Eliezer had a response on twitter to the criticism of “calling for violence”
The great political writers who also aspired to be good human beings, from George Orwell on the left to Robert Heinlein on the right, taught me to acknowledge in my writing that politics rests on force.
George Orwell considered it a tactic of totalitarianism, that bullet-riddled bodies and mass graves were often described in vague euphemisms; that in this way brutal policies gained public support without their prices being justified, by hiding those prices.
Robert Heinlein thought it beneath a citizen’s dignity to pretend that, if they bore no gun, they were morally superior to the police officers and soldiers who bore guns to defend their law and their peace; Heinlein, both metaphorically and literally, thought that if you eat meat—and he was not a vegetarian—you ought to be willing to visit a farm and try personally slaughtering a chicken.
When you pass a law, it means that people who defy the law go to jail; and if they try to escape jail they’ll be shot. When you advocate an international treaty, if you want that treaty to be effective, it may mean sanctions that will starve families, or a shooting war that kills people outright.
To threaten these things, but end up not having to do them, is not very morally distinct—*I* would say—from doing them. I admit this puts me more on the Heinlein than on the Orwell side of things. Orwell, I think, probably considers it very morally different if you have a society with a tax system and most people pay the taxes and very few actually go to jail. Orwell is more sensitive to the count of actual dead bodies—or people impoverished by taxation or regulation, where Orwell acknowledges and cares when that *actually* happens. Orwell, I think, has a point. But I also think Heinlein has a point. I claim that makes me a centrist.
Either way, neither Heinlein nor Orwell thought that laws and treaties and *wars* were never worth it. They just wanted us to be honest about the cost.
Every person who pretends to be a libertarian—I cannot see them even pretending to be liberals—who quoted my call for law and treaty as a call for “violence”, because I was frank in writing about the cost, ought to be ashamed of themselves for punishing compliance with Orwell and Heinlein’s rule.
You can argue that the treaty and law I proposed is not worth its cost in force; my being frank about that cost is intended to help *honest* arguers make that counterargument. To pretend that calling for treaty and law is VIOLENCE!! is hysteria. It doesn’t just punish compliance with the Heinlein/Orwell protocol, it plays into the widespread depiction of libertarians as hysterical. (To be clear, a lot of libertarians—and socialists, and centrists, and whoever—are in fact hysterical, especially on Twitter.) It may even encourage actual terrorism.
But is it *not* “violence”, if in the end you need guns and airstrikes to enforce the law and treaty? And here I answer: there’s an *actually* important distinction between lawful force and unlawful force, which is not always of itself the distinction between Right and Wrong, but which is a real and important distinction. The common and ordinary usage of the word “violence” often points to that distinction. When somebody says “I do not endorse the use of violence” they do not, in common usage and common sense, mean, “I don’t think people should be allowed to punch a mugger attacking them” or even “Ban all taxation.”
Which, again, is not to say that all lawful force is good and all unlawful force is bad. You can make a case for John Brown (of John Brown’s Body).
But in fact I don’t endorse shooting somebody on a city council who’s enforcing NIMBY regulations. I think NIMBY laws are wrong. I think it’s important to admit that law is ultimately backed by force.
But lawful force. And yes, that matters. That’s why it’s harmful to society if you shoot the city councilor—
—and a *misuse of language* if the shooter then says, “They were being violent!”
Further followup (I think I do disagree here with the implication of how easy it is to come away with the impression if you’re reading the post un-primed – it looks like probably some LessWrongers here came away with this impression and probably read it pretty quickly on their own. But, I think it’s useful to have this spelled out)
Sometimes—even when you say something whose intended reading is immediately obvious to any reader who hasn’t seen it before—it’s possible to tell people to see something in writing that isn’t there, and then they see it.
My TIME piece did not suggest nuclear strikes against countries that refuse to sign on to a global agreement against large AI training runs. It said that, if a non-signatory country is building a datacenter that might kill everyone on Earth, you should be willing to preemptively destroy that datacenter; the intended reading is that you should do this *even if* the non-signatory country is a nuclear power and *even if* they try to threaten nuclear retaliation for the strike. This is what is meant by “Make it explicit… that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.”
I’d hope that would be clear from any plain reading, if you haven’t previously been lied-to about what it says. It does not say, “Be willing to *use* nuclear weapons” to reduce the risk of training runs. It says, “Be willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange” [initiated by the other country] to reduce the risk of training runs.
The taboo against first use of nuclear weapons continues to make sense to me. I don’t see why we’d need to throw that away in the course of adding “first use of GPU farms” to the forbidden list.
I further note: Among the reasons to spell this all out, is that it’s important to be explicit, in advance, about things that will cause your own country / allied countries to use military force. Lack of clarity about this is how World War I *and* World War II both started.
If (say) the UK, USA, and China come to believe that large GPU runs run some risk of utterly annihilating their own populations and all of humanity, they would not deem it in their own interests to allow Russia to proceed with building a large GPU farm *even if* it were a true and certain fact that Russia would retaliate with nuclear weapons to the destruction of that GPU farm. In this case—unless I’m really missing something about how this game is and ought to be played—you really want all the Allied countries to make it very clear, well in advance, that this is what they believe and this is how they will act. This would be true even in a world where it was, in reality, factually false that the large GPU farm ran a risk of destroying humanity. It would still be extremely important that the Allies be very explicit about what they believed and how they’d act as a result. You would not want Russia believing that the Allies would back down from destroying the GPU farm given a credible commitment by Russia to nuke in reply to any conventional attack, and the Allies in fact believing that the danger to humanity meant they had to airstrike the GPU farm anyways.
So if I’d meant “Be willing to employ first use of nuclear weapons against a country for refusing to sign the agreement,” or even “Use nukes to destroy rogue datacenters, instead of conventional weapons, for some unimaginable reason,” I’d have said that, in words, very clearly, because you do not want to be vague about that sort of thing.
It is not what I meant, and there’d be no reason to say it, and the TIME piece plainly does not say it; and if somebody else told you I said that, update how much you trust them about anything else either.
And goes on to say:
So long as I’m clarifying things: I do not dispute those critics who have noted that most international agreements, eg nuclear non-proliferation, bind only their signatories. I agree that an alliance which declares its intent to strike a non-signatory country for dangerous behavior is extraordinary; though precedents would include Israel’s airstrike on Iraq’s unfinished Osirak reactor in 1981 (without which Iraq might well have possessed nuclear weapons at the time it invaded Kuwait—the later US misbehavior around Iraq does not change this earlier historical point).
My TIME piece does not say, “Hey, this problem ought to be solvable by totally conventional normal means, let’s go use conventional treaties and diplomacy to solve it.” It says, “If anyone anywhere builds a sufficiently powerful AI, under anything remotely like present conditions, everyone will die. Here is what we’d have to do to prevent that.” And no, I do not expect that policy proposal to be adopted, in real life, now that we’ve come to this. I spent the last twenty years trying to have there be options that were Not This, not because I dislike this ultimate last resort… though it *is* horrible… but because I don’t expect we actually have that resort. This is not what I expect to happen, now that we’ve been reduced to this last resort. I expect that we all die. That is why I tried so hard to have things not end up here.
But if one day a lot of people woke up and decided that they didn’t want to die, it seems to me that this is something extraordinary that a coalition of nuclear countries could decide to do, and maybe we wouldn’t die.
If *all* the countries on Earth had to voluntarily sign on, it would not be an imaginable or viable plan even then; there’s extraordinary, and then there’s impossible. Which is why I tried to spell out that, if the allied countries were willing to behave in the extraordinary way of “be willing to airstrike a GPU farm built by a non-signatory country” and “be willing to run a risk of nuclear retaliation from a nuclear non-signatory country”, maybe those allied countries could decide to just-not-die *even if* Russia refused to be part of the coalition.
To answer the question over whether Eliezer advocated for violence, I ultimately think the answer was no, but he is dancing fairly close to the line, given that an AI company believes Eliezer to be a lunatic. If it’s one of the major companies, then God help the alignment community, because Eliezer might have just ruined humanity’s future.
Also, violence doesn’t work as much as people think, and nonviolent protests are 2x as effective as violent protests or revolutions. Even in the case of nonviolent protest failure, there’s no evidence that a violent movement could have succeeded where nonviolence didn’t, which is another reason why violence doesn’t work.
There are other reasons why nonviolence works better than violence here, of course.
However, one cannot make universal statements. The efficacy of violent and nonviolent methods depend upon the exact context.
If someone believes in an imminent hard takeoff, and gives high credence to Doom, violent activity may be rational.
Eliezer had a response on twitter to the criticism of “calling for violence”
Further followup (I think I do disagree here with the implication of how easy it is to come away with the impression if you’re reading the post un-primed – it looks like probably some LessWrongers here came away with this impression and probably read it pretty quickly on their own. But, I think it’s useful to have this spelled out)
And goes on to say:
To answer the question over whether Eliezer advocated for violence, I ultimately think the answer was no, but he is dancing fairly close to the line, given that an AI company believes Eliezer to be a lunatic. If it’s one of the major companies, then God help the alignment community, because Eliezer might have just ruined humanity’s future.
Also, violence doesn’t work as much as people think, and nonviolent protests are 2x as effective as violent protests or revolutions. Even in the case of nonviolent protest failure, there’s no evidence that a violent movement could have succeeded where nonviolence didn’t, which is another reason why violence doesn’t work.
There are other reasons why nonviolence works better than violence here, of course.
Here’s the link to the research:
https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/success-nonviolent-civil-resistance/
However, one cannot make universal statements. The efficacy of violent and nonviolent methods depend upon the exact context. If someone believes in an imminent hard takeoff, and gives high credence to Doom, violent activity may be rational.