I appreciate your effort to take political violence seriously and not strawman it. I think it is critical that people argue against a steelman if they are going to be persuasive to those who might want to advocate for or carry out violence. However, I feel like you end up doing the same thing you accuse others of.
I cannot imagine a world in which people manage to coordinate at a scale this large and go undetected. Practically, it seems nearly impossible to achieve the coordination necessary to destroy enough data centers or kill enough researchers to make an impact on AI progress. For one, these actions would have to be carried out over a very short span of time, probably shorter than one night, in order not to be noticed before companies beef up their security. For another, one person can only kill so many people in a day, so you would have to get thousands of people on board with mass murder (or at least mass property destruction) and coordinate with them within this short time-frame. Finally, you’d have to do all this without someone whistleblowing, or something else going awry.
In fact, it seems like large-scale political violence is more difficult to coordinate than a global ASI ban, which Eliezer argues for. Even though a global ASI ban is often treated as an idealistic goal, I argue that it’s significantly easier to make happen than any sort of impactful political violence. It would require immense coordination, to be sure, but not nearly as much as the violence would require. Also, the coordination for a global ban wouldn’t have to be secret, as it would be for violence. Furthermore, a global ASI ban is something we can progress to through smaller laws, whereas any sort of effective political violence would have to happen all at once. Really, compared to effective political violence, a global ASI ban looks so doable.
One would need to have many people commit violence, but it wouldn’t need to be organized at such a large scale or committed over such a short time period.
AI is compute-constrained. According to https://www.allaboutai.com/resources/ai-statistics/ai-data-centers/, there are “4,000 AI-capable facilities globally.” Yes, many data centers would need to be hit, but one doesn’t need to fully destroy a data center to have a meaningful impact. Taking one offline for 6 to 12 months matters. It matters even more if you can permanently damage chips so that they have to be replaced. After some attacks, security will be increased, but no security is perfect, and the attacker gets to pick the most vulnerable targets. This talk of data centers ignores the fact that there are even better targets: AI chip fabs, and the factories for chip fab machines. A single successful attack on such a facility could significantly reduce future global computing capacity. There are far fewer of these in the world. And there are creative points of attack. For example, one could destroy a chip fab machine during shipment.
Organizing doesn’t require a massive conspiracy. In the US, it is legal to call for violence as long as it doesn’t cross certain boundaries for imminence and specificity. There are radical climate change activist orgs that routinely call for violence and do so within the limits of the law (e.g. Deep Green Resistance). They maintain a strict separation between “above-ground” legal activities and “below-ground” illegal activities. The AI threat is much more direct and immediate than climate change, and has targets for violence that are more clearly linked to the outcome. One or more organizations could publicly organize and advocate and make it clear that there was widespread support for the use of violence in these ways. Then, small groups and individuals could organize to commit individual acts of sabotage. Some groups will fail for various reasons, but if there are enough groups, it could make a difference.
The goal of such political violence wouldn’t be to single-handedly stop AI. It would be to make clear the level of opposition, threaten the possibility of continued escalation of violence, and buy time for governments to act to pause AI. It takes time to build any movement, and this would be no different.
I appreciate your effort to take political violence seriously and not strawman it. I think it is critical that people argue against a steelman if they are going to be persuasive to those who might want to advocate for or carry out violence. However, I feel like you end up doing the same thing you accuse others of.
One would need to have many people commit violence, but it wouldn’t need to be organized at such a large scale or committed over such a short time period.
AI is compute-constrained. According to https://www.allaboutai.com/resources/ai-statistics/ai-data-centers/, there are “4,000 AI-capable facilities globally.” Yes, many data centers would need to be hit, but one doesn’t need to fully destroy a data center to have a meaningful impact. Taking one offline for 6 to 12 months matters. It matters even more if you can permanently damage chips so that they have to be replaced. After some attacks, security will be increased, but no security is perfect, and the attacker gets to pick the most vulnerable targets. This talk of data centers ignores the fact that there are even better targets: AI chip fabs, and the factories for chip fab machines. A single successful attack on such a facility could significantly reduce future global computing capacity. There are far fewer of these in the world. And there are creative points of attack. For example, one could destroy a chip fab machine during shipment.
Organizing doesn’t require a massive conspiracy. In the US, it is legal to call for violence as long as it doesn’t cross certain boundaries for imminence and specificity. There are radical climate change activist orgs that routinely call for violence and do so within the limits of the law (e.g. Deep Green Resistance). They maintain a strict separation between “above-ground” legal activities and “below-ground” illegal activities. The AI threat is much more direct and immediate than climate change, and has targets for violence that are more clearly linked to the outcome. One or more organizations could publicly organize and advocate and make it clear that there was widespread support for the use of violence in these ways. Then, small groups and individuals could organize to commit individual acts of sabotage. Some groups will fail for various reasons, but if there are enough groups, it could make a difference.
The goal of such political violence wouldn’t be to single-handedly stop AI. It would be to make clear the level of opposition, threaten the possibility of continued escalation of violence, and buy time for governments to act to pause AI. It takes time to build any movement, and this would be no different.