A hunger strike is not a good tool if you don’t want to paint someone as a villain in the eyes of the public when they don’t give in to your demand.
Is there any form of protest that doesn’t implicitly imply that the person you’re protesting is doing something wrong? When the thing wrong is “causing human extinction” it seems to me kind of hard for that to not automatically be assumed ‘villainous’.
(Asking genuinely, I think it quite probably the answer is ‘yes’.)
Something like: Hunger strikes are optimized hard specifically for painting someone as a villain because they decide to make someone suffer or die (or be inhumanely fed), this is different from other forms of protests that are more focused on, e.g., that specific decisions are bad and should be revoked, but don’t necessarily try to make people perceive the other side as evil.
I don’t really see the problem with painting people as evil in principle, given that some people are evil. You can argue against it in specific cases, but I think the case for AI CEOs being evil is strong enough that it can’t be dismissed out of hand.
The case in question is “AI CEOs are optimising for their short-term status/profits, and for believing things about the world which maximise their comfort, rather than doing the due diligence required of someone in their position, which is to seriously check whether their company is building something which kills everyone”
Whether this is a useful frame for one’s own thinking—or a good frame to deploy onto the public—I’m not fully sure, but I think it does need addressing. Of course it might also differ between CEOs. I think Demis and Dario are two of the CEOs who it’s relatively less likely to apply to, but also I don’t think it applies weakly enough for them to be dismissed out of hand even in their cases.
“People are on hunger strikes” is not really a lot of evidence for “AI CEOs are optimizing for their short-term status/profits and are not doing the due diligence” in the eyes of the public.
I don’t think there’s any problem with painting people and institutions as evil, I’m just not sure why you would want to do this here, as compared to other things, and would want people to have answers to how they imagine a hunger strike would paint AI companies/CEOs and what would be the impact of that, because I expect little that could move the needle.
Is there any form of protest that doesn’t implicitly imply that the person you’re protesting is doing something wrong? When the thing wrong is “causing human extinction” it seems to me kind of hard for that to not automatically be assumed ‘villainous’.
(Asking genuinely, I think it quite probably the answer is ‘yes’.)
Something like: Hunger strikes are optimized hard specifically for painting someone as a villain because they decide to make someone suffer or die (or be inhumanely fed), this is different from other forms of protests that are more focused on, e.g., that specific decisions are bad and should be revoked, but don’t necessarily try to make people perceive the other side as evil.
I don’t really see the problem with painting people as evil in principle, given that some people are evil. You can argue against it in specific cases, but I think the case for AI CEOs being evil is strong enough that it can’t be dismissed out of hand.
The case in question is “AI CEOs are optimising for their short-term status/profits, and for believing things about the world which maximise their comfort, rather than doing the due diligence required of someone in their position, which is to seriously check whether their company is building something which kills everyone”
Whether this is a useful frame for one’s own thinking—or a good frame to deploy onto the public—I’m not fully sure, but I think it does need addressing. Of course it might also differ between CEOs. I think Demis and Dario are two of the CEOs who it’s relatively less likely to apply to, but also I don’t think it applies weakly enough for them to be dismissed out of hand even in their cases.
“People are on hunger strikes” is not really a lot of evidence for “AI CEOs are optimizing for their short-term status/profits and are not doing the due diligence” in the eyes of the public.
I don’t think there’s any problem with painting people and institutions as evil, I’m just not sure why you would want to do this here, as compared to other things, and would want people to have answers to how they imagine a hunger strike would paint AI companies/CEOs and what would be the impact of that, because I expect little that could move the needle.
That is true. “People are on hunger strikes and the CEOs haven’t even commented” is (some) public evidence of “AI CEOs are unempathetic”
I misunderstood your point, I thought you were arguing against painting individuals as evil in general.