Show HN: Doom or Bloom, map your AI worldview (doom-or-bloom.com)
45 points by transitivebs 5 hours ago
Map your AI worldview by answering a few questions, and see how you compare with others.
only takes a few minutes && free & open source && private by default && powered by Jev
I think this is a really important question for everyone to be asking themselves, and my hope is that this lil project helps to move our conversations around AI futures in a more balanced, productive direction.
weinzierl 17 minutes ago
I'm in the incremental bloom quadrant and I knew that even before I took the test. It's not even that I'm hesitant about this. I mean, I don't know the future but the incremental bloom is by far the likeliest thing I can imagine.
That being said, it strikes me as odd how empty this quadrant is. Why?
transitivebs 3 minutes ago
there are some more people here in the larger view of X users: https://www.doom-or-bloom.com/users
hypfer an hour ago
It shunned me for lack of demonstrated reasoning, which is a weird metric in that context.
If you measure how much energy is invested into convincing an <input> element pointing to a machine of something, you're not measuring reasoning.
You're measuring how desperate a person is for communication (and, usually, how unstable they are).
purpleflashing 2 hours ago
I tried to answer all the questions and it placed me in the extreme doom category while I would place myself closer to the center because I do not hold any particuarly strong opinions and I struggled to answer coherently some questions (e.g. I don't "expect" anything of the future or AI, I don't think "good future" is something I can conceptualize, same for "harm" on the level of society, etc.)
transitivebs 2 hours ago
hmmm the system's def not perfect. hopefully the process was still useful?
thanks for your feedback; if you publish your results, i'll look into it and try to figure out where things went wrong
thevinter 4 hours ago
> log-in with X
No thanks? Also why do you even need a login?
john_strinlai 4 hours ago
it doesn't appear to be a requirement.
transitivebs 3 hours ago
yeah, it's purely optional. by default, your results stay private in your browser session
but i wanted a way for people to publish their results to share w/ others
esafak 3 hours ago
Suhinnall27 4 hours ago
I believe your correct that this is a question everybody should ask themselves, and it would be very interesting to see how varied the responses are. I feel AI has been both a blessing and curse, and I hope it doesn't solely become the later.
transitivebs 3 hours ago
def plan to follow up w/ some anonymized analysis of the results if i get enough submissions
chroma_zone 2 hours ago
What are the "simulated answers" for the public figures based on? They don't seem to be direct quotes, so I assume they're AI-generated in their voice from the sources? I'd make that more clear since you risk misrepresenting people's opinions.
transitivebs 2 hours ago
all of the pages include the public sources they're based on and a clear disclaimer. this is also spelled out in the methodology section. many of these folks are using direct quotes to answer the questions where available as well
that being said, i agree, the simulated personas could be better flagged
appreciate the feedback
zaphar 3 hours ago
Depending on what exactly this analysis means by Human Choices I either think it captured me well or got me completely wrong:
Human choices can make limited changes, but dominant forces constrain the outcome.
I actually believe Human Choice is the dominant force here. But I expect aggregate human choice to limit the changes a single individual can have on the global outcome.transitivebs 3 hours ago
yeah, moloch will come for us all in the end
Marha01 3 hours ago
Gary Marcus in the center? He is a strong AI skeptic, I think he should be lower, away from the "Civilizational change" direction.
transitivebs 3 hours ago
i agree, but if you view the sources his answers are grounded in, he seems to have updated to being more moderate in light of recent progress. still def on the lower side of the predicted impact spectrum, but it seems he's taking the impacts more seriously now
that's why it's so important to show the sources used to derive these positions. like https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/why-my-pdoom-has-risen-dra...
transitivebs 3 hours ago
i really spent a lot of time looking through results and trying to course-correct and fix the model where i found obvious issues, but it's definitely not perfect
if you find any particularly egregious results, they're likely due to not having good enough public sources for that user's viewpoints. def let me know and i'll try to improve them
thanks
in-silico 2 hours ago
The public figure viewer would be way better to use if I could inspect entries without opening a new page.
cyclopeanutopia an hour ago
P(doom) ~ 100%, checks out, but I'm an easy case.
ctoth 4 hours ago
Bloom (like a mold)
ddxv 4 hours ago
P doom < 1 percent and at the bottom closest to incremental change.
edit: I would be curious to see how I'd changed over time as well. I would guess I was much more worried a year ago
transitivebs 3 hours ago
really appreciate you taking the time to test it out && hope it was useful
ecommerceguy 2 hours ago
I couldnt get past 30%. Useless.
grey-area 3 hours ago
Unask the question.
Perhaps step outside this foolish dichotomy and consider whether LLMs are being vastly oversold as tools (no AI is not all LLMs and it's foolish to conflate the two). They can be useful in certain domains, they can be a useful crutch in helping humans think. Jumping from there to they will turn us all to grey goo or trigger a fucking renaissance is just unthinking acceptance of what you've been told by marketers and flimflam merchants like Altman and Musk selling you a dream.
The only doom LLMs could bring, which we're already seeing, is the enshittification of our shared spaces; infesting them with a simulacrum of thought and creativity, dumbing us all down till we think advertising copy is good writing and sloppy, shiny, happy images are the only kind of art we need.
transitivebs 3 hours ago
which is why it's so important for people to answer this question.. your views are 100% supported by this project if you leave your expected bias at the door ;)
grey-area 2 hours ago
I'm curious why you think answering this question and plotting people on a chart based on doom or bloom would help in any way for those who don't think either doom or bloom is an appropriate framing, and I also don't really know what you mean by 'expected bias', expected by whom?
It's not an open question, it's a very closed one which severely restricts the possible futures considered.
transitivebs 2 hours ago
transitivebs 2 hours ago
kypro 34 minutes ago
I deliberately used non-emotive language and didn't explicitly hint at how I see things evolving with AI – otherwise what's the point if it's just telling me what I already know?
Instead I tried to stick to my view on both current and future capabilities of AI, and how it's likely to progress in the coming years.
My result was closed to Hinton which isn't that reflective of my actual view (I'd put doom at around 99% at this point). But that's probably just because of how I answered.
I like it though! Especially how it clearly exposes how unreasonable Ed Zitron is, and perhaps myself =)
transitivebs a minute ago
glad you found it helpful :) and yes, i find ed zitron super painful to listen to in general
martythemaniak 43 minutes ago
Doom or Bloom for Whom?
Say that I believe that AI is an ordinary technology (in the same way as the internet or transistors) that will be used to concentrate massive amounts of wealth and power into a small set of unaccountable oligarchs and their handmaidens while everyone else gets endless enshittification.
Pretty great outcome if you're one of the lucky few. Why wouldn't Musk or Andreesen think that's "bloom"? The exact same outcome OTOH seems pretty doom to me (a random dude)
ModernMech 3 hours ago
Needs more dimensions for net worth and social media audience size.
transitivebs 3 hours ago
i don't have net worth data in there, but you can sort by X follower counts on this more detailed page: https://www.doom-or-bloom.com/users
ModernMech 3 hours ago
Nice, that's a good dimension.