I think many mass casualty events would be warning shots, but not all warning shots would be mass casualty events. I think an agentic AI system getting most of the way towards escaping containment or a major fraud being perpetrated by an AI system would both be meaningful warning shots, but wouldn’t involve mass casualties.
I do agree with what I think you are pointin at, which is that there is something Orwellian about the “warning shot” language. Like, in many of these scenarios we are talking about large negative consequences, and it seems good to have a word that owns that (in-particular in as much as people are thinking about making warning shots more likely before an irrecoverable catastrophe occurs).
I totally think it’s true that there are warning shots that would be non-mass-casualty events, to be clear, and I agree that the scenarios you note could maybe be those.
(I was trying to use “plausibly” to gesture at a wide range of scenarios, but I totally agree the comment as written isn’t clearly meaning that).
I don’t think folks intended anything Orwellian, just sort of something we stumbled into, and heck, if we can both be less Orwellian and be more compelling policy advocates at the same time, why not, I figure.
I think many mass casualty events would be warning shots, but not all warning shots would be mass casualty events. I think an agentic AI system getting most of the way towards escaping containment or a major fraud being perpetrated by an AI system would both be meaningful warning shots, but wouldn’t involve mass casualties.
I do agree with what I think you are pointin at, which is that there is something Orwellian about the “warning shot” language. Like, in many of these scenarios we are talking about large negative consequences, and it seems good to have a word that owns that (in-particular in as much as people are thinking about making warning shots more likely before an irrecoverable catastrophe occurs).
I totally think it’s true that there are warning shots that would be non-mass-casualty events, to be clear, and I agree that the scenarios you note could maybe be those.
(I was trying to use “plausibly” to gesture at a wide range of scenarios, but I totally agree the comment as written isn’t clearly meaning that).
I don’t think folks intended anything Orwellian, just sort of something we stumbled into, and heck, if we can both be less Orwellian and be more compelling policy advocates at the same time, why not, I figure.