For two: clearly some sorts of otherness warrant some sorts of fear. For example: maybe you, personally, don’t like to murder. But Bob, well: Bob is different. If Bob gets a bunch of power, then: yep, it’s OK to hold your babies close. And often OK, too, to try to “control” Bob into not-killing-your-babies. Cf, also, the discussion of getting-eaten-by-bears in the first essay. And the Nazis, too, were different in their own way. Of course, there’s a long and ongoing history of mistaking “different” for “the type of different that wants to kill your babies.” We should, indeed, be very wary. But liberal tolerance has never been a blank check; and not all fear is hatred.
I think the strength of this point may be misleading. The word “murder” usually has a negative connotation in language, so if one hears that “a murderer got lots of power”, then one should reasonably expect more negative stuff. However, although killing humans is almost always bad, it is not necessarily bad. For example, I think it would be totally fine to kill a terrorist to prevent the death of e.g. 1 M people. To assess the value of a given action, we have to ask what is better from the point of view of the universe. Once one does that, AI killing all humans is no longer necessarily bad, but it will also not be good for free.
Nice post, Joe.
I think the strength of this point may be misleading. The word “murder” usually has a negative connotation in language, so if one hears that “a murderer got lots of power”, then one should reasonably expect more negative stuff. However, although killing humans is almost always bad, it is not necessarily bad. For example, I think it would be totally fine to kill a terrorist to prevent the death of e.g. 1 M people. To assess the value of a given action, we have to ask what is better from the point of view of the universe. Once one does that, AI killing all humans is no longer necessarily bad, but it will also not be good for free.