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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 who enable those deaths are usually safely ensconced thousands of miles away, often living in cushy suburbs.

To emphasize as strongly as I possibly can, I am not advocating for more violence. Quite the contrary, I'm advocating for less. I just don't understand why we have all these adages to convince people that "violence is always wrong", while I'm sure some at least some of the people who say that are actively engaged in building machines designed to kill people.

Related, the Substack link you posted is titled "Political Violence is Never The Answer". But our country (and a lot of them) were literally founded on political violence. How do people square those 2 ideas?

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 development. So none of the vigilante actions are justified under their own logic. It’s probably preferable to avoid being in jail when the robot apocalypse comes.

I don’t think the death of Sam Altman or even the dissolution of OpenAI would stop the continuation of AI development. There are too many actors involved, and too many companies and nation states invested in continuing AI development. Even Eliezer Yudkowsky became president of the United States he could not stop it.

> "The ends don't justify the means" and literal entire religions have been built on this concept.

Most religions rely on a supernatural force judging us post-mortem to balance out the rights and wrongs done during life.

The problem with this, of course, is that there's zero evidence this force exists, and relying on this force to right the wrongs in life only serves to prevent the masses from attempting to correct the wrongs themselves either directly via vigilantism or, more importantly, by replacing existing systems with ones which will serve them better.

I'm all for fixing things first via the soap box and ballot box, but sometimes the ammo box is the only resort left.

    The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
    - Thomas Jefferson

Yudkowsky himself also posted a rebuttal today: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/article/2043601524815716866

> "The ends don't justify the means"

Eh. The ends do justify the means, but only inasmuch as those means actually do help to achieve the ends — astonishingly often, they don't (and rarer, but also often, actually bring you in the opposite direction from those end goals), and so remain unjustified.

I miss the days when people blamed all their woes on their parents circumcising them. Simpler times.

> 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 order he was rules-obligated to follow.

Is an 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?

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Wealth inequality isn't just about economic wellbeing but political power. Separately, the US legislature is almost entirely crippled, only able to pass one major bill per presidential term, while the dominant political party celebrated this and cedes all power to an executive whose intention is to tear apart the administrative state and bring about techno feudalism.

I once again note that none of the AI leadership has even tried to address government policies to guarantee a baseline of economic wellbeing for our citizens, while they acknowledge AI will likely have massive, disruptive impacts on society and economy. Anthropic is the only one that has shown any public concern for the dangers of AI by insisting on some moral baseline of AI use in the Defense department.

> "fix participatory democracy"

Ah yes, a popular codeword for "I did not get my way".

There is no electoral majority behind the AI doomer cult. It is not a failure of "democracy" that they haven't gotten what they want. It is a failure of their activism, or just the general unpalatability of their wild ideas, or both. They don't get to throw Molotovs just because they lose.

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.

>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.

I don't remember who, but someone made an interesting point about this around the time GPT-4 was released: If the major nuclear powers all understand this, doesn't that make nuclear war more likely the closer any of them get to AGI/ASI? After all, if the other side getting there first guarantees the complete and total defeat of one's own side, a leader may conclude that they don't have anything to lose anymore and launch a nuclear first strike. There are a few arguments for why this would be irrational (e.g. total defeat may, in expectation, be less bad than mutual genocide), but I think it's worth keeping in mind as a possibility.

> 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?

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Agreed. But, many said the same thing about Moore's Law or its equivalents in 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, and yet the pace of core hardware development has been relentlessly exponential. I keep thinking we must be approaching some kind of limit (and surely we must be!) but I've learned not to bet on it.

It's often constructive to consider the edges and corners of the space of possible positions, to understand the weaknesses of the various arguments.

For this case, imagine that you're an accelerationist, and you want the AI to take over, kill everyone, and usher in a new AI-only age for the planet, and later the universe.

How disappointed are you as this person? It's bottlenecks everywhere. Communities don't want to allow datacenters to be built. You literally want to bring nuclear power plants online just to run a few DCs, and those historically take 10+ years to permit and build. There's not enough AC switchgear and transformers to send power into the DCs, even if you have the power. Chip prices are skyrocketing, and you have to sign a 3-4 year contract to get RAM now.

And meanwhile, the AI doesn't have many robot bodies. Tesla might put some feeble robots into mass production in a few years, but humans can knock those over with a stick into a puddle of water and it's over for that robot. The nuclear arsenals are all still in bunkers and submarines requiring two guys to physically turn keys, and the computers down there are so old they use 8" floppies.

Sure, there's some good progress on autonomous weapons, but a few million self-destructing AI drones built by human hands isn't going to cut it.

So as a hypothetical person hoping that AI destroys everything, you'd be rather impatient, I think, unless you think the AI can trick humanity into destroying itself relatively soon.

> People are basing their entire world view [on things getting worse because their leadership is abandoning them or actively working against their interests]

We understand hard times and are willing to work together to solve problems, but not when leadership is actively harmful.

Fixed that for you.

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, either. It's not LLM-generated, nor is it insincere. But I do have to point out: He's the one who is slinging the tsunami of words here, not Alexander Campbell.

No you wouldn't.

Look at what the molotov cocktail guy accomplished by "taking direct action against a clear and present danger": Nothing, besides casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large.

It's downright dumb to attempt to impose your will via unilateral violence when you aren't in a position to actually complete the goal. Note that that goes whether you're actually right or not.

Your statement is incorrect.

If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you would be taking action that maximizes the chances of reducing a clear and present danger.

Between Yudkowsky and the Molotov cocktail guy, which approach do you think had and is having more of an impact?

An individual can rarely, if ever, enact change through violence. The history of nearly all successful movements is violence often makes change harder.

Rallying people through speech is a far more successful way for an individual to enact change through violence

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?

Disagree. Just one more blog post. I swear, one more blog post will do it.

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.

That pesky basilisk to worry about though

Wouldn’t geoengineering through stratospheric aerosol engineering (likely with sulfates) be both cheaper and less technically challenging than changing the built environment? If we’re accepting massive climate changes anyways, it seems like taking the risk with solar radiation modifications would be the next step

That is interesting, and I think you are right that emissions reductions will not happen any time soon (eventually, but it will take a while).

I am not convinced we need robots. A lot of it is not all that hard to do. For example, better forestry management to prevent forest fires. A lot of cities rebuild big chunks of their infrastructure over a century or so anyway. The problem is more social and political - you get worse forest management because you can blame climate change when it happens.

> It sure would have been nice to have 100 thousand firefighting robots battling the fires in Los Angeles last year.

Yes, but also 100k firefighting robots is kind of a lot. How many firefighting robots should exist in the world? And how many seawall-building robots for the rising sea level? And how many other robots? At what point does the environmental cost of all these robots offset their benefits?

Upvoted because this is an interesting take, but I disagree at least somewhat. I think you should be wary whenever you've narrowed down your options to, "in order to solve the top-priority problem X, our only hope is solution Y."

I agree that some technological solution might be the key to dealing with the climate, and that maybe robots would be part of such a solution, maybe powered by similar techniques as the current wave of AI. It's not an insane scenario, but it's worth keeping your perspective open to other possible developments.

https://www.howeandhowe.com/civil/thermite

The firefighting robots of which you speak already exist.