I had Max Tegmark as a professor when I was an undergrad. I loved him. He is a great physicist and educator, so it pains me greatly to say that he has gone off the deep end with his effective altruism stuff. His work through the Future of Life Institute should not be taken seriously. For anyone interested, I responded to Tegmark’s concerns about AI and Effective Altruism in general on The Luddite when they first got a lot of media attention earlier this year.
I argue that EA is an unserious and self-serving philosophy, and the concern about AI is best understood as a bad faith and self-aggrandizing justification for capitalist control of technology. You can see that here. Other commenters are noting his opposition to open sourcing “dangerous technologies.” This is the inevitable conclusion of a philosophy that, as discussed in the linked post, reifies existing power structures to decide how to do the most good within them. EA necessarily excludes radical change by focusing on measurable outcomes. It’s a fundamentally conservative and patronizing philosophy, so it’s no surprise when its conclusions end up agreeing with the people in charge.
I think Max Tegmark is like other public intellectuals, for example, Michio Kaku, that have to say something controversial periodically to stay in he news and maintain their reputation.
Maybe. It had been almost 15 years since I last heard of him until the EA stuff started going mainstream, but he was a very well respected physicist, especially for how young he was back then. After having taken several very small classes with him, it would surprise me if he was a clout chaser. People are complicated though, so who knows.
Everyone’s focusing on LLMs. Idiots. LamgChain is where the first “AI” systems will come from. And anyone can do that shit.
