Isn't it weird that the most dramatic cries about AI risk are coming from inside the AI companies? After Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon resigned over fears that its product could destroy humanity itself earlier this month, the company's alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, publicly agreed that his product has a 10 percent chance of causing human extinction in the next decade. Employees at Anthropic's competitor, OpenAI, have been voicing similar sentiments.
It's not a coincidence. Many AI frontier researchers and "AI doomers" alike are animated by an almost religious belief that "artificial superintelligence" will soon supplant humanity. The philosopher Émile Torres calls the debate between the AI labs and the doomers a "narcissism of small differences." Not only do both sides share a vision of the future, but they also agree on a very specific set of philosophical assumptions, which Torres abbreviated as "TESCREAL."
