I received an immense amount of hate for this tweet; this surprised...
Dean W. Ball@deanwball
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Dec 01, 2025
~1 min read
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I received an immense amount of hate for this tweet; this surprised me.
But one thing didn’t surprise me: none of that negativity came from people whom I associate with the AI safety or “doomer” communities.
On its face, this *should* surprise you. If you had no context—if you were an alien—you would think “AI safety” and certainly “AI doom” people would *hate* the idea of AI being used to transform science, up to and including autonomous experiments. Such things are even in doom scenarios!
Yet they do not hate this EO, and many are supportive. This is because they are generally techno-optimists, as I have pointed out for a long time now. Fundamentally, they want the benefits of AI (for the most part; obviously there are exceptions).
Instead, the large volume of negativity I saw came from people with a much duller and more ambient anti-tech sentiment. They believe this EO is a “bailout” for “AI oligarchs,” and that AI is entirely fraudulent. Look at the replies; they hold all sorts of asinine slop-beliefs.
Soon enough it is possible that ~all AI discourse on this site will look much more like this than what it has looked like for the past two years. I hope not. But either way, the safetyists and the accelerationists—at least the intellectually honest among them—will soon realize that they are much closer on the spectrum of opinions about AI than they ever thought possible.
(N.B.: It’s very plausible lots of these accounts are bots working on behalf of anti-tech economic interests or foreign governments (all successful misinfo campaigns are based on things people already “want” to believe), but at least some of them are not.)
But one thing didn’t surprise me: none of that negativity came from people whom I associate with the AI safety or “doomer” communities.
On its face, this *should* surprise you. If you had no context—if you were an alien—you would think “AI safety” and certainly “AI doom” people would *hate* the idea of AI being used to transform science, up to and including autonomous experiments. Such things are even in doom scenarios!
Yet they do not hate this EO, and many are supportive. This is because they are generally techno-optimists, as I have pointed out for a long time now. Fundamentally, they want the benefits of AI (for the most part; obviously there are exceptions).
Instead, the large volume of negativity I saw came from people with a much duller and more ambient anti-tech sentiment. They believe this EO is a “bailout” for “AI oligarchs,” and that AI is entirely fraudulent. Look at the replies; they hold all sorts of asinine slop-beliefs.
Soon enough it is possible that ~all AI discourse on this site will look much more like this than what it has looked like for the past two years. I hope not. But either way, the safetyists and the accelerationists—at least the intellectually honest among them—will soon realize that they are much closer on the spectrum of opinions about AI than they ever thought possible.
(N.B.: It’s very plausible lots of these accounts are bots working on behalf of anti-tech economic interests or foreign governments (all successful misinfo campaigns are based on things people already “want” to believe), but at least some of them are not.)
Dean W. Ball@deanwball
Very excited to see this AI for Science Executive Order—the Genesis Mission. The Administration has appropriately ambitious goals here; we may be on the verge of world-changing breakthroughs. Congratulations to all involved!