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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19935 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Nazi Germany was not defeated by individual high-ranking Germans heroically and altruistically sacrificing themselves to assassinate Hitler, and Goering, and Himmler, and so on down the line until the Third Reich was unable to function due to a lack of leadership. It was defeated when America and Britain and Russia coordinated together to overwhelm the Wehrmacht military.

From Eliezer Yudkowsky's Twitter account:

The corporations and factions driving to build superhuman artificial intelligence, and our subsequent extinction, could be shut down with less effort than World War II; and the Allies did not then say, "Oh, that's hard, guess we should lie down and die then."

If China decides they would also prefer not to die along with everyone else -- or that they're not willing to go to war with a genuinely terrified US/UK about what the Allies genuinely believe to be omnicide -- it could be done with less effort than the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

(I'd be more worried about Europe signing on than China, actually? Europe is easy to convince to regulate, hard to get to take any regulatory problem actually seriously. China hasn't particularly seemed unfriendly to the notion of world treaties on AI; I'd hope that a treaty which treated China symmetrically with all other signatories, and offered them no insult suggesting otherwise, would be well-received. But I mention China anyways because it's the scapegoat always dragged up to explain why the West can't possibly destroy the world any more slowly.)

(Also to be clear, there isn't actually any point in unilateral relinquishment by one country if ASI research just moves elsewhere. It's international action or bust; you have to stop ASI everywhere. That's enabled by the narrowness of the GPU supply chain; and ultimately backed by the willingness of terrified Allies to use military force to destroy any stolen GPUs, lest the blockage against ASI be broken and everyone on Earth die.)

Anyway. Not actually as hard as WW2. The reason we'll die is if people don't see it coming, not because nothing could actually be done if we saw it coming.

And from Eliezer Yudkowsky's other Twitter account:

"But if they believed the theory that says they've got a huge chance of wiping out humanity, why are they working for AI companies --?" BECAUSE THEY WERE SELECTED TO BE PEOPLE WHO'D DO IT ANYWAY! Most of us who understood (and built) that theory DID NOT TAKE THE MONEY!

If there's a terrible thing to be done, but doing it gets you money and status and bragging rights in the short term -- and you get to feel big and important and like you'll get to be in the room where it happens -- if personally enacting the big disaster feels better than being powerless --and you can reach for a dozen excuses about "someone else would do it anyway", excuses that only need to convince yourself instead of a court judge -- then SOME PEOPLE WILL GO FOR IT! It is NOT A MYSTERY THAT AI COMPANIES EXIST!

SOMEBODY will try to do a horrible thing if there's a lot of immediate rewards for it and they think they won't immediately go to jail! They always will! Every time! The only question is whether everyone ELSE, the rest of civilization, manages to shut them down or not!

There is no anomaly here in need of explanation. All humanity's history of horrors and disasters has always been like this, including plenty of disasters that predictably took down the perpetrators with them.

Is that a full and detailed story of this particular band of disaster-spawners' detailed psychology? No, and I don't know all the details for a fact, and you really shouldn't care. If for some reason it actually mattered, I could talk your ear off about all my sad icky guesses for hours. But it would be pointless inside baseball.

It's just not surprising. There is nothing strange about this situation to be explained.

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