the “obvious error” rule

From @buccocapital on Anthropic CEO’s insistence that AI is going to wipe out 50% of jobs.

Bingo.

The “we gave you our data and you used used it take our livelihoods” hasn’t even become a broad movement yet. The limit of the movement would be “Sorry, but this thing you built belongs to all of us in the same sense as a national park,” and the rolling protests from industry to industry as they get wiped will be sure to inform the politicians of their preferences.

The caricature black-and-white thinker’s retort is “Well, that’s how the cookie crumbles.” But even stock exchanges, bastions of capitalism, have “obvious error rules” that use a mix of guidelines and metrics to deem certain trades as clearly erroneous, not what any reasonable trader could have intended, or just out of bounds. They have the discretion and authority to bust or adjust such trades.

A view from the comments:

If Dario is right, society is gonna invoke an “obvious error”. That’s nice that you nerds figured all this out, but your optimization function didn’t know how to count human flourishing, and as far as we can tell, there’s a bunch of you who don’t even consider this a goal. It’s also creepy that you wouldn’t hide that. A gangster surprise strangles you from behind while you’re in the front seat. A supervillain tells you their whole plan to your face before they push the button.

You’ve probably seen this floating around. Extinctionists? Good grief, look who these people are:

So does Dario even want to be right about 50% of people losing their jobs? If he’s wrong, he’ll have to just live with being a regular old billionaire. I don’t know if that’s enough for him. If he is sounding the alarm on the risk and not just pumping Anthropic’s products, then he actually is being a virtuous Cassandra and maybe he just sees himself on a runaway train of prisoner’s dilemma defection.

If he thinks he can thread the needle and have everything he wants, well, I guess he’s no different than any loud mega titans these days.