Show HN: Doom or Bloom, map your AI worldview

I'm in the incremental bloom quadrant and I knew that even before I took the test. It's not even that I'm hesitant about this. I mean, I don't know the future but the incremental bloom is by far the likeliest thing I can imagine.

That being said, it strikes me as odd how empty this quadrant is. Why?

I tried to answer all the questions and it placed me in the extreme doom category while I would place myself closer to the center because I do not hold any particuarly strong opinions and I struggled to answer coherently some questions (e.g. I don't "expect" anything of the future or AI, I don't think "good future" is something I can conceptualize, same for "harm" on the level of society, etc.)

It shunned me for lack of demonstrated reasoning, which is a weird metric in that context.

If you measure how much energy is invested into convincing an <input> element pointing to a machine of something, you're not measuring reasoning.

You're measuring how desperate a person is for communication (and, usually, how unstable they are).

> log-in with X

No thanks? Also why do you even need a login?

I believe your correct that this is a question everybody should ask themselves, and it would be very interesting to see how varied the responses are. I feel AI has been both a blessing and curse, and I hope it doesn't solely become the later.

What are the "simulated answers" for the public figures based on? They don't seem to be direct quotes, so I assume they're AI-generated in their voice from the sources? I'd make that more clear since you risk misrepresenting people's opinions.

Depending on what exactly this analysis means by Human Choices I either think it captured me well or got me completely wrong:

   Human choices can make limited changes, but dominant forces constrain the outcome.

Gary Marcus in the center? He is a strong AI skeptic, I think he should be lower, away from the "Civilizational change" direction.

The public figure viewer would be way better to use if I could inspect entries without opening a new page.

P(doom) ~ 100%, checks out, but I'm an easy case.

Bloom (like a mold)

P doom < 1 percent and at the bottom closest to incremental change.

edit: I would be curious to see how I'd changed over time as well. I would guess I was much more worried a year ago

I couldnt get past 30%. Useless.

Unask the question.

Perhaps step outside this foolish dichotomy and consider whether LLMs are being vastly oversold as tools (no AI is not all LLMs and it's foolish to conflate the two). They can be useful in certain domains, they can be a useful crutch in helping humans think. Jumping from there to they will turn us all to grey goo or trigger a fucking renaissance is just unthinking acceptance of what you've been told by marketers and flimflam merchants like Altman and Musk selling you a dream.

The only doom LLMs could bring, which we're already seeing, is the enshittification of our shared spaces; infesting them with a simulacrum of thought and creativity, dumbing us all down till we think advertising copy is good writing and sloppy, shiny, happy images are the only kind of art we need.

Doom or Bloom for Whom?

Say that I believe that AI is an ordinary technology (in the same way as the internet or transistors) that will be used to concentrate massive amounts of wealth and power into a small set of unaccountable oligarchs and their handmaidens while everyone else gets endless enshittification.

Pretty great outcome if you're one of the lucky few. Why wouldn't Musk or Andreesen think that's "bloom"? The exact same outcome OTOH seems pretty doom to me (a random dude)

I deliberately used non-emotive language and didn't explicitly hint at how I see things evolving with AI – otherwise what's the point if it's just telling me what I already know?

Instead I tried to stick to my view on both current and future capabilities of AI, and how it's likely to progress in the coming years.

My result was closed to Hinton which isn't that reflective of my actual view (I'd put doom at around 99% at this point). But that's probably just because of how I answered.

I like it though! Especially how it clearly exposes how unreasonable Ed Zitron is, and perhaps myself =)

Needs more dimensions for net worth and social media audience size.

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