The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
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The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
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Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#2... been saying this for years. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you wouldn't just be posting on lesswrong, you would be taking direct action against a clear and present danger.
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#3Wouldn’t be a proper technology revolution without some version of labor realizing they are commodities and rejecting the collapse of the current form of labor power, so that tells me we’re actually in the transition from an old economic process to a new one.
Dont forget, the Luddites were correct about the direction that automation and labor power were going. They weren’t blindly “fighting machines”, they were fighting inequitable working conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
>Periodic uprisings relating to asset prices also occurred in other contexts in the century before Luddism. Irregular rises in food prices provoked the Keelmen to riot in the port of Tyne in 1710 and tin miners to steal from granaries at Falmouth in 1727. There was a rebellion in Northumberland and Durham in 1740, and an assault on Quaker corn dealers in 1756.
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#4... been saying this for years. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you wouldn't just be posting on lesswrong, you would be taking direct action against a clear and present danger.
That pesky basilisk to worry about though
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#5... been saying this for years. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you wouldn't just be posting on lesswrong, you would be taking direct action against a clear and present danger.
Disagree. Just one more blog post. I swear, one more blog post will do it.
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#6I am disappointed "Doomerism" is not an official name for the practice of putting Doom on anything and everything!
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#7I don't agree with Yudkowsky, but I think there's certainly a chance that he's right about AI destroying humanity. I just don't think the likelihood of that happening is as high as he thinks it is. But there certainly is a chance.
The problem with trying to stop it is, how? Even if you killed every single AI company leader and every single top AI engineer, it would almost certainly just slow down the rate of progress in the technology, not stop it. The technology is so vital to national security that in the face of such actions, state security forces would just bring development of the tech under their direct protection Manhattan Project-style. Even if you killed literally every single AI engineer on the planet, it's pretty likely that this would just delay the development of the technology by a decade or so instead of actually preventing it.
The technology is pushed forward by a simple psychological logic: every key global actor knows that if they don't build the technology, they will be outcompeted by other actors who do build the technology. No key actor thinks that they have the luxury of not building the technology even if they wanted to not build it. It's very similar to nuclear weapons in that regard. You can talk about nuclear disarmament all you want but at the end of the day, having nuclear weapons is vital to having sovereignty. If you don't have nuclear weapons, you will always be in danger of becoming just the prison bitch of countries that do have them. AI seems that it is growing toward a similar position in the calculus of states' notional security.
I can think of no example in history of the entire world deciding to just forsake the development of a technology because it seemed like it could prove to be too dangerous. The same psychological logic always applies.
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#8It is completely coherent to both think that an extremely bad thing is coming, and yet that does not justify any particular action. "The ends don't justify the means" and literal entire religions have been built on this concept. It is not irrational or incoherent to believe that even something as serious as extinction does not justify arbitrary action.
Someone _may_ decide that it does, but it is not a necessary conclusion.
And that is completely aside from the many many (in my opinion convincing) arguments that such acts of violence would not be effective anyways.
This article is a much better (and much longer) extension of the argument and direct refutation of the OP article
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/political-violence-is-never-ac...
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#9... been saying this for years. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you wouldn't just be posting on lesswrong, you would be taking direct action against a clear and present danger.
Does this apply to other domains or just AI? For example, if you think gain-of-function research accidents put millions of lives at risk, is the logical next step to quit your job and become a terrorist?
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#10... been saying this for years. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you wouldn't just be posting on lesswrong, you would be taking direct action against a clear and present danger.
They are! Yudkowsky sat down with Senator Bernie Sanders last month to explain what's at stake, successfully convinced him that it's a big deal, and Sanders has now proposed a national moratorium on AI data centers (https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-o...) to help slow things down. That's pretty direct, and a lot more useful than random violence by random people.