The extremist rhetoric regarding the robot apocalypse seems to point in one very sordid direction, so what is it that’s preventing rationalist AI doomers from arriving at the obvious implications of their beliefs? One LessWronger demands answers, and the commenters respond with a flurry of downvotes, dissembling, and obfuscation.
Many responses follow a predictable line of reasoning: AI doomers shouldn’t do violence because it will make their cause look bad
Others follow a related line of reasoning: AI doomers shouldn’t do violence because it probably wouldn’t work anyway
Some responses obtusely avoid the substance of the issue altogether
At least one response attempts to inject something resembling sanity into the situation
Note that these are the responses that were left up. Four have been deleted.
Um, Yud literally said we should nuke AI data centres. I think he’s pretty on board the violence train.
Funny thing I figure is that they actually prefer being right so much, they worry organizing and stopping the apocalypse would result in their predictions being wrong. A date worse than existential annihilation.
I think I’m just going to go ahead and start a fucking Wintermute cult.
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Holy shit we’re reaching SRD levels of effort on these posts, good stuff.
While the idea of getting some neo-Luddism out of all this stupidity is kind of appealing, has anyone called them Luddites over these views?
The insinuations of the label would drive them nuts and result in at least a few essays/blog posts about it, so it probably already happened and the blog posts exist.
What is really scary is the idea that they absolutely know what is going to happen and only they can stop it. The comparisons to Nazi were completely wrong–it isn’t about stopping the Nazis but killing a young art student who you think could be a future dictator.
You seem to be saying that if I’m extremely confident that continued AI development would be the end of the world, then the only logically consistent thing for me to do is to endorse even extreme violence to combat it. In other words, moral arguments against using terrorism to save the world are silly; all that matters are the positive (as opposed to normative) facts about the actual risk of apocalypse. If they really believe this stuff about AI doom, then they should be supporting violent solutions, so their reluctance to openly support them shows that either they don’t really believe it or they’re too afraid to admit that they support them. Right?
But that sounds like a utilitarian argument. And this sub doesn’t strike me as utilitarian (though rationalists often do; is that the idea?). Most non-utilitarians would say that even if various actual extremist groups were right about their violence helping to save the world, the violence still wouldn’t be justified, because terrorism is wrong even if done for a good cause. If everything Nazis believed about secret Jewish financial and military control were true, most would agree that this wouldn’t have justified any of what they did to random other Jews, because they still would have been wrong on the moral question of whether genocide and instructional racism are acceptable tactics! But it seems like your sneer could apply equally to 1930s German antisemites who claimed to support the conspiracy theories but oppose violence and oppression of Jews. If not, why?