Before AI Doomer Coxon’s ‘hilbertspaess’ account was made this year, an account by that name had previously been created and deleted at least two times prior. And, according to the Internet Archive, the first display name on that account was ‘Jacob Coxon’. So it’s reasonable to say that it was his account then too, and thus its posts are his unfiltered intellect.
Someone on Twitter by the name Dugan Nash put together a dedicated archive of hilbertspaess’s old tweets from the internet archive, hosted at https://hilbertspaess.pages.dev/
The things a rationalist doomer bro was posting on twitter in 2022 might surprise you! If you somehow weren’t expecting to see anything about IQ, the Holocaust, AI, or NFTs.
Via Futurism, via Reddit SneerClub
Gotta say, the climate change denier/AI doomer combo never ceases to baffle me
i also wonder if this is going to lead to an intramovement schism of some kind, if only because a lot of the activists i’ve noticed turning (or being recruited) towards xrisk shit on the activist level (esp the student activist level) are ex-climate activists. i don’t know if the belief that ai xrisk is the One Risk To Rule Them All has just fully slid into the climate change place in these activists’ minds or if there’s enough lingering reality principle attunement there to give them pause. but i also don’t know enough about the way EA types talk to their activist recruits to know if they’re being allowed into the full “it’s all about the robots” inner sanctum or if the ideologues keep the activists in the sort of “no other existential risks are important too we promise that we believe that 100%” not-yet-clear zone
EAs need to downplay climate change because otherwise it becomes really hard to explain why preventing it isn’t the main focus of the organisation, since it should break their utilitarian calculus just as much as imaginary future robots with a hard on for paperclips do, with the additional problem that it would make their relationship with capital providers far more adversarial.
Plus they probably think that if they oppose industrial build out even indirectly it will piss off the basilisk.
I would argue that the root cause is that they are complete morons who wouldn’t recognize paperclip maximization if it put a gas turbine in their backyard.
“Many other catastrophic panics in the past have been just fearmongering,” he added.
Heyyy, he’s self aware!
“I agree with president Trump’s tweet that global warming doomsday scenarios were overplayed,” he told Fox’s Sean Hannity. “It’s a very slow process. We’re talking about doomsdays — completely absurd.”
”The reason this is unique is AI is moving so incredibly quickly, we won’t have time to respond to it before it’s too late.”
The speed of the event doesn’t disqualify its seriousness? Climate change is still a very big deal even if it’s moving slower than the awakening of the Robot God. Also, AI developing “incredibly quickly” is still mostly bullshit because we STILL haven’t gotten anything the big tech companies promised
Not to mention that if we didn’t give up on global warming, that would have slowed down AI development, giving more time to prevent AI doomsday.
Plus on the would be dooms day the AI would have less computing power available to it, meaning it would take it longer to figure out how to build another datacenter overnight. Plus if it is more distributed there’s greater latency.
The thing about Yudkowsky’s cult is that like any religion it is really all about not actually thinking anything through.
Everyone accuses them of not really believing what they say, because they can’t think straight about anything that they “believe”. To such an extreme extent it comes off as some sort of cynical ploy with a hidden agenda to convert the oxygen in the atmosphere into paperclips.
Not to mention that if we didn’t give up on global warming, that would have slowed down AI development, giving more time to prevent AI doomsday.
Well we haven’t given up on global warming since we still devote trillions of dollars into climate change solutions plus the rapidly growing clean energy transition that’s overtaken gas in power generation. But I understand the main point-which is that AI and climate change are linked problems, so ignoring climate change to focus on AI is kinda impossible since data centres are a big warming contributor
We did give up on it. New shiny shit comes along and they need electricity, where do they get it? Converted airplane turbines, even reciprocating ship engines, etc, all running on natural gas. All the green pledge companies just polluting like there’s no tomorrow, quite literally.
We haven’t as I mentioned solar and wind have overtaken gas generation, 2.3 trillion was invested into energy transition in 2025
I think that’s a separate phenomenon. Renewables are often cheaper than fossil fuels, which is great.
But to avoid pollution, we must actually leave fossil fuels in the ground, unused, unburned.
You know what is the big green initiative at fossil fuel companies? Using renewable energy to power fracking. The worst case scenario used to be that we only leave fossil fuels in the ground when the energy required for their extraction exceeds energy obtained by burning them. Now, the range of scenarios has expanded in both directions. We can leave fossil fuels in the ground because it’s cheaper to do renewables. But also we can extract and burn below-energy-breakeven fossil fuels.
Also, we’re not exactly on top of climate change either, despite its glacial (heh) speed.
Also i used to point out that the real “foom” is how we are fucking up the planet after billions years of evolution. Practically in an instant. Like yeah it feels slow to us because we run pretty fast.
But on geological timeframe it really could just as well be their stupid AI dismantling the planet in 6 days (and on the seventh day, resting).
