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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

It's not a normal technology.

I haven't seen much splitting into two groups of people who are for and against. It's more that individuals can see upsides - does cool stuff, and downsides - something like a rival lifeform that will be smarter than us.

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I think that's a pretty odd framing, because the upsides are pretty relative and lopsided to those receiving certain benefits. The people who are anti-AI often are those who can acknowledge that AI does cool stuff, but that it's not worth it and doesn't provide any real benefit except by helping people keep up in a frenetic arms race to develop new tech.

Personally, I'm against AI but even if it could never be smarter than us and if it were at the state that it was last year, I'd still be against it due to the environmental cost.

I'm mildly pro but agree on the environmental costs. I think they should try to make it green energy only though not much chance with the current US admin. I'm not so enthused with current AI. I use last years like language translation a lot and I'm interested in the possible sci-fi future like curing diseases, some sort of immortality, abundance etc.

I keep seeing it and it's really bipolar. Boosters think it's the best thing ever and downplays all the issues while antis think it's completely useless and a disaster environmentally and morally.

Good luck saying LLMs are useful but still a net negative in the filter bubble this author is in. No, you also need to think it has zero utility or you're the enemy.

One datapoint on the same people seeing pro and anti is Nick Bostrom (Swedish philosopher & writer) who was one of the instigators of AI doom with his 2014 book:

Superintelligence 2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang...

has now brought out another book on the positives:

Deep Utopia 2024 https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/deep-utopia-life-and-meaning-in-...

I was just watching an interview with him:

Nick Bostrom Says We Are Clueless About What's Coming https://youtu.be/J9WBZ8BTLLg https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/opinion/interesting-times... - rattles on a bit

Apparently Yudkowsky was influenced by the 2014 book in coming up with his stuff.

The timeline is older than that.

Yudkowsky wrote about AI since the 1990s, his first realization of the AI danger was circa 2001, his "Sequences" were 2006-2009.

Bostrom also wrote much earlier about AI existential risk, see e.g. this paper of him from 2002:

https://www.jetpress.org/volume9/risks.html

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