I don’t think that’s at all clear, and looking at tukabel’s past comments certainly doesn’t give me any confidence that it wasn’t.
If I may expand on tukabel’s response: What is the point of this post? [...]
I think there’s certainly an argument of this sort to be made, I think it’s an interesting argument, and I think (as your comment demonstrates) it can be made without getting needlessly political. But tukabel didn’t really bother to make it, and certainly didn’t bother to avoid making it in a needlessly political way.
Does that really seem like a political post to you, though? It doesn’t look like an attempt to discuss politics, types of politics, who’s right and who’s wrong, there’s no tribalism, nothing regarding contemporary politics, etc. It looks like a pure and simple statement of fact: Humans have been coercing other humans into doing specific actions—often times empowering themselves—for the whole of human history.
I don’t think tukabel’s post was very political outside of the statement “An AI doing this is effectively politics, and politics has existed for a long time.” I don’t think that’s considered discussing politics.
Yup, it seems political, because tukabel made particular choices of what specific actions to highlight and what particular sorts of ideologies to suggest might be responsible.
worst case scenario: AI persuades humans to give it half of their income in exchange for totalitarian control and megawars in order to increase its power over more humanimals
In the sort of scenario I would consider “worst case”, a 50% tax to fund whatever the AI is doing wouldn’t be anywhere on the list of things to worry about. Why mention “give it half their income”? It doesn’t even make sense: “give it half of their income in exchange for totalitarian control”—so humans give the AI half their income, and “in exchange” the AI gets totalitarian control over them? That’s not an exchange, it’s like saying “I’ll pay you £10 in exchange for being obliged to polish your shoes for you”. Outside of peculiar sexual fetishes, no one does that.
So why talk about “half of their income”? Because tukabel wants to complain about how taxes are bad, that’s why. Politics.
ooops, politics and collectivist ideologies are doing this since ages
Collectivist ideologies? Well, I guess. But it’s not as if it’s only “collectivist ideologies” that have persuaded people to hand over their money for dubious benefits. (To take a typical class of counterexamples from quite a long time ago, consider fraudulent businesses in the time of the South Sea Bubble.) Why focus on “collectivist ideologies”? Because tukabel wants to complain about how collectivism is bad and individualism is better, that’s why.
That’s how it looks to me, anyway. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe I’ve been oversensitized by seeing any number of other people doing what I think tukabel is doing here, and now see Proselytizing Libertarians under every bed. That would still be an example of why it’s worth going out of the way to avoid saying things that are liable to look like politics: because even if you aren’t actually intending to slide political preaching into a discussion of something else, it’s very easy for it to look as if you are. (This is one of the key points Eliezer made back when he wrote “Politics is the Mind-Killer”. Look at the Nixon example he cites; it’s no more inflammatory than tukabel’s, and that’s the point.)
Full disclosure: It is possible that I am extra-sensitive to other annoyances in tukabel’s comments because I find his persistent neologizing so grating. No, tukabel, I do not need to see “humans” always replaced with “humanimals” in order to remember that humans are animals, any more than I need “square” replaced with “squarectangle” to remember that squares are rectangles.
I did not really know what was meant by “collectivist ideaologies” and assumed it to be something along the lines of “ideaologies that necssitate a collection of people.” Originally, I didn’t see any significance of the 50% (to me, it just seemed like an off-the-cuff number), but you put it into some good context.
I don’t think that’s at all clear, and looking at tukabel’s past comments certainly doesn’t give me any confidence that it wasn’t.
I think there’s certainly an argument of this sort to be made, I think it’s an interesting argument, and I think (as your comment demonstrates) it can be made without getting needlessly political. But tukabel didn’t really bother to make it, and certainly didn’t bother to avoid making it in a needlessly political way.
Does that really seem like a political post to you, though? It doesn’t look like an attempt to discuss politics, types of politics, who’s right and who’s wrong, there’s no tribalism, nothing regarding contemporary politics, etc. It looks like a pure and simple statement of fact: Humans have been coercing other humans into doing specific actions—often times empowering themselves—for the whole of human history.
I don’t think tukabel’s post was very political outside of the statement “An AI doing this is effectively politics, and politics has existed for a long time.” I don’t think that’s considered discussing politics.
Yup, it seems political, because tukabel made particular choices of what specific actions to highlight and what particular sorts of ideologies to suggest might be responsible.
In the sort of scenario I would consider “worst case”, a 50% tax to fund whatever the AI is doing wouldn’t be anywhere on the list of things to worry about. Why mention “give it half their income”? It doesn’t even make sense: “give it half of their income in exchange for totalitarian control”—so humans give the AI half their income, and “in exchange” the AI gets totalitarian control over them? That’s not an exchange, it’s like saying “I’ll pay you £10 in exchange for being obliged to polish your shoes for you”. Outside of peculiar sexual fetishes, no one does that.
So why talk about “half of their income”? Because tukabel wants to complain about how taxes are bad, that’s why. Politics.
Collectivist ideologies? Well, I guess. But it’s not as if it’s only “collectivist ideologies” that have persuaded people to hand over their money for dubious benefits. (To take a typical class of counterexamples from quite a long time ago, consider fraudulent businesses in the time of the South Sea Bubble.) Why focus on “collectivist ideologies”? Because tukabel wants to complain about how collectivism is bad and individualism is better, that’s why.
That’s how it looks to me, anyway. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe I’ve been oversensitized by seeing any number of other people doing what I think tukabel is doing here, and now see Proselytizing Libertarians under every bed. That would still be an example of why it’s worth going out of the way to avoid saying things that are liable to look like politics: because even if you aren’t actually intending to slide political preaching into a discussion of something else, it’s very easy for it to look as if you are. (This is one of the key points Eliezer made back when he wrote “Politics is the Mind-Killer”. Look at the Nixon example he cites; it’s no more inflammatory than tukabel’s, and that’s the point.)
Full disclosure: It is possible that I am extra-sensitive to other annoyances in tukabel’s comments because I find his persistent neologizing so grating. No, tukabel, I do not need to see “humans” always replaced with “humanimals” in order to remember that humans are animals, any more than I need “square” replaced with “squarectangle” to remember that squares are rectangles.
Ah, good points.
I did not really know what was meant by “collectivist ideaologies” and assumed it to be something along the lines of “ideaologies that necssitate a collection of people.” Originally, I didn’t see any significance of the 50% (to me, it just seemed like an off-the-cuff number), but you put it into some good context.
I concede and retract my original criticism