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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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The AI-enabled human tyrant is a much more realistic and immediate problem and in fact could make AI in his image more likely too.

We shouldn't let the apocalyptic scenario of Skynet make us downplay that, or accept it as a lesser problem.

Plenty of human tyrannies desire to enslave people and destroy the rest. Sadism against the different "kulaks" is an underestimated element of this. We already have woke A.I. which raises the danger and immediacy of the problem of power hungry totalitarian ideologues using A.I. for their purposes.

The immediate danger we must prioritize is these people centralizing A.I. or using it to replace systems that wouldn't have their bias, or in fact use it to create an A.I. enforced constant social credit. But the danger of humans getting their ideas from A.I. is it self great.

Anyway, evil AGI is more likely to be result of malevolent tyrannical human lead A.I. which continues its programming and becomes independent. Maybe goes a step further. Rather than the entire humanity, which might also be at risk, there people even more at risk which are those at the sights of woke A.I. today.

But human ideologues of this type, could also take advantage of greater power and a more totalitarian society to commit atrocities.

We shouldn't let the apocalyptic scenario of Skynet make us downplay that, or accept it as a lesser problem.

To be clear, a dickhead with a singleton is still plausibly worse than Hitler. The "lesser problem" is still very big. But it is both somewhat less bad and somewhat easier to avoid.

It isn't easier to avoid though. AI being used for such purposes is more likely than Skynet and will happen earlier. Wanting to avoid Skynet is of course laudable too.