AI Summary
5 min readIn October 2024, a OpenAI employee named Jacob Coxon left the company and gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal in which he said he believed there was a real chance AI would destroy humanity. He used the phrase "this is crunch time for humanity." That exact phrase was not his own—it was a direct quote from Eliezer Yudkowski, the founder of a fringe philosophical movement called rationalism. Coxon’s interview was quickly amplified by other figures in the same movement, and within days, a handful of current Anthropic employees publicly agreed with him, saying things like "he's right" and "probably gonna kill everyone." The episode, featuring computer scientist Cal Newport and physicist Adam Becker, argues that this moment is not a rational warning from sober insiders but rather the public emergence of a decades-old belief system that has quietly taken over the leading AI labs.
Where the Beliefs Came From
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What you'll learn
- 1 (05:12) **Introducing the Problem** - Ed Zitron sets up the episode: why are the leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind talking about AI apocalypse?
- 2 (06:17) **Defining the Rationalists: Who They Are** - Adam Becker gives the origin story of the "rationalist" movement.
- 3 (11:29) **The Central Figure: Eliezer Yudkowsky** - The story of the movement's most influential thinker, a high-school dropout who became its prophet.
- 4 (15:54) **The Money Enters: Peter Thiel** - How a tech billionaire funded the movement, turning a blog into an institution.
- 5 (32:16) **The Connection to Frontier AI Labs** - Cal Newport maps the direct pipeline from the rationalist community to OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind.
- 6 (35:00) **Defining "Alignment" in Their Terms** - The critical distinction between the common-sense meaning and the rationalist meaning of the word.
- 7 (37:05) **The Overlap with Effective Altruism (EA)** - How a second movement merged with rationalism to create a powerful, well-funded ideology.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Ed Zitron is joined by computer science professor and writer Cal Newport and journalist and astrophysicist Adam Becker to get the word out that the narrative about existential risk from AI a narrative driven by a religious cult of effective altruists and rationalists.
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Adam
https://bsky.app/profile/adambecker.bsky.social
https://www.youtube.com/@DreamingAgainstTheMachine
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-becker/more-everything-forever/9781541619593/
Cal
Podcast & Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@CalNewportMedia/
Newsletter: https://calnewport.com
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