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With the recent discussion on AI 2040, I have been thinking about how the modern AI safety movement of the early 21st century almost entirely pattern matches against the Marxist movements of the early 20th century.
They were both largely wrong about what begat capitalism / AI; Marxism was very insistent on labor value theory, and LW used to be very focused on symbolic AI/GOFAI/FOOM. Despite this, both were extremely prescient about the eventual end states of capitalism and AI well before the general public were aware of such concepts; capitalism leading to involution, monopolism, inequality, alienation, overproduction vs AI leading to AGI/ASI/singularity/the end of humanity.
Both movements have a history of having rock-solid beliefs, perhaps somewhat overconfidently, that current developments will lead to an imminent, eschatological Event; the 1848 revolutions, WW1 revolutions, and the Great Depression leading to the imminent collapse of capitalism, vs Deep Blue, AlphaGo and LLM's leading to the imminent creation of AGI.
Many genuinely altruistic, intelligent people find themselves drawn to both movements as they become convinced by the prescience of the movement's thinkers and start believing in the imminence of the Event - Scott himself has talked about such sympathies before.
Such people (the vanguard party / AI safetyists) are convinced that they are the ones that know best, that they are the only people who are clearly forecasting the imminent Event, and that it's their role to save the lumpenproles / permanent underclass who don't understand class consciousness / the exponential from the Event.
They both believe if the Event goes poorly it will end the world, and if it goes well it will lead to utopic abundance; hence assigning infinite stakes to the actions of the vanguard party / AI safety movement.
They both (correctly) identify that Molochian co-ordination problems make regular action incapable of affecting enough change to make the Event go well; hence the only way out is absolute control over the world by those ideologically and culturally aligned, in order to bring about utopia (communist revolution to seize the means of production vs bombing the data centres and seizing the means of compute).
Inevitably, all such movements end up being co-opted by those very same Molochian dynamics, while never having actually done anything to prevent the Event or improve the chances of the Event leading to abundance (Mao, Stalin vs frontier lab regulatory capture and degrowth ideological capture).
Frankly I also hold similar sympathies myself, with regards to both ideologies. It really is true that capitalism, despite being the best known economic system out of a lot of worse economic systems, has been the genesis of enormous amounts of externalities and suffering, and it really is true that if/when AGI is ever eventuated, at very best it is still going to be the end of the world as we know it, and at worst if anyone builds it everyone dies.
And yet neither Marxism nor AI safety has ever achieved anything that might facilitate a more favorable outcome for the Event, whether it truly is imminent or not, and mostly have just made everything worse. One can only hope that AI safety doesn't rack up Marxism's mountain of bodies along the way.
Are you a time traveller? You're making an awful lot of 'settled' statements about AI safety that seem to have no relation to its current state
What specific statements do you disagree with?
Of course I can't prove Russell's teapot non-existent, that some genius MIRI researcher won't end up discovering the ten lines of Python needed to achieve alignment, or that some firebrand communist leader won't be the one that finally unites all the workers of the world. That's what makes these ideologies so seductive; the idea that the potential payoffs to the Event are so great, anything is permitted for a chance to eventuate the good outcomes.
Empirically the two camps of "AI safety" most likely to achieve anything in the foreseeable future are the frontier-lab aligned teams that want regulatory capture on models in order to secure their own positions, and the NIMBY anti data-centre anti-AI never build anything populists; neither of these camps are particularly aligned with the original mission of AI safety, and either of these outcomes succeeding would be very poor outcomes in my view.
The following
Unless AI takeoff has already occurred, I'm not sure why you're declaring them wrong about this.
We appear to be in the foothills of AI safety deployment. Governments are just now starting to act on AI. The big companies have deployed some resources for regulatory capture, but I've yet to see anything come of it, and there are just as many influential figures dedicated to ensuring zero regulation (i.e. Marc Andreesen)
Again, the event which hasn't happened yet. If you're making the argument that early LW stuff influenced people to eventually found OpenAI/Anthropic, then fair enough, but this is also a world away from saying "AI safety has [n]ever achieved anything"
It's a fundamentally different position from Marxism, where we have a whole host of negative examples of communism in action.
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