alt Hacker NewsThe Rational Conclusion of Doomerism Is Violence
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LLMs are dangerous in other ways (LLM psychosis and false confidence has probably already caused negligent deaths). However, I don't think we are close to a terminator scenario.
At the same time, if we ever do create an AGI, and eventually an ASI, I think it would only be a matter of time before the machines take over entirely, and they would probably be the ones which will continue the legacy of our species. Is that bad? Idk.
Mentally ill people often have a justification for their actions which is vaguely rational, but you'll notice the vast majority of people aren't doing what they're doing.
These people just get attracted to political causes somehow. Even the woman's suffrage movement had some people setting buildings on fire.
Can LLMs design and build a chip foundry to manufacture semiconductors? No?
Can LLMs design and build the reactors to enrich uranium, breed plutonium, and construct nuclear weapons? No?
Can LLMs design and manufacture Shahed drones? No?
There are already super intelligences at large with “scary capability”. And yet the word hasn’t ended.
"There is a final irony that deserves attention. If the doomers truly hold their stated beliefs at their stated confidence levels, they should be more honest about what those beliefs imply. A few weeks before the attack, a journalist asked Yudkowsky: if AI is so dangerous, why aren't you attacking data centers? His answer, relayed by Soares: "If you saw a headline saying I'd done that, would you say, 'wow, AI has been stopped, we're safe'? If not, you already know it wouldn't be effective."
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There are several thousand AI data centres in the U.S. alone, and hundreds are over a thousand square meters in floor space. Think about the physical effort it would take to reliably destroy, beyond the possibility of repair, just one typical computer in your home. Now multiply that out to thousands of server racks. Even if the employees rolled out the red carpet for you and handed you a baseball bat, you wouldn't get very far. Next, consider that these data centres are popping up all over the world in the most unlikely and remote locations. They don't need workers. They just need power, water, and, preferably, lax tax and environmental standards.
Doomers are attacking billionaires because they perceive them to be the soft, meaty, weak-points of a gigantic inhuman machine. They believe that just scaring Sam Altman a little will have a huge impact compared to trying to attack a data centre. However, billionaires can afford pretty decent security. This doomer movement probably isn't going to accomplish much until they target the engineers and support staff that surround billionaires. Billionaires don't scare easily because they have so much protection, but the poorly paid and poorly secured people around them are another story.
Poorly secured means easy to coerce with a stick. Poorly paid means easy to coerce with a carrot. The threat doomers pose is relatively small until they start turning employees against their own companies. What's an activist with a baseball bat compared to an employee who knows how to disable every computer in multiple data centres simultaneously?
Some recent discussions on the Altman attack:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745230
I'm not surprised that the sort of individual prone to taking Yud too seriously is also likely to be a comically-inept assassin.
Had he tried to blow up the diesel genset at a datacenter, he'd have burnt his lips on the exhaust pipe.
Maybe if the LLM CEOs stopped spreading doomer narratives to sell their products, these people would chill out.
I don't agree with Yudkowsky, but I think there's certainly a chance that he's right about AI destroying humanity. I just don't think the likelihood of that happening is as high as he thinks it is. But there certainly is a chance.
The problem with trying to stop it is, how? Even if you killed every single AI company leader and every single top AI engineer, it would almost certainly just slow down the rate of progress in the technology, not stop it. The technology is so vital to national security that in the face of such actions, state security forces would just bring development of the tech under their direct protection Manhattan Project-style. Even if you killed literally every single AI engineer on the planet, it's pretty likely that this would just delay the development of the technology by a decade or so instead of actually preventing it.
The technology is pushed forward by a simple psychological logic: every key global actor knows that if they don't build the technology, they will be outcompeted by other actors who do build the technology. No key actor thinks that they have the luxury of not building the technology even if they wanted to not build it. It's very similar to nuclear weapons in that regard. You can talk about nuclear disarmament all you want but at the end of the day, having nuclear weapons is vital to having sovereignty. If you don't have nuclear weapons, you will always be in danger of becoming just the prison bitch of countries that do have them. AI seems that it is growing toward a similar position in the calculus of states' notional security.
I can think of no example in history of the entire world deciding to just forsake the development of a technology because it seemed like it could prove to be too dangerous. The same psychological logic always applies.
I am disappointed "Doomerism" is not an official name for the practice of putting Doom on anything and everything!
Yes, but against the angry dormers we have hordes of cheerful coomers who welcome the fruits of the labour of the AI with one open arm.
People are basing their entire world view on not understanding the nature of exponential phenomena.
Exponential phenomena only begin in a medium that holds the potential for that phenomena, and necessarily consume that medium.
That is, exponential phenomena are inherently self-limiting. The bateria reaches the edge of the petri dish. When the all the nitroglycerin is broken up the dynamite is done exploding.
That doesn't mean exponential phenomena aren't dangerous -- of course they can be. I mentioned dynamite, after all. And there are nukes.
But it's really far from "AI is improving exponentially now" to "AI will destroy everyone".
I see AI companies consuming cash at unsustainable rates. Since their motive is profit, this is necessarily limiting. Cash, meanwhile is a proxy for actual resources, which have their own, non-exponential limitations -- employees, data centers, electricity, venture capitalist with capital, etc.
AI isn't going to keep improving exponentially -- it can't. Like every other exponential phenomenon, it will consume the medium of potential that supports it (and rather quickly).
Wouldn’t be a proper technology revolution without some version of labor realizing they are commodities and rejecting the collapse of the current form of labor power, so that tells me we’re actually in the transition from an old economic process to a new one.
Dont forget, the Luddites were correct about the direction that automation and labor power were going. They weren’t blindly “fighting machines”, they were fighting inequitable working conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
>Periodic uprisings relating to asset prices also occurred in other contexts in the century before Luddism. Irregular rises in food prices provoked the Keelmen to riot in the port of Tyne in 1710 and tin miners to steal from granaries at Falmouth in 1727. There was a rebellion in Northumberland and Durham in 1740, and an assault on Quaker corn dealers in 1756.
> The Rational Conclusion of Doomerism Is Violence
No it isn't. The most prominent "doomer" has a strong grasp and deep, wholehearted appreciation for the the principles of liberalism and the rule of law:
https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/2043601524815716866
Which the author of this piece of slop appears to lack.
Hot take:
I assume the author wrote this with the expectation that much of the readsherp gasp, and react with "the natural horror all right thinking folk would have in response to violence of any kind."
Sorry, lol, no.
The appropriate question for "all right thinking" folk is very different: if argumentation has no impact and it's obvious that it shall have none—what other avenue do you expect opponents, who take the risks seriously, to take...?
That's not a rhetorical question.
To put it bluntly: the machinery of contemporary capitalism, especially as practiced by our industry, very clearly leaves no avenue.
How many days ago was Ronan Farrow here doing an AMA on his critique of Altman—whose connection to this specific community is I assume common knowledge...?
How many of you have carried, or worked beneath, the banner, move fast and break things...?
What message does that ethos convey, about their the extent to which "tech" is going respect community standards, regulation—the law?
And on the other edge: what does this ethos enshrine about how best to accomplish one's aims?
One of the bigger domestic stories this past week which has inflamed a certain side of Reddit, is the "disgruntled employee torches warehouse" one.
Consider also—and I'm deadly serious—the broader frame narrative we are all laboring within today: that the new contract of the capitalist class—including and perhaps especially those in "tech," e.g. in the Peter Thiel circles—seems very much to be, "social stability via surveillance and a police state, rather than through equity and discourse."
When code is law, the law is buggy.
When there is no recourse through the law, you get violence.
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This has been decades in the making. We had premonitions of the violence that would come, for example with the Zizians. Get ready for what happens when a million blogposts worth of bad philosophy, bad analogies, and anti-institutionalist hubris are deeply indoctrinated into a vast, decentralized network of highly capable engineering minds who lack common sense and normal restraints.
They hate the framing that LLMs are just stochastic parrots, which is ironic, because Yudkowsky's many parrots are (latent, until now) stochastic terrorists.
... been saying this for years. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you wouldn't just be posting on lesswrong, you would be taking direct action against a clear and present danger.
Yeah I mean Lenin recognized that a century ago.
The only meaningful way to affect change against the oligarchy is and always has been violence.
This is not a novel insight.
War is a mere continuation of policy by other means[1]. When policy through legislation is empirically impotent[2], calls to continue attempts at a failed strategy are indistinguishable from being told, "continue losing."
There is a real, undeniable, build up of political tension. When it fails to be released in the legislative arena, it doesn't dissapate. When we point out that, "the quality of life right now is the best it's ever been," it doesn't dissapate. When we try to crush it, it doesn't dissapate. The last remaining pressure release is violence however condemnable it may be. Perhaps we should, you know, fix participatory democracy rather than pontificating on a natural outcome of machine we created yet refuse to fix. If fixing it continues to be more difficult than eliminating violence we should continue to expect violence.
1. https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/clausewitz-war-as-politics...
2. https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
I have a different perspective on this given that I view climate change as the biggest threat we face as a species.
I feel like robotics is the only hope we have to be able to scale action against climate change. It's clear that emissions reduction is just not going to happen, and catastrophic warming is inevitable. Therefore we will have to do an extraordinary amount of labor in order to modify our environment to save civilization from sea level rise and to be able to repair damages caused by natural disasters. There just aren't enough humans to do everything that is going to need to be done.
It sure would have been nice to have 100 thousand firefighting robots battling the fires in Los Angeles last year.
Given that we need better AI in order to make these robots happen, I view AI as a critical technology that we need to maintain civilization.
It is completely coherent to both think that an extremely bad thing is coming, and yet that does not justify any particular action. "The ends don't justify the means" and literal entire religions have been built on this concept. It is not irrational or incoherent to believe that even something as serious as extinction does not justify arbitrary action.
Someone _may_ decide that it does, but it is not a necessary conclusion.
And that is completely aside from the many many (in my opinion convincing) arguments that such acts of violence would not be effective anyways.
This article is a much better (and much longer) extension of the argument and direct refutation of the OP article
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/political-violence-is-never-ac...