I'm not surprised that the sort of individual prone to taking Yud too seriously is also likely to be a comically-inept assassin.
Had he tried to blow up the diesel genset at a datacenter, he'd have burnt his lips on the exhaust pipe.
The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
81–90 of 203 posts
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#82I 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…
Humanity agreed, for example, that growing ozone hole is dangerous for everyone, and worked together to ban production of gases that damage ozone layer. See Montreal Protocol International Treaty. It was highly effective. Training powerful AIs isn’t different.
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#83Can 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.
> And yet the world hasn’t ended.
...yet
But we only need things to spiral out of control one time for that to change.
The world as we understand it would have ended if Vasily Arkhipov didn't veto the decision to launch a sub nuke during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Is an emotionless AI system in his place ever going to make the same decision he did?
How confident are you we won't put an AI system in his place, particularly when we have to assume if we don't others will?
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yudkowsky himself also posted a rebuttal today: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/article/2043601524815716866
I found the last paragraph a fairly great summary of a rather long post: > 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.
The whole post should have just been this one line. He likes the sound of his own voice too much.
That said, it rings hollow. AI doomerism is rooted in Terminator style narratives, and in that narrative, the rogue Sarah Connor changes history (with a lot of violence, explosions, and special effects).
The whole scene is toxic.
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#85It 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 conc…
The older I get, the more I get the sneaking suspicion that statements like "the ends don't justify the means" and "violence is always the wrong answer" are, at best, wildly logically inconsistent in any society at any time, and at worst, designed to ensure only a very few people in power can commit violence. An ongoing conflict has resulted in the violent deaths of literally many thousands of children. The people wh…
> The older I get, the more I get the sneaking suspicion that statements like "the ends don't justify the means" and "violence is always the wrong answer" are, at best, wildly logically inconsistent in any society at any time, and at worst, designed to ensure only a very few people in power can commit violence.
My experience has been the polar opposite: The older I get, the more I've seen people come to completely incorrect conclusions that justify their decisions to harm others. This ranges from petty things like spreading gossip, to committing theft from people they don't like ("they had it coming!") to actual physical violence.
In every case, zoom out a little bit and it becomes obvious how their little self-created bubble distorted their reality until they believed that doing something wrong was actually the right and justified move.
I think you're reaching too far to try to disprove the statement in a general context. Few people are going to say "violence is always the wrong answer" in response to someone defending themselves against another person trying to murder them, for example. I think these edge cases get too much emphasis in the context of the article, though. They're used as a wedge to open up the possibility that violence can be justified some times, which turns into a wordplay game to stretch the situation to justify violence.
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#86Some recent discussions on the Altman attack:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745230
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#87[deleted]
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#88> The Rational Conclusion of Doomerism Is Violence No it isn't. The most prominent "doomer" has a strong grasp and deep, wholehearted appreciation for the the principles of liberalism and the rule of law: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/2043601524815716866 Which the author of this piece of slop appears to lack.
It is true that only Yudkowsky gets to say what the rational conclusion of his ideas are. Nobody else gets to speculate. Only the pope of rationalism, because he's the rational one here. See? It's right there in the name! > this piece of slop Citation needed. Or maybe we need to update the title of that children's book for internet arguments: Everyone Who Disagrees With Me Is Slop. The Yud post you linked is not slop…
> It is true that only Yudkowsky gets to say what the rational conclusion of his ideas are. Nobody else gets to speculate. Only the pope of rationalism, because he's the rational one here. See? It's right there in the name!
No, I am saying that Yudkowsky's views are straightforwardly compatible with bedrock principles of liberalism, and the author of the piece fails to acknowledge that compatibility or grapple with them himself. It's not about "rationalism" or who is "allowed" to speculate.
I called it slop because it says false things that have the hallmark of LLM style, e.g.
> The Sequences build the liturgy: a small caste of correct thinkers, epistemically and morally superior, whose rationality entitles them to govern what the rest of humanity is allowed to build. It’s not a safety movement. It’s a priesthood with an origin story written in fanfiction.
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#89I 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. Can't you? Haven't many (most?) countries agreed to nuclear disarmament? What about biological weapons? Even anti-personnel mines, I think?
China is rapidly building out their nuclear arsenal as we speak, and the USA is undergoing an expensive replacement process of theirs as well.
That kind of idea might have held water in the 90's, but that's not the world we live in any longer.
Re: The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence
#90It 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 conc…
Your reasoning makes sense under a regime of infinite games . In other words, the goal is to continue playing the game rather than win once. These people do not believe we are in an infinite game. They believe they have a narrow set of moves to avoid checkmate, and apparently getting rid of Sam Altman is one of them. I will suggest another reason though: we are likely already in the light cone of continued AI develop…
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. If that's not just talk, then this line reasoning only gives you a few possible modes of action. I would not be worried about the people with Molotov cocktails, but I'd be very worried about bio terrorism.