longtermism closely is important to understanding the ideological grift-nexus it forms with AI safety, I am sincerely loathe to interface with anything created by William MacAskill. That’s in part because while at least Yudkwosky’s work offers the charms of the enthusiastic amateur, my educated guess is that MacAskill is the sort of creature whose slickly-polished thought pellets are engineered for board room-degustation – slick and repulsive Cronenbergian suppositories of simulated thought.

But more substantively, it’s because MacAskill is now known to have ignored reports of Sam Bankman-Fried’s corruption, meaning he had a direct hand in enabling the FTX fraud. And when I wrote a column pointing out how disgusting a position this is for an Oxford professor purportedly specializing in Ethics, he hired a coterie of Royalist toffs from a so-called “reputation management firm” to write me a strongly worded letter on fancy letterhead. That letter was the kind of veiled legal threat that’s intended to silence young and vulnerable journalists before they get in the bad habit of telling the truth.

So William MacAskill seems to be a geniuine lizard, a grasping climber who never gave any more of a fuck about the substance of his writings than Sam Bankman-Fried himself did. I am hoping someone can recommend a concise and solid analysis of the premises of “longtermism” so I can ignore this book and forget that its author exists for the rest of my life.

Film and Book Notes

After Blue: Dirty Paradise Dir. Bertrand Mandico (2021)

If you’re a weirdo, you need to watch this movie right now. It’s streaming on Shudder, and I also grabbed the Vinegar Syndrome special edition, which is still available. It exists in a joyfully growing modern niche of bizarro/surrealist pulp-fantasy films including The Spine of Night, Mandy, and Mad God. After Blue has a lot in common with Mandy in particular, in its colorful visual language, mythic structure, and shared DNA with El Topo.

But After Blue is much lower budget and even weirder than Mandy. It may be the most perfect distillation I’ve ever seen of the sweet spot between the weirdest fringe of gallery-focused video fine art, and low-budget genre filmmaking. It’s all in a really engaging and frequently joyfully disorienting narrative package, involving some sort of ancient assassin-witch named Kate Bush for no discernible reason – though at the end of the day, you’re not here for the story, you’re here for the incredibly style. This is also a very sexy movie, in the truest sense, which I personally find a selling point, but to each their own.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers Dir. Philip Kaufman (1978)

This one in a sense flew under my radar for many years. That is, I was aware of its existence, but I had assumed it was more of a political allegory than a proper horror film. But then I heard someone compare it to John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing. For better or worse it doesn’t quite live up to those heights of visceral paranoia, and the four-year difference really shows in the quality of effects – Invasion maybe still has a bit too much in common with the 1950s era film it’s trying to improve on.

That said, it is way weirder and cooler than I had assumed. In particular, the main characters’ slow awakening to the reality of what’s going on around them is artfully done, both from writing and cinematography perspectives. In particular, there are some wonderful moments of utterly bizarre stuff happening in the streets around our main characters, but neither the characters nor the camera seem to acknowledge any of it.

It’s something of a jab at urban indifference, which is timely given some recent events in New York. But mostly, I respect nothing more than a storyteller who refuses to tip their hand – who shows the viewer or reader something that they cannot entirely comprehend, and gives them no clues.

Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart

I kind of wish I was writing about the 2018 move starring 50 Cent and Gerard Butler, but this one features far scarier gangsters. The 1992 book, written by a Pulitzer prize winner, details the truly depraved exploits of Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, and others who built a rampant and crazed insider-trading ring on Wall Street in the 1980s. It’s a thrilling tik-tok for a business fraud sicko like me (and probably you), very comparable to Bethany Mandel’s The Smartest Guys in the Room and similar detailed chronologies of great crimes.

It’s certainly educational as to the mechanics of the trades fraudsters were able to make. It’s even more bracing as yet another reminder that there are really bad people out there who feel no compulsion about breaking the rules. Notably, Michael Milken was one of those guys – and if there’s one thing I’ve figured out over ten years of examining financial and investment fraud - they don’t change.

Parting Shot: Call Me Liz

On the topic of fraudsters never changing, I wanted very briefly to highlight a new New York Times profile about Elizabeth Holmes. It’s inherently valuable – apparently the first time she’s spoken to the press since 2016. It contains some extremely revealing moments of sublime delusion on display by Holmes, who will come across to the careful reader as a totally unreconstructed narcissistic sociopath.

Yet the piece has been pilloried on (what’s left of) Twitter as simply another in the long line of New York Times hagiographies of white-collar criminals. I have a lot to say about this relative to my experience in and around the news business, but in the meantime, read it. It’s worth your time, and frankly it’s a positive step for the Times, however ephemeral.