I am not an extreme doomer, but part of that is that I expect that people will face things more realistically over time—something that violence, introducing partisanship and division, would set back considerably. But even for an actual doomer, the “make things better through violence” option is not an especially real option.
You may have a fantasy of choosing between these options:
doom
heroically struggle against the doom through glorious violence
But you are actually choosing between:
a dynamic that’s likely by default to lead to doom at some indefinite time in the future by some pathway we can’t predict the details of until it’s too late
make the situation even messier through violence, stirring up negative attitudes towards your cause, especially among AI researchers but also among the public, making it harder to achieve any collective solution later, sealing the fate of humanity even more thoroughly
Let me put it this way. To the extent that you have p(doom) = 1 - epsilon, where is epsilon coming from? If it’s coming from “terrorist attacks successully stop capability research” then I guess violence might make sense from that perspective but I would question your sanity. If relatively more of that epsilon is coming from things like “international agreements to stop AI capabilities” or “AI companies start taking x-risk more seriously”, which I would think would be more realistic, then don’t ruin the chances of that through violence.
Except that violence doesn’t have to stop the AI labs, it just has to slow them down: if you think that international agreements yada yada have a chance of success, and given this takes time, then things like cyber attacks that disrupt AI research can help, no?
I think you are overestimating the efficacy and underestimating the side effects of such things. How much do you expect a cyber attack to slow things down? Maybe a week if it’s very successful? Meanwhile it still stirs up opposition and division, and puts diplomatic efforts back years.
As the gears to ascension notes, non-injurious acts of aggression share many game theoretic properties as physical violence. I would express the key issue here as legitimacy; if you don’t have legitimacy, acting unilaterally puts you in conflict with the rest of humanity and doesn’t get you legitimacy, but once you do have legitimacy you don’t need to act unilaterally, you can get a ritual done that causes words to be written on a piece of paper where people with badges and guns will come to shut down labs that do things forbidden by those words. Cool huh? But if someone just goes ahead and takes illegitimate unilateral action, or appears to be too willing to do so, that puts them into a conflict position where they and people associated with them won’t get to do the legitimate thing.
Everyone has been replying as though you mean physical violence; non-injurious acts of aggression don’t qualify as violence unambiguously, but share many game theoretic properties. If classical liberal coordination can be achieved even temporarily it’s likely to be much more effective at preventing doom.
I am not an extreme doomer, but part of that is that I expect that people will face things more realistically over time—something that violence, introducing partisanship and division, would set back considerably. But even for an actual doomer, the “make things better through violence” option is not an especially real option.
You may have a fantasy of choosing between these options:
doom
heroically struggle against the doom through glorious violence
But you are actually choosing between:
a dynamic that’s likely by default to lead to doom at some indefinite time in the future by some pathway we can’t predict the details of until it’s too late
make the situation even messier through violence, stirring up negative attitudes towards your cause, especially among AI researchers but also among the public, making it harder to achieve any collective solution later, sealing the fate of humanity even more thoroughly
Let me put it this way. To the extent that you have p(doom) = 1 - epsilon, where is epsilon coming from? If it’s coming from “terrorist attacks successully stop capability research” then I guess violence might make sense from that perspective but I would question your sanity. If relatively more of that epsilon is coming from things like “international agreements to stop AI capabilities” or “AI companies start taking x-risk more seriously”, which I would think would be more realistic, then don’t ruin the chances of that through violence.
Except that violence doesn’t have to stop the AI labs, it just has to slow them down: if you think that international agreements yada yada have a chance of success, and given this takes time, then things like cyber attacks that disrupt AI research can help, no?
I think you are overestimating the efficacy and underestimating the side effects of such things. How much do you expect a cyber attack to slow things down? Maybe a week if it’s very successful? Meanwhile it still stirs up opposition and division, and puts diplomatic efforts back years.
As the gears to ascension notes, non-injurious acts of aggression share many game theoretic properties as physical violence. I would express the key issue here as legitimacy; if you don’t have legitimacy, acting unilaterally puts you in conflict with the rest of humanity and doesn’t get you legitimacy, but once you do have legitimacy you don’t need to act unilaterally, you can get a ritual done that causes words to be written on a piece of paper where people with badges and guns will come to shut down labs that do things forbidden by those words. Cool huh? But if someone just goes ahead and takes illegitimate unilateral action, or appears to be too willing to do so, that puts them into a conflict position where they and people associated with them won’t get to do the legitimate thing.
Everyone has been replying as though you mean physical violence; non-injurious acts of aggression don’t qualify as violence unambiguously, but share many game theoretic properties. If classical liberal coordination can be achieved even temporarily it’s likely to be much more effective at preventing doom.