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The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

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Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#171

Post by hollerith »

janalsncm wrote: post #167
hollerith wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Eliezer Yudkowsky has gone so far as to say that it might be ok to kill most of humanity (excepting a "viable reproduction population") to stop AI That doesn't sound like a non-misleading summary of anything he would say. Do you have a quote or a link?

Apparently he deleted the tweet but there are screenshots and he apologized. https://betweendrafts.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/survivo... https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1642229374656348161

Those 2 links certainly satisfy my request. Thank you.

My summary of Eliezer's deleted tweet is that Eliezer is pointing out that even if everyone dies except for the handful of people it would take to repopulate the Earth, even that (pretty terrible) outcome would be preferable to the outcome that would almost certainly obtain if the AI enterprise continues on its present course (namely, everyone's dying, with the result that there is no hope of the human population's bouncing back). It was an attempt to get his interlocutor (who was busy worrying about whether an action is "pre-emptive" and therefore bad and worrying about "a collateral damage estimate that they then compare to achievable military gains") to step back and consider the bigger picture.

Some people do not consider the survival of the human species to be intrinsically valuable. If 99.999% of us die and the rest of us have to go through many decades of suffering just for the species to survive, those people would consider that outcome to be just as bad as everyone dying (or even slightly worse since if 100% of us were to die one day without anyone's knowing what hit them, suffering is avoided). I can see how those people might find Eliezer's deleted tweet to be alarming or bizarre.

In contrast, Eliezer cares about the human species independent of individual people (although he cares about them, too).

Also, just because I notice that outcome A is preferable to outcome B does not mean that I consider it ethical to do anything to bring about outcome B. For example, just because I notice that everyone's life would be improved if my crazy uncle Bob died tomorrow does not mean that I consider it ethical to kill him. And just because Eliezer noticed and pointed out what I just summarized does not mean that Eliezer believes that "it might be ok to kill most of humanity to stop AI" (to repeat the passage I quoted in my first comment).

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#172

Post by handoflixue »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #138
handoflixue wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well what other tools do we have? I'll answer with a quote from the founder of the Rationalist movement, Eliezer: "How certain do you have to be that your child has terminal cancer, before you start killing puppies? 10% sure? 50% sure? 99.9%? The answer is that it doesn't matter how certain you are, killing puppies doesn't cure cancer."

Ok, I don't think anyone suggested killing puppies. Are you going to take this topic seriously or just dodge the question?

The point is that violence isn't actually a tool, just like killing puppies isn't an actual solution.

I can know "this doesn't work" without knowing exactly what does work. "Violence is the only tool we have, so we have to use it" is the sort of logic that leads to the Holocaust.

If you want my own personal observations: Over the past few centuries, we've managed women's suffrage, black suffrage, gay marriage, etc. largely without violence, so clearly there are processes out there for progress. We fixed the Ozone Hole without killing people. I don't think murder was involved at all in finding recent AIDS medication, or GLP-1.

There are tons of examples of successful social progress in the past few decades that don't involve violence. Conversely, I struggle to name any terrorists that accomplished their goals by bombing scientists.

If nothing else, we can make violence a lot more legible by embodying it in a legal process, and bringing society onto the same page about it's necessity.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#173

Post by handoflixue »

arduanika wrote: post #147
handoflixue wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's rather relevant that the community itself rejects the logic you're trying to impose on it. You can straw-man any sort of conclusion on to any sort of philosophy. This will not actually help you much at all if you're trying to predict what people will actually do. If the only people that reach your conclusion are ones that don't actually subscribe to the philosophy, then it doesn't matter, because no one…

> "If the only people that reach your conclusion are ones that don't actually subscribe to the philosophy, then it doesn't matter, because no one is actually acting on those conclusions." What an odd thing to say right after young Mr. Moreno-Gama reached that conclusion and did subscribe to the philosophy, when it does matter, because he did actually act on those conclusions. How odd to introduce a hypothetical that…

Every major philosophical group has killed people. Whatever beliefs you profess to hold, people have killed for them. If the presence of one or two deranged outliers is enough to reach reasonable conclusions about a group, then we can write off absolutely every single major contribution to philosophy, and conclude that having a philosophy leads only to violence and murder.

You have to understand basic statistics: is this group actually more dangerous than average? Do rationalists kill more than non-rationalists?

Or is the rational conclusion of non-rationalists also violence?

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#174

Post by thrance »

nitwit005 wrote: post #50

Mentally ill people often have a justification for their actions which is vaguely rational, but you'll notice the vast majority of people aren't doing what they're doing. These people just get attracted to political causes somehow. Even the woman's suffrage movement had some people setting buildings on fire.

Are you implying that the suffragettes were mentally ill?

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#175

Post by handoflixue »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #91
handoflixue wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the point every prominent member of the "Doomer" community is making: Violence isn't an effective action; it is a counterproductive action. It is actively destructive.

Well what other tools do we have? Waiting for the market to fix things is also destructive and harms orders of magnitude more people than violent direct action does; democracy is wildly ineffective compared to violence even at its most optimistic; what else remains? Fleeing the planet?

Giving this a less glib response: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/article/2043601524815716866 goes in to some detail, but Eliezer has always had a fairly clear call for action, which is international regulation. And in particular, he makes the point that random acts of violence are actively counterproductive to his goal.

We walked out of the Cold War alive. Humanity has faced extinction before, and despite it all, we walked away alive last time. It's not unreasonable to think we can do it again.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#176

Post by thrance »

kurthr wrote: post #106
drivebyhooting wrote: post #64

Can LLMs design and build a chip foundry to manufacture semiconductors? No? Can LLMs design and build the reactors to enrich uranium, breed plutonium, and construct nuclear weapons? No? Can LLMs design and manufacture Shahed drones? No? There are already super intelligences at large with “scary capability”. And yet the word hasn’t ended.

Can LLMs convince a human who has power over each and everyone of those things to use them for a(n unstated) prompts goal? Yeah, probably over 50% of the population already, and if not many of the rest soon.

> probably over 50% of the population

On which end of this split do you place yourself? Most people believe they're smarter than average [0].

And have some more respect for your fellow human, please.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6029792/

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#177

Post by nradov »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #120
nradov wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During WWII, the entire Allied leadership was willing to kill millions of Axis children if that's what it took to win the war and force the enemy to surrender unconditionally. There was at least some genocidal intent. Population centers were intentionally bombed to wipe out civilian factory workers. We can argue about whether that was right or wrong but the reality is that it's probably inevitable once armed conflict…

It was wrong, and yes would likely be seen as genocidal in the current day, rightly so. You can't just randomly kill innocent civilians, no matter what. It didn't even meaningfully accelerate the end of the war.

Was it wrong though? How many US troops should we sacrifice to save one enemy civilian? In other words, if you were President Roosevelt or Truman then how do you morally justify not doing everything possible to shorten the war by even one day? How do you tell a US family that their son had to die so that the US government could avoid randomly killing innocent civilians?

It's cheap and easy to pretend to be morally superior when you're not the one forced to make hard choices based on limited information, and then deal with the consequences.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#178

Post by MiguelX413 »

hax0ron3 wrote: post #7

I 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…

> 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.

I wish they did before too.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#179

Post by AnimalMuppet »

thrance wrote: post #174
nitwit005 wrote: post #50

Mentally ill people often have a justification for their actions which is vaguely rational, but you'll notice the vast majority of people aren't doing what they're doing. These people just get attracted to political causes somehow. Even the woman's suffrage movement had some people setting buildings on fire.

Are you implying that the suffragettes were mentally ill?

I think they're implying that the suffragettes who set buildings on fire were mentally ill.

Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

#180

Post by AnimalMuppet »

shimman wrote: post #129
thegrim33 wrote: post #115

The LLM doomerism is just one arm of the general "us vs them" strategy - defining a group of people as the others who are the bad guys, defining yourself as the good guys, constantly fostering hate against the others, finding ways to give your group rationale for why they have the moral high ground, all of it in the end an act to gain power/influence/money for the people orchestrating it. The anti-AI angle is just th…

No, AI doomerists are people cosplaying as religious fanatics. It's mostly sci-fi nonsense that ignores the real material realities that people are currently suffering due to LLMs (water shortages, energy spikes, cancer rates increases, job quality tanking, unnerving local environments, exacerbating the climate crisis). Most AI safety workers are just doing creative fiction (what if the AI turns into skynet!?1!!?) an…

LLMs are causing cancer rates to increase? Say what???

What do you think the causal mechanism is?

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