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No, I get that. My question is whether we should be rooting for the Authorities or the Chaos, in the final analysis. Faced with that choice, my own bias is heavily in favor of the Chaos, but I try to be aware of it and compensate proportionally. This becomes harder when people argue persuasively that the road we're on clearly leads to the iron chains of long-term dystopia. Some people argue that terrible things are coming, but there's nothing to be done about it. Other people argue that there's things we can do to alter the future, but we shouldn't be in a hurry to do so because intervening would be worse. And it has to be one or the other, doesn't it? Either the coming future is worse, or the things needed to forestall it are worse. One must prefer one or the other, must one not?
The question is, is it in our interest to tolerate the continued existence of the current state?
Ok fair, I apologize for misinterpreting your post. The initial hypothetical is about LLMs empowering bad actors' ability to cause immeasurable destruction, and my response to that hypothetical was to consider that in such a world LLMs would also empower governments to establish immeasurable surveillance and policing. Whether or not we "should" do anything to stop that massive accumulation of power is impossible to decisively answer because we're already buried under an avalanche of hypothetical layers. It depends in part whether you agree that LLM-equipped terrorists are a risk worth worrying about in the first place.
I guess the way I'd put it is that it seems a lot more plausible that LLMs or similar can allow an effective panopticon than that they can allow mega-death terrorism, and so the assurance that Mega-death terrorism would probably be prevented by a government panopticon leaves me more worried on balance, not less. What saves us from the government panopticon?
There was an old woman who swallowed a fly...
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