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Hardly. He's applying the Dictator's Handbook hypothesis that the powerful don't need to (and can't) care about the population in countries where the workforce is economically irrelevant to the AI automation problem. Unlike @astrolabia's comment, @Azth's isn't more inflammatory than the underlying idea, so I disagree with you lumping them together.
And yet, the literal author of the comment agrees with me.
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Yes it's the same broad idea but phrased in a careless way. If a dictator in the prototypical primary resource extraction economy, say the classic example of a gold mine, doesn't need.to care about some subsistence farmers when he has his gold revenue then why would he?
In the hypothetical (or not, depending on perspective) economic disruption AI world this shifts to something new. If a dictator previously dependant on E.g., agriculture discovers gold to mine,
why would the new gold mining dictator care about the useless peasants who can't even perform subsistence farming (assume they don't own any land and merely worked on someone else's, who hasn't given them land now gold ha been discovered, or perhaps the gold mining has polluted the land, either case assume they can't subsistence farm), as well as the bureocrats who formerly administered the sectors of the economy that now don't exist?
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As I see it, there are two possible explanations
Option One: He literally believes that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. This is absurd. No one not living in a cave could plausibly think that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. At the very least such a claim requires explanation/justification as per the rules:
Option Two: He does not literally believe that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. In that case, the comment is much more inflammatory than necessary, again violating the rules.
I disagree that it's absurd or inflammatory. I think it's probably wrong, but it seems an entirely reasonable belief, not just about US leaders, but basically anyone in general. Erring on the side of "people won't give a shit about megadeaths and megasufferings of people who are useless to them and powerless to stop them" doesn't seem like a major error, even if it is an error.
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