Luke Burgis: belief

Transcript context

…Sure. I always probe people’s motivations. In this case, I had a back and forth with some folks at Anthropic. I was asking basic questions like, what’s next after this? They basically invited 14, 15 people out for a couple of days to comment on Claude’s constitution. I think they were all Christians, and they were interested in virtue ethics and what Christianity might have to add to the development of making Claude be good. I asked basic questions like, “What do you mean by be? Philosophically, like that. What does that mean? What does it mean for Claude to be good? It seems like your discovery of virtue ethics, and they were using the word discernment, is you’ve landed on something that Ignatius and the Jesuits had figured out 500 years ago. What’s next? Is it just the two days, and what comes after that?” The more that I talked to them—people do this all the time; it’s why people like to meet the pope, for instance—I didn’t know how genuine it was. I thought that they were looking for a way to say, “We did this thing, we conferred with some Christians, we’re the good guys, we’re building the good AI. ” Then the way that it was pitched to me was very much like, if I care about the future and the good of humanity, then this is definitely something that I could do. It was framed like a moral imperative, not only by people at Anthropic, but even by people that know me, by fellow Christians. I said, “I do think I have some moral responsibilities, and there’s some moral imperatives in my life, but flying out to San Francisco to consult for Anthropic for free is not one of them.” I don’t think that makes me a bad person. It was just in the communication with them, I felt like something was off. Just philosophically, putting aside your theological views, but what do you think of effective altruism as a normative philosophy? That has guided, at least, some parts of AI production, right?…

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