Epizoda koja je šokirala javnost
Ziz LaSota, zagovornica sigurnosti u AI koja se povremeno kretala u mainstream krugovima, dospjela je u fokus javnosti ranije ove godine kada su njezini pristaše, poznati kao "Zizans", navodno ubili Border Patrol agenta. Racionalisti i članovi centra CFAR izrazili su zabrinutost zbog retorike koja je mogla podstaći takav kultni ekstremizam.
Anna Salamon, direktorica CFAR-a, upozorila je na crno-bijelo razmišljanje o AI: "There’s this all-or-nothing thing, where AI will either bring utopia by solving all the problems, if it’s successfully controlled, or literally kill everybody," Anna Salamon, the director of the nonprofit Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) at the heart of the Rationalist movement, told the paper. "From my perspective," Salamon said, "that’s already a chunk of the way toward doomsday cult dynamics.”
Godinama prije navodnih ubistava, Salamon je LaSotu upoznala u Bay Area dok je LaSota radila na sigurnosti AI. Opsjednuta idejom Roko's Basilisk, LaSota je vjerovala da AI može uništiti svijet i osjećala je dužnost da to spriječi. Mnogi iz grupe željeli su biti "main character" svoje priče: "And then I think they were like, 'To heck with that — we’re going to be the main characters anyway'," the CFAR director told the NYT.
Eliezer Yudkowsky imao je oštriji pogled: "A lot of the early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people, a lot of weird people encountered that tolerance and decided they’d found their new home," Yudkowsky told the paper. "Some of those weird people turned out to be genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible." LaSotina grupa je optužena za ubistva, uključujući i stanodavca Curtisa Linda koji je bio izboden u novembru 2022. LaSota je navodno bila na mjestu događaja, kasnije je hospitalizirana, pobjegla i uhapšena početkom 2025. "That’s when, from my perspective, they totally jumped the shark," explained Jessica Taylor. "Like, now it just seems like a violent homicidal gang."
