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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15618 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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They don't want AI to not kill everyone. They want fantastical global regulatory regimes.

This is what we would term uncharitable thinking on any other post

I dont think its uncharitable, from my reading of various AI safety writings I would describe it as substantially accurate.

I don’t think it’s uncharitable, but I do believe the prominent rationalists are altruists (or less kindly, quokkas) who genuinely want regulation to save humanity and/or are using the threat for attention and funding.

It doesn’t matter, because the people implementing the regulation would almost certainly corrupt it for power and personal gain, including undermining it for themselves or their friends, unless it was designed so that corruption and undermining are almost impossible. If ASI needs much more chips than already exist, that may actually be feasible (because a defector must run many fabs, which takes a while and can’t be easy to hide).

Yeah, probably, but it's fun to dunk on the "AI safety" nerds

The nuclear non-proliferation treaty was not about preventing nuclear apocalypse. They just wanted a fantastical global regulatory regime.

Speaking of nuclear apocalypse, though.

Plan B is the real one here. Implementation probably involves going to war with a near-peer, nuclear-armed superpower so sophisticated they are on the edge of ASI.

You probably do need a credible path for how a full-scale conventional conflict avoids escalating to nuclear exchange and then avoids escalating to nuclear apocalypse, if that's an at-all viable Plan B.

It would be quite ironic if the way AI managed to kill all of us is that we were so afraid it might go to a fast takeoff that we decided a nuclear apocalypse would be better than risking it.

Nah, not even that. The NNPT is just about the big kids deciding the big stick club should be exclusive to them only. And its enforced by big sticks, not some figleaf of global regulation. It would only work if AGI already existed but was a closely held secret of the militaries of the various signatories.

The trick is, there's undoubtedly some sociopathic subset of people who did in fact just want to gain a global regulatory regime's power and weren't all that worried about nuclear war.

And these are the people who most want to control that regime, and UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should be allowed to.

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