Davik

Karma: −48

Davik Apr 7, 2025, 9:16 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: Third-wave AI safety needs sociopolitical thinking
The systemic issue is capital accumulation. It neatly explains everything in your examples that’s actually happening and not a hallucination.
You’re right that EA needed this guidance on sociological and political issues...
Ten years ago.
This was a discussion that was had, and rejected, early on. Now everything EA did is meaningless as capital destroys the world economy and all institutions of collective action.

Davik Apr 7, 2025, 8:58 PM
−28 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Third-wave AI safety needs sociopolitical thinking
The government can be democratically elected. You idiot. Ordinary people elect the government and compromise the people making art. Corporations are oligarchical, and ordinary people have effectively no control over their governance. Democratic power concentrated in one government is more decentralized than oligarchical power concentrated in ten corporations. Ideally power would be diffuse to everyone, but creating a system where all ownership of AI is cooperative is only possible through first destroying the oligarchy that currently controls it.
This is self evident to anyone with any political education using sources more recent than 1700, and honestly even the original Leviathan knows that corporations are a threat. That conclusion that governments were more of one was before hundreds of years of capital accumulation and democratization of the west.
This is why the left is so completely done with you clowns. If the AI risk profiles being advocated are accurate and you’re still ignorant of how centralization of power works in a democracy, still so ignorant of the threat of corporate oligarchy, despite the active destruction of America by corporate oligarchs, then nuclear war is preferable to letting the current batch of EA write the future of AI; you’ll enforce a hereditary feudalism by accident, should you ever manage to wrangle the god your building. That you idiots couldn’t predict the future of AI if you had a god AI is the only solace.
And before you snowflakes lock this out via moderation; what can be destroyed by the truth should be. That includes the ego of your membership.

Davik Apr 7, 2025, 8:40 PM
−12 points
0 ∶ 3
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Third-wave AI safety needs sociopolitical thinking
Because someone else backed off needlessly instead of properly addressing this, let me tell you in no uncertain terms; this is disqualifying wrong. AI art is not only highly reduced in quality, it concentrates power in whomever owns the AI model. It’s just ownership transfer through intellectual property theft, to the capital class who charges you a subscription for access to the model. That you can get a free taste is an advertisement, not a rebuttal of the economic model.
If the EA movement is not 100% agreed that AI art represents an example of centralization of power you cannot be trusted with shepherding AI. The intellectual gap is too large to reasonably bridge; the community is rotten and beyond saving, acting merely as a tool to further AI misalignment.

Davik Apr 7, 2025, 8:17 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: Third-wave AI safety needs sociopolitical thinking
Two factors come to mind.
It isn’t. Prices are just inflated creating false growth. Real gdp, adjusted for variable inflation, shows dead even growth.
Inequality. There are more billionaires in the US siphoning money from across the globe due to the lack of effective capital regulation. Hence what effects do persist are partially explained as capital flight to the USA inflating the top of the per capital pyramid without in any way increasing actual worker productivity.

Davik Apr 7, 2025, 5:22 PM
−5 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jitse Goutbeek’s comment on: GiveWell’s response to the USAID funding cuts
The best rebuttal to this is that EA regularly tackles “longtermism” causes regularly, on the basis that they can use small bits of influence and money to help address major causes with disproportionate impact. AI is the biggest one the community is interested in.
And this is purely irrational.
The entire fabric of society is set to unravel by, say, next week. There’s a near zero percent chance of anything good happening on any of EAs fronts, including AI. If the government either collapses or becomes unaligned there’s absolutely no reason to think regulations or guidelines on AI will be followed or effective. There are few heuristics we can agree on with AI, but it should be absolutely obvious that an unaligned government creates an unaligned AI, and that government resources are orders of magnitude higher than anyone else.
Hence every cent of money or effort spent by EA on any non political long term cause is meaningless. Even if the money spent couldn’t have mattered if it was political it’s still an example of invalid and irrational spending; worrying about earthquakes while your house is on fire type logic. Nothing was more threatening than the collapse of democracy, including AI, not because AI is theoretically less destructive but because the risk was orders of magnitude more immediate.
Yes, the risk was known. No, pleading ignorance doesn’t absolve anyone.
This could and was predicted a decade ago. Decades if you view EA as an offshoot of the rationalist community and lump their efforts; as early as the “politics is the mind killer” post on less wrong people have been criticizing the de facto political neutrality of the movement, and they were right. I won’t say it’s the original sin, that’s absolutely the obsession with the highly degenerative silicon valley tech sphere at the expense of humanities and social sciences (that could have addressed this too) in recruiting, outreach, and messaging, but it’s up there.
Basically, EA choose political neutrality and what it got was eaten by politics. Now it’s irrelevant. Nothing that’s been done or will be done matters.
You’ve lost.
EA is a zombie.
It’s dead.