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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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I see plenty of people here making quite sure predictions of impending AI doom. Can anyone steelman to me an argument for seriously believing this, and meanwhile not going full Unabomber on top AI scientists and research centers? I mean, if we are talking about an imminent threat of all of humanity ceasing to exist, surely some innocent lives being sacrificed and personal danger is negligible. People commit political violence over much more trivial things. All the AI panic crowd feels extremely contrived and performative to me.

Non-state violence has essentially no possibility of indefinitely stopping all AI development worldwide. Even governmental violence stopping it would be incredibly unlikely, it seems politically impossible that governments would treat it with more seriousness than nuclear proliferation and continue doing so for a long period, but terrorists have no chance at all. Terrorists would also be particularly bad at stopping secret government AI development, and AI has made enough of a splash that such a thing seems inevitable even if you shut down all the private research. If at least one team somewhere in the world still develops superintelligence, then what improves the odds of survival is that they do a good enough job and are sufficiently careful that it doesn't wipe out humanity. Terrorism would cause conflict and alienation between AI researchers and people concerned about superintelligent AI, reducing the odds that they take AI risk seriously, making it profoundly counterproductive.

It's like asking why people who are worried about nuclear war don't try to stop it by picking up a gun and attacking the nearest nuclear silo. They're much better off trying to influence the policies of the U.S. and other nuclear states to make nuclear war less likely (a goal the U.S. government shares, even if they think it could be doing a much better job), and having the people you're trying to convince consider you a terrorist threat would be counterproductive to that goal.