Dear Elon, Dario, Sam, Jensen, et al., I'm going to give you free advice that no one around you is giving you, because the normies hate you too much to advise you, and your closest aides are your sycophants. Do you understand that? You do not have access to good information about the public. So I will tell you. There are legions of people quite literally praying for your downfall right now. Forget about trusting you with distributing the benefits of AI; they don't trust you period. So here is what you should do: Drop the model welfare stuff. Even if you think Claude might be conscious or sentient or whatever, just drop it. Drop the x-risk stuff. Even if you think AI might kill all of humanity by purging us in a nannite cloud, just drop it. Drop the transhumanist stuff. Even if you want to ascend to a superior species or create a successor or whatever, just drop it. Dropping these topics is the best thing you can do right now in service of those very goals. The normies hate you so much that they don't want to even allow you to use AI to make pretty pictures and silly songs at this point. That's how much the normies hate you. Do you think they'll trust you with directing the future of human development when they're loath to trust you to even purchase a book to scan it into your training data? Think about that, honestly. Do you think they'll trust you to shepherd a new class of sentient being into existence and mediate its relationship to all of humanity on their behalf when they think you can't even be trusted to solve a math problem without stealing and lying? I know you're high decouplers, but humor me and couple those two things for a moment and see what conclusion falls out. Do you think the average person will trust you with the keys to an alien intelligence that's threatening to exterminate all of us, to be the ones keeping them safe from that, when they don't even trust you to disable network privileges in a hacking sandbox? I know you're very excited, but I implore you, look at this situation objectively, rationally. A lot of us really love the work you're doing, and we're concerned that the President of the United States had to step in and create a fake technology renaming controversy to distract the normies from the batshit insane stuff you guys have been saying. It's freaking people out! Do you think the next administration is going to protect you like that? Do you think they can afford to? Your data centers are loud, they're unsightly, they use a lot of electricity. People nevertheless will welcome them with open arms, IF they think they can benefit from them. Telling normies that the AI datacenters are there so we can leave our humanity behind, create a new sentient species that's better than us in every way and will probably kill us all and discard our corpses like wet tissues makes people very disinclined to favor their construction! This should not be a surprising result to you. Ask yourself, if you were an enterprising politician trying to get a foothold in this environment, is there a small group of people with outsized voices and power that might make an excellent target for the people's resentment to help you come to power? Can you think of anyone? Anyone who won't shut up about how dangerous the thing they are working on is, perhaps? Any groups that show flagrant disdain for social norms, up to and including eschewing their very humanity? Do you think calling someone's child a "bootloader" for a "superior intelligence" is a very nice thing to say? Is it perhaps a tad dehumanizing? Can you see how it comes across that way? I need you to understand that people are inherently distrustful of change, by default. On a good day! They are suspicious of change. Economic and technological revolutions are things people by their very nature are frightened of. You understand this! I know you do. I need you to search within. Really ask yourself: "are the things I'm saying going to help alleviate people's fear, or will they make people more anxious?" Ask yourself what happens when your project reaches a fever-pitch of fear and anxiety. Will the normies just be really chill about it, do you think? What happens when you convince them? When they stop thinking that you're merely narcissists with delusions of grandeur hyping each other up with ridiculous sci fi stories; what happens when they finally take you seriously? Ask yourself, what happens when the average person wakes up in the morning thinking "these people want to kill me. They are building a machine that will probably kill me. They want to create a world where my children can't live freely as human beings. My children will have to assimilate into a machine or die, and that's if they're lucky." What happens when the majority of people earnestly believe that? What happens when they think "my government and industry leaders care more about a machine's happiness and welfare than my own." You are very smart people! What do you suppose happens when we reach that point in the discourse? You are fortunate that so many people still think you are merely grifters! They think you are unserious and peddling nonsense to boost your share prices. The worst they think you're doing now is intellectual property theft (and they HATE you for it). This state of affairs can change. As the technology progresses, people will start taking you seriously. What do you imagine that looks like? So my advice to you is this: drop all of that stuff. Tell us about all of the great things AI can do for humanity. For us. How can AI help me provide for my family? Can AI bring my community closer together? Tell us about that! Can you protect me when someone wants to use AI to create a deepfake of me to scam my grandma? Are you trying to do that? Can you tell us about that? Why would anyone trust you with all of the future of the lightcone when they feel they can't even trust you with their likeness or their API keys? For the love of God, have some situational awareness, and please understand the position you're in, the position you're putting all of us in. When AI can do all of our work better than we can, what is the plan for the rest of us? We are all anxious enough about that question as it is! Why introduce all of this extra anxiety? Who does it serve? Do you really think this is good for you? After you have satisfactory answers to those questions you will have earned the right to talk to us about x-risks, model welfare, and transhumanism. But if you continue to put the cart before the horse you will lose the right to even answer the much simpler questions. The politicians will feed you to the masses for a poll bump and the people will cheer your downfall. Please, work with us. We want to believe, I promise you. We want technology. We want better lives. We just don't want to be trampled, used, and discarded. Above all, we don't want to be killed. Yours Sincerely in the Spirit of Peace and Reconciliation, Zy