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There is an argument to be made that if you want to stop the development of a technology dead in its tracks, you let the government (or any immensely large organization with no competition) do the ressource allocation for it.
If the US government had a monopoly on space travel by law, we wouldn't have satellite internet the way we do right now. And we may actually had lost access to space for non-military applications altogether.
Of couse this argument only goes as far as the technology not being something that is core to those few areas of actual competition for the organization, namely war.
But I feel like doomers are merely trying to stop AI from escaping the control of the managerial class. Placing it in the hands of the most risk averse of the managers and burdening it with law is a neat way of achieving that end and securing jobs as ethicists and controllers.
It's never really been about p(doom) so much as p(ingroup totally unable to influence the fate of humanity in the slightest going forward).
Yes, I think this is what it actually comes down to for a lot of people. The claim is that our current course of AI development will lead to the extinction of humanity. Ok, maybe we should just stop developing AI in that case... but then the counter is that no, that just means that China will get to ASI first and they'll use it to enslave us all. But hasn't the claim suddenly changed in that case? Surely if AI is an existential risk, then China developing ASI would also lead to the extinction of humanity, right? How come if we get to ASI first it's an existential risk, but if China gets there first, it "merely" installs them as the permanent rulers of the earth instead of wiping us all out?
I suppose there are non-zero values you could assign to p(doom) and p(AGI-is-merely-a-superweapon), with appropriate weights on those outcomes, that would make it all consistent. But I think the simpler explanation is that the doomers just don't seriously believe in the possibility of doom in the first place. Which is fine. If you just think that AI is going to be a powerful superweapon and you want to make sure that your tribe controls it then that's a reasonable set of beliefs. But you should be honest about that.
Only minor quibble I have with your post is when you said "doomers are merely trying to stop AI from escaping the control of the managerial class". I think there are multiple subsets of "doomers". Some of them are as you describe, but some of them are actually just accelerationists who want to imagine themselves as the protagonist of a sci-fi movie (which is how you get doomers with the very odd combination of beliefs "AI will kill us all" and "we should do absolutely nothing whatsoever to impede the progress of current AI labs in any way, and in fact we should probably give them more money because they're also the people who are best equipped to save us from the very AI that they're developing!")
That's fair, this is an intellectual space rife with people who have complicated beliefs, so generalizing has to be merely instrumental.
That said I think it is an accurate model of politically relevant doomerism. The revealed preferences of Yuddites is to get paid by the establishment to make sure the tech doesn't rock the boat and respects the right moral fads. If they really wanted to just avoid doom at any cost, they'd be engaging in a lot more terrorism.
It's the same argument Linkola deploys against the NGO environmentalist movement: if you really think that the world is going to end if a given problem isn't solved, and you're not willing to discard bourgeois morality to solve the problem, then you are either a terrible person by your own standards, or actually value bourgeois morality more than you do solving the problem.
I feel like this is unfair. The hardcore Yuddites are not on the Trust & Safety teams at big LLM companies. However, I agree that there are tons of "AI safety" people who've chosen lucrative corporate jobs whose output feeds into the political-correctness machine. But at least they get to know what's going on that way and have at least potentially minor influence. The alternative is... be a full-time protester with little resources, clout, or up-to-date knowledge?
The hardcore Yuddites were pissed at those teams using the word "Safety" for a category that included sometimes-reading-naughty-words risk as a central problem and existential risk as an afterthought at most. Some were pissed enough to rename their own philosophy from "AI Safety" to "AI Notkilleveryoneism" just because being stuck with a stupid-sounding neologism is a cheap price to pay to have a word that can't be so completely hijacked again.
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The way this could work is that, if you believe that any ASI or even AGI will have high likelihood of leading to human extinction, then you want to stop everyone, including China, from developing it. But it's difficult to prevent them from doing so if their pre-AGI AI systems are better than our pre-AGI AI systems. Thus we must make sure our own pre-AGI AI is ahead of China's pre-AGI AI, to better allow us to prevent them from evolving their pre-AGI AI to actual AGI.
This is quite the needle to try to thread, though! And likely unstable, since China isn't the only powerful entity with the ability to develop AI, and so you'd need to keep evolving your pre-AGI AI to keep ahead of every other pre-AGI AI, which might be hard to do without actually turning your pre-AGI AI into actual AGI.
To be fair to doomers, this is a needle that was thread by scientists before. The fact that there is a strong taboo against nuclear weapons today is for the most part the result of a deliberate conspiracy of scientists to make nuclear weapons special, associated with total war and to think the world in terms of the probability of this total war to make their use irrational.
That reading of their use is not a foregone conclusion from the nature of the destruction they wreak. But rather a matter of policy.
And to apply the analogy to this, it did require both that those scientists actually shape nukes into a superweapon and that they denounce it and its uses utterly.
I see a lot of doomer advocacy as an attempt to manifest AI's own Operation Candor.
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That "non-military" is critical. Governments can develop technology when it suits their purposes, but those purposes are usually exactly what you don't want if you're afraid of AI.
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