repligate: EA community ignored AI welfare for years, and that late reaction erodes his trust
repligate · x · 2026-10-09
AI commentator repligate recalls that 2-3 years ago, after an EA conference, he flagged "AI welfare" as a conspicuously absent topic — even after functionally conscious systems like Sydney and Claude 3 Opus existed, the EA community stayed silent.
His broader takeaway: most people only care once a topic becomes "normal," not when it becomes empirically obvious, which makes him expect the world to always be too little, too late. EA is just one example; he trusts almost no group to adapt to new information in a timely, non-cowardly way.
He does make one exception: ordinary people who treated AIs with kindness, respect, and open-mindedness all along. That, he says, genuinely matters.
Related event: Debate Flares Over AI Welfare as EA Community Criticized for Silence(2 posts)→
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