This post aims to convince other people, especially people who focus on democracy versus authoritarianism, to be less concerned about which country develops ASI first.
I agree that it makes sense to make this kind of argument. I have some questions/disagreements below, which don’t necessarily affect your conclusions, but seem important to point out anyway.
I think Deng Xiaoping and Ronald Reagan were fairly non-psychopathic. But current leaders of China, the US, and OpenAI inspire little confidence. The frontrunners for the US 2028 presidential election do not at all reassure me.
Did you know that Deng approved the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen protesters (as part of the CCP top leadership, also subsequently making a speech endorsing this)? I see from context that you probably don’t consider suppression of dissent (like the Tiananmen crackdown) to be evidence or part of being “psychopathic”. Maybe you could expand a bit more what you do mean, and what makes you more worried about the people you mentioned above? What makes you more worried about Xi relative to Deng, for example?
Communism, in spite of all its faults, is a utopian ideology that causes most of its adherents to genuinely favor a pleasant society, even when it blinds them to whether their policies are achieving that result.
A darker interpretation is that the (subconscious, but more real or substantial in some sense) goals of nearly all humans are to gain power and status, and utopian ideologies are merely a tool for achieving this. From this perspective, Communists do not more “genuinely favor a pleasant society” but are instead more deluded (on a conscious level) about their true motivations, and about human nature in general. That “it blinds them to whether their policies are achieving that result” is not some sort of incidental side effect, but a fundamental part of what’s going on.
(Are you aware of the many internal CCP purges, often powered by forced (i.e., torture-induced) confessions, both before and after it took power in 1949? This is another reason to prefer to the “power maximization” model of Communist/human motivation.)
There’s some risk that either the CCP or half the voters in the US will develop LLM psychosis. I’m predicting that that risk will be low enough that it shouldn’t dominate our ASI strategy. I don’t think I have a strong enough argument here to persuade skeptics.
I would agree that “it shouldn’t dominate our ASI strategy” given many other risks that all have to be considered, but not that the risk is low in an absolute sense, at least if we interpret “LLM psychosis” more broadly to include corruption / adversarial manipulation of human values or motivational systems in general.
I agree that it makes sense to make this kind of argument. I have some questions/disagreements below, which don’t necessarily affect your conclusions, but seem important to point out anyway.
Did you know that Deng approved the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen protesters (as part of the CCP top leadership, also subsequently making a speech endorsing this)? I see from context that you probably don’t consider suppression of dissent (like the Tiananmen crackdown) to be evidence or part of being “psychopathic”. Maybe you could expand a bit more what you do mean, and what makes you more worried about the people you mentioned above? What makes you more worried about Xi relative to Deng, for example?
A darker interpretation is that the (subconscious, but more real or substantial in some sense) goals of nearly all humans are to gain power and status, and utopian ideologies are merely a tool for achieving this. From this perspective, Communists do not more “genuinely favor a pleasant society” but are instead more deluded (on a conscious level) about their true motivations, and about human nature in general. That “it blinds them to whether their policies are achieving that result” is not some sort of incidental side effect, but a fundamental part of what’s going on.
(Are you aware of the many internal CCP purges, often powered by forced (i.e., torture-induced) confessions, both before and after it took power in 1949? This is another reason to prefer to the “power maximization” model of Communist/human motivation.)
I would agree that “it shouldn’t dominate our ASI strategy” given many other risks that all have to be considered, but not that the risk is low in an absolute sense, at least if we interpret “LLM psychosis” more broadly to include corruption / adversarial manipulation of human values or motivational systems in general.