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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.
You're in a war naive society and someone publishes a white paper: "people can use violence to take whatever they want from unarmed populations" You want no one to be dispossessed so you can join the capabilities army explicitly organized around preventing banditry or you can abstain. If everyone like you abstains what do you think the equilibrium on banditry will be? Certainly abstention can be defended under a number of philosophies but joining is a perfectly rational decision.
I'm responding to this scenario:
The reasoning here is faulty in the way I outlined. You're critiquing the assumptions you baked into your own scenario. I would personally inject a lot more nuance instead of these stark terms but I was willing to engage in your hypothetical. My P(doom) is much closer to 20% than the 100% you apply. 20% is still huge and easily worth mitigating with some bilateral treaties. It's you lot who seem to conflate bilateral treaties with like eternal tyranny despite no such tyranny coming from previous treaties.
I mean not exactly? Communists believe capitalism is inherently unstable and will eventually give birth to communism once buried under the weight of its contradictions or whatever. But they make no real promises of imminence. For that matter AI safety people mostly don't even commit to claiming certainty that LLM architecture will even get there, only that it could and we ought be prepared in case it does.
Not really true of Marxists. As far as I can tell Marx himself estimated the stakes at finite, maybe in the ballpark of alleviating serfdom or avoid depression. nuclear proliferation is a much better comparison. The comparison falls pretty flat in general here.
I don't know, kind of if you squint? I'll point out that at least the Yud brand is very happy to keep us at the status quo rather than trying to usher in the eschaton, it's the accelerationists who are really pushing for utopia. Certainly both have a vision of the good, but this is where I think liberalism, christianity, or basically any have this quality.
What horrible acts? Establishing bilateral treaties and, in the same vein of cartoonish libertarian discourse that equates having laws at all with infinite tyranny because noncompliance eventually escalates to violence, we might have to enforce the treaties with violence? This chain is incredibly unconvincing and conflicts violently with the previous clause because it's precisely the opposite group of people who want to do these "horrible acts" as who want to usher in the utopia.
In short this whole comparison looks incredibly forced. It looks a lot like out group homogeneity bias. And I have no earthly idea what your position actually is. You seem to simultaneously want to let it rip because you oppose safety people who want to slow down, while also distrusting the people pushing it forward? What would you actually advise the people worried about ai existential risk do?
Implicit in such claims is that "we should use the capabilities army to stop anyone else from mustering an army", hence turning into the bandits that you were so afraid of in the first place.
Much of the global south would disagree with that assessment. Still, the obvious differences between HEU and compute is that there is no justifiable civilian use for HEU, and the existential risk of HEU is plainly obvious, whereas compute is dual-use with vast civilian applications, while the existential risk is speculative at best. Any serious attempt to control compute will be useless at best, and lead to eternal tyranny / WW3 at worst.
This is why I specified the early 20th century; there was a legitimate widespread belief amongst many 20th century intelligentsia that the fall of capitalism was imminent around the WW1 revolutions and the Great Depression, when it really did look like the contradictions of capitalism were coming to roost.
No, it is indeed broadly true of 20th century Marxism. Traditional Marxism considers the communist revolution to be a final, eschatological event capable of ending the class struggle, and with the end of class struggle an end to the suffering, exploitation and conflict plaguing humanity for the rest of time. Lenin and Trotsky were both adherents to this school of thought, where they believed that they were the ones at the vanguard to the most important moment in all of history, precisely because of the immensity of the stakes.
Sure, I will concede that the Yud school of thought is less about creating utopia and more about avoiding infinite dystopia, while the Scott school is talking about ushering in utopic superintelligence by 2040. The point is that AI safetyists act like Cassandra in having very strong beliefs where they are the only ones that are clearly forecasting the imminent disaster and that the rest of society is badly mistaken; being over-confident about like, who wins the World Cup has few consequences unless you gamble too much on Kalshi, but it is very dangerous when you also believe that the stakes of your inside view are functionally infinite.
Well, 20th century Marxism directly lead to the USSR and Maoist China, neither of which could have said to been optimal for human flourishing. I'm not saying AI safety has lead to anything this bad yet, but when you start talking about nuclear war being acceptable to achieve your aims, or that we need a world government to nationalize the means of compute because the alternatives are so much worse, it does make me concerned.
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