unitary executive power.
Shankar Sivarajan
Karma: 1,455
Baptists and Bootleggers. The regulations they call for would in fact help them at the expense of smaller competition (and especially open models), and they know it even if you don’t.
“SMAISMRMILMEPOETALEUMIBUNENUGTTAUIRAS” lends itself to misinterpretation.
This essay, Reboot the Police, comes to mind. (Not about being low-integrity/unprincipled, just about cozying up to the left, and it does not polarize AI Safety, which is what he was criticizing in the quoted tweet.)
If someone becomes the face of such as movement, there’s a risk of there being released a “hidden camera” video of them (well, their face and voice; quid est veritas?) saying – in unaccented American – that their ulterior plan is to keep China down so democratic AI can dominate instead, which might set back for a long time more distributed movements that might potentially emerge … hmm, that’s not a bad idea.
Twitter seems full of people who think this is just a publicity stunt.
And your suggestion is to unambiguously make them correct?
Other companies can demonstrate a prolonged absence of such incidents despite similar incentives,
Can they? This strikes me as just a specific manifestation of the general phenomenon of user-hostile enshittification.
9e3e2ebf93f2d0d29f37f9b63a9448cbdf0c33302c2666d7a0697de950605d34
Is there something like this already?
Yes, the people who go around suing small businesses for ADA violations and settling.
present justice systems are vastly vastly better than random medieval witch trials.
You’re comparing to the wrong thing. It is true that the present (American) legal system is better than medieval legal systems, because they prosecute for factually better crimes (cf. C. S. Lewis[1]) and that they rarely do the thing you’re advocating for. Those kinds of trial, where you pick a target and prosecute them for some law you can find that fits, are in fact not better than the worst of the witch trials, just as the Nuremberg Trials performed by the Soviet Union and their Allies you cite so admiringly were not better than an ancient triumph, a ritual to celebrate the vanquishing of a foe and demonstrate virtus.
- ^
“Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the ‘Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?’ But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.”
- ^
Not being an adherent of the philosophy that holding the Mandate-of-Heaven stick, large as it may be, makes otherwise-bad actions good, I see no particularly compelling reason to uphold this supposed taboo, insofar as it even exists as you describe it, beyond simple fear of reprisal from the wielder of said stick, and what you call muddying the waters strikes me instead as an admittedly-ineffectual-but-still-noble attempt at imposing moral clarity on the discussion.
non-state violence
This is moving the goalposts.
Consider an example I expect you’ll find less sympathetic than Elmore and @habryka: Joel Webbon. Would you make the same excuses for his statement?
You have an army. … Arrest Tim Walz, bring him to DC, try him, and hang him. Honor Christ. Save the country.
And later,
Only after a fair trial, of course.
I don’t believe I have ever espoused a “commitment to nonviolence.”[1] (I might have said non-aggression principle, which is different.) I’m not on PauseAI’s side here: they’re also wrong if they think having the state’s jackbooted thugs do something that would be bad if non-state actors did it makes it morally better.
- ^
If I have, I renounce that position now.
- ^
I commend you on making the perfect reaction emoji for this. I love the Cromwell “bowels of Christ” quote and have used for a really long time when people are making some egregious error of judgment leading to something even someone whose values were fundamentally abhorrent might consider evil.
I don’t know how to convince you that what you unironically call “justice” is a perversion of the term. I can’t give you any actual examples of “medieval” barbarity in the present day, because no matter how many, you’d just say “Chinese cardiologists.”
I remember there was an organization a few years ago warned that they would sue you guys (might have been Nonlinear? I might be mangling some details, but my point will stand), and you correctly understood that as a threat to try to ruin you with legal fees, not a promise that impartial justice would be served because you were in the right. Is your intuition about criminal trials so radically different because you trust in the benignity of the prosecutors?
How on earth is calling for criminal trials a call for violence.
I accuse you of being disingenuous. If one called for Sabrina, the young lady who put everyone in town in danger by practicing witchcraft, to be subjected to a trial by ordeal, you wouldn’t be so confused by the term and the aesthetics of the process that you’d think it meaningfully different from calling for her to be drowned or whatever.
This is called “glowposting.”
If you take the view that the AI companies as institutions are evil and so everyone who works for them is bad, sure, fine. But do you apply this principle generally, or is this special pleading? Just about all large institutions collaborate with the state, and plenty of people work directly for it. Do you make the same judgments about their moral character as well? USAID might be a particularly fun example to consider, but it should work with any, say, $1B+ market cap company.
Hah, of course it isn’t predicting term limits getting abolished! At least you didn’t say he did the Grover Cleveland thing, which would be even less plausible! No, obviously the scenario being constructed is after Clinton beats Bush in ’16, and wins reelection in 2020, Trump becoming Vice President in 2024, and then succeeding to the presidency. (Edit: and Xi continuing to be President isn’t surprising at all, and needs no explanation.)
Slightly more speculatively, from context, it looks like the previous President got shot by something like an AR15 with Chinese electronics strapped onto it to make it like an aimbot, which the Dems are declaring a “fully semi-automatic super intelligent assault rifle” and fearmongering to try to get it banned or the imported components taxed at some absurd tariff rates or whatever, and Trump is saying that he’s just assured the Chinese manufacturers that isn’t going to happen on his watch, and he’s going to continue to support the free trade status quo, the obvious position for him to take that’d appeal to both his small business owner base and the Second Amendment extremist fringe he needs to occasionally throw a sop to.