I spent many years debating stupid creationists, and I never ever got paid a nickel.* Nothing. For all that effort. I was in the wrong business, because apparently you can get paid $10,000 for debating AI-Doomer nonsense, and you can even show up for the online debate looking like this:
He was called to debate by this anonymous fellow, 47fucb4r8curb4fc8f8r4bfic8r, who coughed up the $10K for the privilege of telling Eliezer Yudkowski to stop making extravagant claims and stop threatening AI researchers with doom.
It is an utterly ridiculous debate between two clowns. Yudkowski wants to claim that research on AI is an existential threat to humanity (I think that’s silly, except in the sense that it is a waste of resources), while 47fucb4r8curb4fc8f8r4bfic8r is an LLM researcher who wants to grandstand and claim that Yudkowski is an existential threat to him, personally. I can’t take either of them seriously.
What I have learned is that if I want to profit from future debates, I need to invest in goofy hats.
*OK, Ray Comfort once sent me a fruit basket, but that was it. It was memorable because it was such an exception.
Please tell me the fruit basket had bananas in it.
It did not!
At its extreme AI is creationism. Sure Seth Lloyd may take things a bit far likening the universe to a quantum computer, but that doesn’t in itself a designer. There are people like Musk and Bostrom who think we live in a simulation. That’s a form of creationism. Musk apparently thinks we owe fealty to some basilisk.
Hemi: Has anyone ever offered any EVIDENCE that we might be living in a simulation? Does this “theory” have any descriptive or predictive power that our current consensus understanding of reality lacks?
Seriously, why is ANYONE even taking this idea seriously? “The Matrix” wasn’t even that good a movie, let alone a truly plausible scenario.
Is 47fucb4r8curb4fc8f8r4bfic8r still vulnerable to the Anthropic test refusal string? That would give Yudkowski an unfair advantage in this debate.
@3 Hemidactylus
It is justified. Humans created artificial intelligence.
I agree that the leading minds in the field (or perhaps merely the loudest voices) have a lot of silly ideas borrowed from the Christian apocalypse, though.
Is AI a bigger clownshow than creationism?
We measure AI in centibillionaires; creationism has perhaps one decamillionaire.
The collapse of the former would ruin the economy of the entire planet; the collapse of the latter would cause minor-to-medium hardship in Grant County, Kentucky.
Correction to my # 6: … centebillionaires …
Sure, AI is a clown show. BUT, they are clowns with flamethrowers.
Here is Just one more in an endless pile of pain, waste and abuse by AI data centers:
Maryland Residents to Pay $1.6 Billion More in Power Bills Due to Out-of-State Data Centers: Complaint
“Maryland customers have neither caused the need for these billions in new transmission projects, nor will they meaningfully benefit from them,” said Maryland People’s Counsel David S. Lapp.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/data-centers-maryland-electricity
Too many debates are just a re-enactment of the Monty Python fish slap dance. Messy meaningless arguments that accomplish nothing.
@3: SF author Robert Sawyer explicitly draws a connection between Intelligent Design and the simulation hypothesis. Unfortunately, he’s on the wrong side of the argument: https://intemblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/science-at-heart-interview-with-robert.html
(The money quote is a long way down search on “simulation”).
So much wrongness!
No, it is not.
That’s not AI, either.
Pushing it, but again, not AI. The word is ‘simulationism’.
—
Also, two people talking at each other is also not AI, either.
Dunno if it’s creationism, but I would use the term AB rather than AI: Absolute Bullshit. It really throws me how supposedly professional tech and businessmen morph into surreal bullcrap-slingers on all matters of AI.
Oh bubble, do pop soon.
That said, I covet those glasses. Might be somewhat headache-inducing, but I do bigly covet.
shermanj @8, it’s political, too, not just financial or technological: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/why-millions-americans-pay-unfinished-electricity-projects-2026-05-09/
↓
BOSTON, May 9 (Reuters) – Millions of Americans are unknowingly financing electric grid projects before they get any benefit.
Policy-makers, in an urgent bid to overhaul the nation’s aging electric grid, are increasingly letting utilities charge customers for power plants and transmission lines long before they’ve been built, boosting near-term bills in exchange for promised savings decades down the road, according to a Reuters review of regulatory disclosures.
The incentives aim to supercharge grid upgrades at a time of soaring demand from data centers that power artificial intelligence, but are also raising power bills for households and businesses already reeling from rising energy costs.
Traditionally, utilities seeking to build expensive infrastructure projects have had to secure loans from banks and investors, and are only allowed to pass along those costs to customers after the projects are finished.
But those projects also can be financed in advance under the so-called Construction Work In Progress (CWIP) incentive, a benefit that supercharges cash flow and reduces borrowing costs for electric utilities. The fees typically total several dollars per month on an average household bill, multiplied across millions of customers.
This seems like an excellent excuse to invest in goofy hats. Not that you really need one.
“OK, Ray Comfort once sent me a fruit basket, but that was it. It was memorable because it was such an exception.”
There’s your solution. Put the fruit basket on your head and debate under the pseudonym of Carmen Miranda.