The Paper of Record had a good article today about existential AI risk, mentioning EY:
In the early 2000s, a young writer named Eliezer Yudkowsky began warning that A.I. could destroy humanity. His online posts spawned a community of believers. Called rationalists or effective altruists, this community became enormously influential in academia, government think tanks and the tech industry.
It even mentioned Clippy!
The worriers have often used a simple metaphor. If you ask a machine to create as many paper clips as possible, they say, it could get carried away and transform everything — including humanity — into paper clip factories.
Very happy to see this.
Cade Metz already has multiple strikes against him when it comes to journalistic carelessness around the rationalist community and around AI risk. In addition to outing Scott, he blithely mischaracterized the situation between Geoff Hinton and Google.
It's harmful that the NYT still has him on this beat (though I'm sure his editors don't know/care that he's treating the topic as an anthropological curiosity rather than something worth taking seriously).