I was chatting with about what an AI version of this kind of terror attack might look like and I was struggling to come up with plausible scenarios, but now one occurs to me: somebody who takes AI risk/alignment bs too seriously and physically attack AI infrastructure
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Once any religion becomes large enough to develop an extremist fringe, you have to take the risk seriously. I can see some nutjob hopped up on a weird "nootropic stack" bombing an AI datacenter or worse. It's the blow-up-Skynet plot of Terminator, except there is no Skynet.
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sadly, looks that way... I was initially leaning towards him being a conscious sociopath scammer like madoff, but it increasingly looks like he was serious (in a bullshit-but-not-really way) about all the weird extreme utilitarianism in the multiverse shit
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It would be hugely ironic and tragic if the biggest risk of AI were in fact people paranoid about "unfriendly AI" doing decidedly unfriendly things to currently living humans who don't share their paranoia about future metaverse torture and such.
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Yep... this is true across the whole broad memeplex, not just the explicitly EAish-longtermist crowd.
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Replying to @vgr
+1 If you dig into the ideology of longtermism (into which most of EA mutated) you'll unveil psychopath ‘ethics’ with a nasty messiah complex. People who feel primarily accountable to hallucinated billions of far-future humans stop caring for the ones currently living.
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If you're seriously invested in/work in AI, crypto, or more wholesome flavors of long-termism like long now, you're now in the position of all the normie muslims being constantly asked to explain/justify/apologize for what fringe terrorists do
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Replying to
Corollary: Tech needs more visible ethics and competent ethicists. We're massively understaffed there. ⇒ fertile breeding ground for nuts
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I disagree on that. I think the ethics crowd is a protection racket comprising largely disingenuous grifters. There are no "competent" ones. Just axe-grinding resentment types. And "visible" ethics is worse, since it just creates a bullshit signaling economy of ethics theater
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Hm, a pity. From my POV ethics = value-add: sparring, de-biasing, better governance, last but not least _risk mgt_. Needs experts because most people lack the skills and knowledge for sound ethical reasoning. Which in turn also keeps the nuts at bay.
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And “visible” as in “walk the talk” (vs. lipsticking the pig with armchair signalling) _and_ making the chain of arguments behind decisions (or red lines) visible.
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Needs unpacking, probably. Hard to compress into a few tweets. Would be hogging the whole thread ;) Too much of a tangent right now.


