The New Yorker has a piece on the Bay Area AI doomer and e/acc scenes.
Excerpts:
[Katja] Grace used to work for Eliezer Yudkowsky, a bearded guy with a fedora, a petulant demeanor, and a p(doom) of ninety-nine per cent. Raised in Chicago as an Orthodox Jew, he dropped out of school after eighth grade, taught himself calculus and atheism, started blogging, and, in the early two-thousands, made his way to the Bay Area. His best-known works include “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” a piece of fan fiction running to more than six hundred thousand words, and “The Sequences,” a gargantuan series of essays about how to sharpen one’s thinking.
[…]
A guest brought up Scott Alexander, one of the scene’s microcelebrities, who is often invoked mononymically. “I assume you read Scott’s post yesterday?” the guest asked [Katja] Grace, referring to an essay about “major AI safety advances,” among other things. “He was truly in top form.”
Grace looked sheepish. “Scott and I are dating,” she said—intermittently, nonexclusively—“but that doesn’t mean I always remember to read his stuff.”
[…]
“The same people cycle between selling AGI utopia and doom,” Timnit Gebru, a former Google computer scientist and now a critic of the industry, told me. “They are all endowed and funded by the tech billionaires who build all the systems we’re supposed to be worried about making us extinct.”
They are pretty dominant in the LLM space and are already having their people fast tracked into positions of influence, while sinking tons of cash into normalizing their views and enforcing their terminology.
Even though they aren’t trying to pander to religious americans explicitly, their millenialism with the serial numbers filed off worldview will probably feel familiar and cozy to them.