Cal Newport believes much of the fearmongering that is done by tech executives in the A.I. space is due to their backgrounds in Rationalism and related philosophies.

This reality, that Rationalism deeply influenced many of today’s major A.I. companies, helps us calibrate the unnerving language we’ve been hearing from their leaders. When Mr. Altman declares their pending models will be “sobering” for humanity or Mr. Amodei frets that this technology “will test who we are as a species,” it doesn’t necessarily mean that they discovered frightening new evidence that something catastrophic is imminent.

I listened to Newport expand upon this theory on the Not Dead Yet podcast. He’s got a convincing argument that the Rationalist movement has so strongly influenced these executives that they are simply parroting its talking points. He points out that tech execs who don’t come from those backgrounds — such as those in China and Jensen Huang of Nvidia — speak in an entirely different way about A.I. Newport’s view seems to explain a lot about the rhetoric we’re used to hearing from certain quarters.