The usefulness of the “bad people” label is exactly my point here. The fact of the matter is some people are bad, no matter what excuses they come up with. For example, Adolf Hitler was clearly a bad person, regardless of his belief that he was the single greatest and most ethical human being who had ever lived. The argument that all people have an equally strong moral compass is not tenable.
More than that, when I say “Sam Altman is a bad person”, I don’t mean “Sam Altman’s internal monologue is just him thinking over and over again ‘I want to destroy the world’”. It means “Sam Altman’s internal monologue is really good at coming up with excuses for unethical behavior”.
Like:
I’m not concerned that Dario Amodei will consciously think to himself: “I’ll go ahead and press this astronomically net-negative button over here because it will make me more powerful”. But he can easily end up pressing such a button anyway.
I would like to state, for the record, that if Sam Altman pushes a “50% chance of making humans extinct” button, this makes him a bad person, no matter what he’s thinking to himself. Personally I would just not press that button.
The usefulness of the “bad people” label is exactly my point here. The fact of the matter is some people are bad, no matter what excuses they come up with. For example, Adolf Hitler was clearly a bad person, regardless of his belief that he was the single greatest and most ethical human being who had ever lived. The argument that all people have an equally strong moral compass is not tenable.
More than that, when I say “Sam Altman is a bad person”, I don’t mean “Sam Altman’s internal monologue is just him thinking over and over again ‘I want to destroy the world’”. It means “Sam Altman’s internal monologue is really good at coming up with excuses for unethical behavior”.
Like:
I would like to state, for the record, that if Sam Altman pushes a “50% chance of making humans extinct” button, this makes him a bad person, no matter what he’s thinking to himself. Personally I would just not press that button.