Here’s how I see it: we live in an attention economy where every initiative with a slew of celebrities attached to it is competing for eyeballs and buy in. It adds to information fatigue and analysis paralysis . In a very real sense if we are debating AGI we are not debating the other stuff. There are only so many hours in a day.

If you take the position that AGI is basically not possible or at least many decades away (I have a background in NLP/AI/LLMs and I take this view - not that it’s relevant in the broader context of my comment) then it makes sense to tell people to focus on solving more pressing issues e.g. nascent fascism, climate collapse, late stage capitalism etc.

In the United Kingdom yes because of our authoritarian Online Safety Act that came into power earlier this year. If I join a discord channel marked as nsfw I get a prompt for id which I bypass with a VPN in another country.

My Gmail account is old enough to buy drinks in a bar in the US (21)

Eurgh I’m not sure whether it’s worse if he earnestly believes this crap or he’s cynically and smartly playing the game. The only loser here is the human race.

He’s saying it because he is trying to force a reaction from his evangelical republican pals. Either he wants to warn them off AI regulation because that would end the world or (the more likely option I think) he wants the accelerationist bastards to go full steam ahead and regulate because they want the end of the world and he wants to “pull up the ladder” on new emerging competing AI companies.