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Notes -
The two most prominent representatives of AI Safety are
Eliezer Yudkowsky, who as below commentators have noted, has advocated in Time for a world government to seize power and prevent the development of AI via violence, even to the point of bombing data centres and triggering nuclear war. He was one of the primary inspirations for Altman and Musk to found OpenAI, and indirectly Amodei et al to found Anthropic; organizations dedicated to pushing forth AI capabilities, directly against AI safety's original goal.
Scott Alexander, who has recently put his support towards AI 2040, a policy proposal that advocates for the creation of an (effective) global world government to nationalize the means of compute throughout the world, in order to prevent un-authorized AI development.
I would say it is a matter of epistemological confidence; I agree, in the abstract, that the hypothetical Event where AGI is created is likely to have poor outcomes, and that if possible, averting the Event would be a good idea.
The problem is with people who believe that AGI is likely to be created imminently soon and in the near-certainty of existentially dangerous outcomes; this line of thinking means you can justify advocating for low-probability policies such as seizing world compute and triggering global war, with a certainty of having dangerous outcomes, because the stakes otherwise are so imminent and so immense.
Even though I directionally align with the belief that AGI is Bad, I think it is far more likely that such proposals are much more likely to cause "mundane" harms like increased governmental repression and/or reduced technological innovation, without having a particularly high likelihood of averting the Event, and quite possibly making it more imminent and/or much worse.
I mentioned something like this in last week's thread, but Eliezer has ironically been one of the most counter-productive people in history at achieving their goals. In a Nick Landian sense, he helped create (unveil?) a hyperstition: the idea of some imagined future being so powerful that it acts as a retrocausal attractor to bring itself into existence. Popularize the idea that we are on the brink of creating a machine god with the power to destroy us all, and inevitably someone's going to go "huh, so I could have a machine god? I should get on that, if only to prevent all the irresponsible people from doing it before me."
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