dr_s: How many MAGA supporters have you actually talked with, about AI safety issues?
It sounds like you have a lot of views on what they may or may not believe. I’m not sure how well-calibrated your views are.
Do you have a decent sample size for making your generalizations based on real interactions with real people, or are your impressions based mostly on mainstream news portrayals of MAGA supporters?
How many MAGA supporters have you actually talked with, about AI safety issues?
I’m basing myself off the specific quotes that are reported in this very piece, and the general behaviour of MAGA towards other issues in the past. The complaints are very precise, and I only agree with a relative minority of them; many seem to boil down to “the AI is bad because it does not agree with me politically”. This is something easily changed, and has nothing to do with the deeper issues at the root of it, which makes it possible to appease a large swath of the dissent with interventions that have nothing to do with AI safety (not unlike how the liberal crowd can be appeased by making sure the AI is politically correct, something equally irrelevant to the bigger goals we’re talking about).
I’m sure there are individuals who would stick by their guns and are more principled. But that’s not very useful when discussing a political alliance with a movement at large. And the movement at large has proven again and again that it is driven by personal loyalty to Donald Trump over any specific hard ideological commitment. That gives it a single point of failure: if Donald Trump were to switch for whatever reason to “AI good”, suddenly a huge chunk of those allies would evaporate.
This is not a matter of “I would never ally with anyone whom I dislike politically on AI safety”. As I mentioned elsewhere, I would be ok with allying with groups whose main definitional ideology is religious. I would definitely ally with the Catholic Church over it, for example—them I trust to be fairly coherent on it. I would also be ok allying with US Christian groups if being Christian was their main driver . And to be sure there is some overlap here. But if we consider MAGA as a unit, then no; even putting aside the obvious non-AI issues I mentioned before, which at this point are large enough to make an alliance potentially distasteful to anyone who doesn’t have a fairly high P(doom) and is thus proportionately desperate, they have quite simply not shown themselves to be a reliable bunch of consistent views.
dr_s: How many MAGA supporters have you actually talked with, about AI safety issues?
It sounds like you have a lot of views on what they may or may not believe. I’m not sure how well-calibrated your views are.
Do you have a decent sample size for making your generalizations based on real interactions with real people, or are your impressions based mostly on mainstream news portrayals of MAGA supporters?
I’m basing myself off the specific quotes that are reported in this very piece, and the general behaviour of MAGA towards other issues in the past. The complaints are very precise, and I only agree with a relative minority of them; many seem to boil down to “the AI is bad because it does not agree with me politically”. This is something easily changed, and has nothing to do with the deeper issues at the root of it, which makes it possible to appease a large swath of the dissent with interventions that have nothing to do with AI safety (not unlike how the liberal crowd can be appeased by making sure the AI is politically correct, something equally irrelevant to the bigger goals we’re talking about).
I’m sure there are individuals who would stick by their guns and are more principled. But that’s not very useful when discussing a political alliance with a movement at large. And the movement at large has proven again and again that it is driven by personal loyalty to Donald Trump over any specific hard ideological commitment. That gives it a single point of failure: if Donald Trump were to switch for whatever reason to “AI good”, suddenly a huge chunk of those allies would evaporate.
This is not a matter of “I would never ally with anyone whom I dislike politically on AI safety”. As I mentioned elsewhere, I would be ok with allying with groups whose main definitional ideology is religious. I would definitely ally with the Catholic Church over it, for example—them I trust to be fairly coherent on it. I would also be ok allying with US Christian groups if being Christian was their main driver . And to be sure there is some overlap here. But if we consider MAGA as a unit, then no; even putting aside the obvious non-AI issues I mentioned before, which at this point are large enough to make an alliance potentially distasteful to anyone who doesn’t have a fairly high P(doom) and is thus proportionately desperate, they have quite simply not shown themselves to be a reliable bunch of consistent views.