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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.
I suppose you're correct, although it is my impression that ~everyone who believes in short AI timelines / AI safety regulation now believes in scaling compute being the way to AGI. Even non-LLM believers are primarily looking for new ways to apply the bitter lesson, and the focus of AI safety regulation is on trying to control world compute, which would be completely pointless if Gary Marcus got the final laugh vis a vis symbolic AI.
Yeah, this is my point. Empirical evidence is that the sum total of AI safety's achievements is, against their own goals, to accelerate the founding of OpenAI/Anthropic and the AI race dynamic, while having made no progress on their actual goals (not even the authors expect Plan A to realistically happen).
Of course, it's possible they could turn it around and heroically pull humanity into post-scarcity abundance, the same way that Marxism still has time to eventuate the communist revolution (arguably it's kind of sort of happening with the DSA); but if the stakes are infinite, then there's nothing to do but keep going, even if you're going in the wrong direction, which is why getting Pascal's Mugged is so dangerous.
This is the point I'm trying to make though; perhaps it was poorly communicated. At the turn of the 20th century, Marxism was in vogue amongst many Western intellectuals, because we had not yet seen what would happen with communism in action.
Right now, we are at the equivalent stage of AI safety, where it is in vogue in certain intellectual circles; we have not yet seen what will happen with AI safety, but it shares many structural similarities to the Marxist movements a hundred years ago.
After the transformers paper came out it was only a matter of time, this way at least the labs are full of safety people who might be able to prioritize alignment work. The alternative was optimistically we get a year or so more time but no influence.
This prove too much. early liberal, proto-capitalist, thought also shared these structural elements.
"Might" is a weak word. Historically, "join your enemies to reform them from within" has pretty much never achieved the desired aims; it seems straightforwardly true that Moloch has won in terms of incentives to push capabilities and accelerate.
I think if you accept the premise that the world is truly doomed on such a short timescale, then having a few more years is better, actually, than trading billions of QALY's for some nebulous idea of influence that has had no empirical benefit.
Perhaps. It would be easier to engage with this if you elaborated on why you think this is the case.
Framing this as a simple enemies or allies distinction is sanding away anything useful. Like if the "enemy" was "war" then one might naively believe that creating an army is joining the "enemy". But if what is bad about war is the killing and oppression then you don't prevent that by disarming, only ensure that the people who win are less noble and less capably opposed.
It's already the case thst people accuse those like yud of being an uninvolved crank who doesn't understand the problem because he doesn't have experience building the models. Ai safety people would have less, not more influence if they abstained.
Given the infinity of total annihilation any qaly calculation is swamped by even a tiny amount of leverage on probability of averting disaster. You'd need to set the capabilities frontier back some appreciable fraction of the sun's remaining lifespan for this to be a meaningful calculation. Fortunately I think having people in leadership positions of the labs gives us more than a tiny amount of leverage.
This is of course vague because you didn't yourself outline what these structural elements are. Seems like some vague notion of the necessity of action to avoid catastrophe. If "we'll be out competed by peer nations who liberalize" is too much of a stretch then we can point to calls to shut down the border lest the nation be dissolved or any number of other calls to action. The calling up of a militia to defend from Indian attacks. The point is that it's silly to compare any movement that wants to act for any reason to communism in order to rub its nose in that feces. You'd leave yourself completely paralyzed.
The difference is that "war" is a concept and "AGI" is, at least theoretically, being physically manifested. If the enemy is "the army about to invade" then you probably don't want to join the enemy army to convince them to turn around.
This is the exact logic that I am saying leads to very bad outcomes. If you believe that the stakes are the infinity of total annihilation, that total annihilation is imminent, and that any leverage thus has infinite value, then you can justify doing anything to gain even miniscule leverage, on nothing but the strength of your own belief. The anime character draining the lives of everyone across the world because they believe that only they can bring the world to salvation is not the protagonist of the story.
I think I have outlined my case well enough.
Adherents of both ideologies believe in an imminent Event, with infinitely high stakes attached to the Event, that they are the only ones capable of making sure the Event leads to utopia, and that at least in the case of Marxism, this set of beliefs lead to the justification of many horrible acts that did not, in fact, meaningfully facilitate a better outcome of the Event. As far as I know, this description does not apply to liberal or capitalistic thought.
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