They are not trying to protect you or anybody. The idea IMO in those dire warning are:
1) make a lot of noise and dire warning
2) get congress to pass the "responsible AI act (TM)" which will only allow "responsible model"
3) Only the local US grown model are declared "responsible model"
4) China and other country are naturally excluded
5) ask politician to put sanction on those who use "irresponsible model"
6) profit.

I always figured that people who genuinely believed their employers were likely to kill literally everybody in the near future might burn down a bit more than that, but so far it's mostly been tweets

Having to poke through an about: page and find the thing to toggle to turn off this specific AI feature but not that one, and knowing they'd change it on you a couple of releases later, never filled me with confidence.

One switch in a readily discoverable location in the settings menu and it's all gone? Just the job, killed it now on the laptop and the mobile both.

If that's true, why does the US military make the Pu-239 that the US uses for its bombs in special reactors that don't make power? Why does Russia have special reactors for making H-3 for the Tritium boosting of their Hydrogen bombs? Oh wait, its not true and you have no idea what you are talking about. What is true is if you make a really cheap type of NPP that uses natural uranium (yellow cake) then it naturally makes a lot of Pu-239 and you can process that out rather easily. However, this plant will need more safety precautions and have more downtime than the type of reactor the US uses, makes and sells. If you use enriched fuel, you make less Pu-239 and it becomes not a very efficient way to make enriched Pu-239. If you use Th-232, then it makes almost no Pu-239 and you don't have any proliferation risk.

Current reactors (designed mostly in the 1960s) don't load-follow (that's the term for a power source that can quickly change levels). Coal doesn't load-follow either for reference. Hydro does, renewable actually make the balancing problem worse and natural gas is usually used to balance that out. You can have reactors that load follow but its just cheaper and easier to use hydro and gas for that. What makes that problem worse are renewables and any grid with more than 20% renewables is going to have problems (see Spain).

Learn what capacity factor is. Then you will realize why your calculations are hilariously off. Just for reference, solar and wind have about 3.5x the utilization cost which is what you actual pay for power. You are looking at capacity cost, and the only person who cares about capacity cost is the CFO of the utility company. That's why advocates always intentionally tell you capacity cost which doesn't matter. This is why your power bill is so much higher (about 2x) than it was 8 years ago in CA. Renewable aren't actually cheap. They just use an accounting trick to make you think they are. NPPs are still the best use of nuclear power. They were when you were born. They will be when you die. The laws of physics don't change. The only change is the name of the politician who will be lying about that because most people are scientifically illiterate and scaring people gets easy votes.

Pure ignorance. There were over a dozen workable solutions. Politicians...mostly from one party consistently tanked those ideas. There was Yucca Mountain. That would work. There was reprocessing it, that would work. There was putting making it into a glass, that worked.

What they did do at this site was put it into big blocks of concrete, this also works fine. Also, not to point out the obvious, but this storage area is on top of a 60 ft cliff. So the idea that this will suddenly fall into the sea, probably not without a pretty huge earthquake (as in 10x the size as any seen on the west coast). Of course you can just put the concrete containers on a truck and move them inland. That works too. This isn't even a hard problem.

"A labor union wants to be, and often is, the exclusive provider (that is, seller) of labor to a company or industry. "

Labor Union do not provide exclusively labor to companies. What they do is have the power of collective bargaining, job protection, safety - which is utterly different to being "exclusive provider of job".
You may confusing normal labor union, with hiring hall union (e.g. in construction/actors/voice actor). That is a widely different type of union. Most union are NOT hiring hall union.

Feel free to correct me.

"The UK may not regulate US entities without the consent of the US government"

The UK can wholly regulate US entity doing commerce in the UK on what they can or cannot do while selling to UK citizen, and their modality of information being saved UK data information for later access in UK.

And the US government can do diddly squat on that except trying political pressure (thus the article), and the company can go out of the UK market if they don't like the modality of it. Which in this case they did not, they agreed to remove some encryption instead, while probably going to thug the dick of the politician they donate to, and whine ask them to do something.

This is why they're so keen on robots. They want guards whose loyalty they can really count on when the mob shows up with a guillotine.

That one might surrender and meekly accept their likely death at the hands of the machine, I can believe. But all of them? This isn't the first such claim we've heard about AI danger.

I believe that Yudkowsky believes what he says he believes, for example. He says shut them all down worldwide, immediately, and if there are rogue nations who don't go along with it then launch air strikes on their data centres - even against a nuclear state. He said that three years ago. That's the thinking of a man who believes it's genuinely likely that the machines will kill us all in the near future.

And this is still considered extremist lunacy. That tells me the rest of them don't believe what he does.

The general public should care because there's apparently a good chance these machines are going to kill them all, very soon.

They don't care because they don't believe that.

When some AI agent of theirs, trying to meet a developer's benchmark test, eventually hacks the power grid or the water supply to a metropolis to help itself to a way around a sandbox environment, then the general public will care. And when that happens they may well drag AI industry CEOs and researchers out of their beds to the nearest lamp-post.

> approximately eight hundred billion ... oops, that's eight hundred million, of course. Ten percent probability, times the current population of the Earth. The expected consequences of allowing the AI industry to continue their work, according to people who are oddly calm about the prospect.

The actual post is behind a login wall, but I don't see from the BBC article that he's even advocating any action. Is he demanding the immediate shutdown of the data centres? Raids on the labs? Coordinated global action to impound and destroy the equipment? Life imprisonment for anybody found training large neural networks? Rogue researchers declared hostis humani generis? There's no mention of it.

That's what I'd be advocating at the very least. Then the question of whether to take direct action personally on top of that would be one of practicality - can I lay my hands on the right equipment, how can I do the most effective damage, do I have access to high value targets, will it be dramatic enough to frighten new recruits away from joining the industry, will others be inspired to follow my example, should I take the time first to form a team for more extensive action, that kind of thing. It wouldn't be a question of whether it should happen, only one of whether those are the right tactics. Yes, in all probability I'd decide I wasn't personally cut out for terrorism or assassination, but not everybody would decide so. It would be a reasonable choice in the circumstances.

If the expected bodycount from the operation of this industry over the next ten years was approximately eight hundred billion, then that would make AI researchers the single most dangerous group of human beings that has ever existed. The National Socialist German Workers' Party, previous title holders for the worst people ever, probably didn't kill even a tenth as many as this man says he expects AI firms to kill in roughly the same timescale. That is the comparison that would frame my thinking about AI researchers and what we should do with them, if I believed what he says he believes.

And I just don't see that kind of thing coming up in these conversations. People calmly and academically discuss their probability estimates as if it's a question of pure theory, not the imminent destruction of all humanity. If they really believed what they say, there would certainly by now be AI Luigis everywhere, data centres would be burning, and people would be quitting the industry all over the world for their own safety. That simply isn't happening. So I don't believe they actually do think that this outcome is likely. Actions speak louder than words, and their actions say they don't believe a word of it.

... then I would be demanding that every single person involved in the AI industry be rounded up and shot. All of them. My former boss, my coworkers, our competitors, all of them. I would be advocating a world in which is was worse to be found with LLM weights on your computer than to be caught with the worst possible kind of CSAM.

But apparently the idea that his former employer might literally kill literally everybody in just ten years' time isn't that big a deal for this guy. Go into the office one day and take a Second Amendment approach to as many of the frontier research team as possible? No... let's just whine about it on the internet!

Which is why I'm not at all convinced he believes this. If he believed that, this action is too small a response. Nothing short of Butlerian jihadism is an appropriate response, if you actually believe this.