April 22, 2025

“You Better Mechanize” by Zvi

35 minutes

Or you had better not. The question is which one.

This post covers the announcement of Mechanize, the skeptical response from those worried AI might kill everyone, and the associated (to me highly frustrating at times) Dwarkesh Patel podcast with founders Tamay Besiroglu and Ege Erdil.

Mechanize plans to help advance the automation of AI labor, which is a pivot from their previous work at AI Safety organization Epoch AI. Many were not thrilled by this change of plans.

This post doesn’t cover Dwarkesh Patel's excellent recent post asking questions about AI's future, which may get its own post as well.

After listening to the podcast, I strongly disagree with many, many of Tamay and Ege's beliefs and arguments, although there are also many excellent points. My response to it is in large part a collection of mini-rants. I’m fully owning that. Most of your probably should skip most of [...]

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Outline:

(01:41) You Better Mechanize

(10:32) Superintelligence Eventually

(11:38) Please Review This Podcast

(11:55) They Won't Take Our Jobs Yet

(13:04) They Took Our (Travel Agent) Jobs

(17:54) The Case Against Intelligence

(25:27) Intelligence Explosion

(27:23) Explosive Economic Growth

(30:25) Wowie on Alignment and the Future

(33:52) But That's Good Actually

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First published:

April 22nd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j7GgmLwymtJEcnf9L/you-better-mechanize

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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