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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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Oh, I see.

"AI Doom" includes a scenario where humans are the actors that cause the bad outcome using AI.

In other words, humans might try to do really bad things.

Yep. We agree.

Nothing new under the sun.

The difference between the scenario I outlined and the most clichéd Mother Brain story you can come up with does not seem particularly relevant in my eyes - of course humans cause any bad outcome in either case, per a simple but-for causality test, because humans could collectively stop doing technology and then we would neither get "make step-by-step instruction for killbots" AI nor the "believes it is a god and can put its money where its mouth is" AI. In the same vein, I'd say some Australopithecus's decision to reproduce caused every bad outcome we experienced and will experience - though probably you have a different view of causality that privileges "full-fledged humans" in some way, so another entity's causal "responsibility" can't flow through them. Either way, I don't see how whether one sees the potentially doombringing AI as an agent with feelings has any influence on whether one should be concerned about AI doom and what one should do about it. P-zombie AIs build the same killbots and respond to the same interventions.