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The Bolsheviks were not Lizardman-tier popular. They got 23% of the vote in the Constituent Assembly elections which were the closest approximation to a free election in post-Tsarist Russia (they happened after the October revolution but before the Bolsheviks consolidated power outside Petrograd) including majorities among the voters they were targetting (the urban working class in Petrograd and Moscow, and the enlisted men in the armed forces), and had already demonstrated enough support in the military to defeat the Kornilov coup. It may not have mattered what Vasya Pupkin thought, but given how things played out it sure-as-hell mattered what Private Ivan Ivanovich thought.
e/acc and the Tech Right do not have the level of elite or popular support they need to take over through anything that looks like politics - at the point Hanania wrote the linked essay the people he was lauding as the future of right-wing politics were backing deSantis. In so far as Balaji Srinivasan had a political project it was based on crypto-enabled exit, and it has already failed - it is now very obvious that the world is a sufficiently dangerous place that you want to be under the protection of a US or Chinese client regime if you own anything worth stealing - particularly if you own anything the Feds or Chicoms would want to steal themselves. The Dominic Cummings project (given the people involved, probably supported in the background by Peter Thiel and Robert Mercer) to replace Trump with someone the Tech Right see as competent and biddable ended up not happening, and if it had happened it would need "orbital mind control lasers complete" persuasion tech in order to beat Trump in a Republican primary.
The only way an e/acc is becoming a technoking is if they build a superintelligent AI and use it to pwn their opponents. And then our technoking will be the man (or possibly transwoman, but definitely someone with a Y chromosome and penis) who is de facto goal-donor to the AI (who is probably a first-tier tech lead who can ignore the de jure top management of his organisation until the AI is turned on, and pwn them afterwards). The only gold-owners who are sufficiently close to top technical AI teams to be de facto goal-donors are Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis. If the AI-enabled technoking isn't one of those two then it is some wunderkind we haven't met yet.
Isn't it a bit facile to measure it at the time they took power instead of say in 1903 when the term was coined and they were the minority in the RSDLP (despite being called the majority)? Or we could even start at the inception of the RSDLP when Russia was still so agrarian that the industrial workers as a whole were lizardmen at a whopping 3% of the population. Seems like that would be the more apt comparison with a movement for the technocapitalist class.
I suppose if we disagree about premises, we can only disagree about conclusions. I think this analysis is about as nonsensical as you probably think mine is.
I think Starlink is a million times more consequential than AI anything. I think that superintelligence is made up ill defined fantasy. I think crypto-enabled exit is coming along just fine.
We can at least agree on that being the most likely scenario.
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How much power does Hassabis actually have within Google?
I am arguing that that bureaucratic power within Alphabet Inc. is less relevant than you might think - the question is at the moment when (and if) Google Deepmind turns on a superintelligent AI, who is the person who is actually setting the direction of the team that determines what said AI. And I think that person is likely to be Demis Hassabis, or someone even lower down the org chart. If Sundar Pichai or Larry Page goes to Demis and tells him to build an AI that is programmed to make Larry technoking of the galaxy, and Demis goes and builds an AI programmed to make Demis technoking instead, I don't see how Larry finds out what is going on soon enough to make a difference.
It depends on how malleable the AGI is, how many people have direct access to those levers, and how much auditing/permission is required to modify its goals.
Current RLHF takes time, you don't simply just append "be helpful and harmless" to a system prompt and immediately finish your job. Even accounting for sweeping algorithmic changes and significantly faster turnover, I expect that the people designing and implementing a superhuman AGI to have something in the way of checks and balances for making sure that updates pushed to production are approved by an oversight committee, not just one dude, no matter how senior.
Like, these people are not stupid, if I can predict the risk from the head scientist telling the AI to hand over the keys to the kingdom, so can they. Let alone all the genius level AGI or narrowly superhuman AI implemented along the way.
There are potentially ways around this, like creating undetectable backdoors when feeding a model training data (an almost intractable problem, without making cryptography trivial first), but they're not possible to pull off without a great deal of premeditation, or a risk of whistleblowing.
I put more stock in a small group/cabal controlling an AGI far more than any one person, unless the company is under private ownership by one person, like in the case of Musk. And Grok, bless its heart, isn't SOTA, nor do I put particularly high odds on X AI overtaking the incumbents at OAI/DM/Anthropic.
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