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Individual criminals cannot consistently enforce a world-wide treaty regulating AI development, making violence they commit useless and counterproductive. Only laws adopted and enforced by the most powerful countries in the world can do that. If you kill Altman or blow up a datacenter then you are arrested and they continue with a different CEO or a different datacenter, if you slaughter every OpenAI employee then Anthropic does it, if you somehow personally hunt down and kill everyone in the U.S. who knows what a "transformer" is then China does it. Here is the post he wrote on the subject following the attempted firebombing:
Eliezer Yudkowsky: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction
That sounds like more of an argument of practicality then. Then it's a matter of whether it's easier to reach a democratic mandate in all major countries then autocratic buy-in from Russia and China vs. a small contingent of fanatic extremists of say 5% in each country leading in AI (which there's only really two) to throttle AGI until say leaders globally can be replaced by a younger generation which subscribes to threat models of extermination by AI. And even that's on the presumption that the violence is in fact counterproductive and you don't end up with a Shinzo Abe's assassin's type of case where the murder is the catalyst for political reform. Suppose Sam Altman burns to popular applause and leaders finally recognize just how unpopular AI is.
Though, I think the whole hypothetical is farcical since in reality, the only threat posed by AI seems to be wasting everyone's time and money, and flooding the internet with slop.
The morality of violence depends on the practical consequences. In consequentialist moral frameworks (including Yud's) this is trivial. In most deontological moral frameworks violence is wrong unless certain conditions are satisfied, some of which relate to practical consequences - for example in Catholic just war theory a just war must be fought with a reasonable probability of success. And in virtue ethics engaging in violence without a plan to achieve anything by it is a vice.
Sounds kind of presumptuous. Suppose the assassination succeeded in all its goals, and there's a global AI freeze. Then from a consequentalist view, oh, I suppose I supported individual violence, given it's effective after all!
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