That could be so, but individuals don’t control things like this. Organizations and their cultures set policy, and science drives hard towards cultures of openness and collaboration. The world would probably need to get over a critical threshold of like 70% egoist AI researchers before you’d see any competitive orgs pull an egoist reflectivism and appoint an unaccountable dictator out of some insane hope that allying themselves with someone like that raises the chance that they will be able to become one. It doesn’t make sense, even for an egoist, to join an organization like that, it would require not just a cultural or demographic shift, but also a flight of insanity.
I would be extremely worried about X.AI, Elon has been kind of explicitly in favor of individualistic approaches to alignment, but as it is in every other AI research org, it will be difficult for Elon to do what he did to twitter here and exert arbitrary power, because he is utterly reliant on the collaboration of a large number of people who are much smarter than him and who have alternatives (Still keeping an open ear out for whistleblowing though.)
Do we live on the same planet? My mental models predict we should expect about one in three humans to be this evil.
That could be so, but individuals don’t control things like this. Organizations and their cultures set policy, and science drives hard towards cultures of openness and collaboration. The world would probably need to get over a critical threshold of like 70% egoist AI researchers before you’d see any competitive orgs pull an egoist reflectivism and appoint an unaccountable dictator out of some insane hope that allying themselves with someone like that raises the chance that they will be able to become one. It doesn’t make sense, even for an egoist, to join an organization like that, it would require not just a cultural or demographic shift, but also a flight of insanity.
I would be extremely worried about X.AI, Elon has been kind of explicitly in favor of individualistic approaches to alignment, but as it is in every other AI research org, it will be difficult for Elon to do what he did to twitter here and exert arbitrary power, because he is utterly reliant on the collaboration of a large number of people who are much smarter than him and who have alternatives (Still keeping an open ear out for whistleblowing though.)