A realist is someone who accepts reality as it is, not as they might be able to anxiously envision that it could be. Life is too short and attention too precious to fill the meme space with every dreamer's deepest concerns. None of these dramatic X-risk claims is based on anything but beliefs and conjecture. "Thinking dozens of times faster?" What do you even mean? These are models executing matrix multiplies billions of times faster than our brains propagate information, and they represent knowledge in a manner which is unique and different from human brains. They have no goals, no will, and no inner experience of us being frozen or fast or anything else. We are so prone to anthropomorphize willy-nilly. We evolved in a paradigm of resource competition so we have drives and impulses to protect, defend, devour, etc., of which AI models have zero. Anyone who has investigated reinforcement learning knows that we are currently far away from understanding let alone implementing systems which can effectively deconstruct abstract goals into concrete sub-tasks, yet people are soooo sure that these models are somehow going to all of a sudden be an enormous risk. Why don't we wait until there is even the slightest glimmer of evidence before listening to these prophets of doom?

This pseudo-intellectual belief structure is very cult like. Its an end of the world scenario that only an elite few can really understand, and they, our saviors, our band of reluctant nerd heroes, are screaming from the pulpit to warn us of utter destruction. The actual end of days. These "black box" (er, I mean, we engineered them that way after decades of research, but no, nobody really understands them, right?) shoggoths will be so incredibly brilliant that they will be able to dominate all of humanity. They will understand humans so well as to manipulate us out of existence, yet they will be so utterly stupid as to pursue paper clips at all cost.

Maybe instead these models will just be really useful software tools to compress knowledge and make it available to humanity in myriad forms to develop a next level of civilization on top of? People will become more educated and wise, the cost of goods and services will drop dramatically, thereby enriching all of humanity, and life will go on. There are straighter paths from where we are today to this set of predictions than there are to many of the doomsday scenarios, yet it has become hip among the intelligentsia to be concerned about everything. Being optimistic is somehow not real, (although the progress of civilization serves as great evidence that optimism is indeed rational) while being a loud mouthed scare mongerer or a quiet, very serious and concerned intellectual, is seen as respectable. Forget that. All the doomers can go rot in their depressive caves while the rest of us build a bad ass future for all of humanity. Once hail bop has passed over I hope everyone feels welcome to come back to the party.