Political Violence Is Never Acceptable

Nor is the threat or implication of violence. Period. Ever. No exceptions.

It is completely unacceptable. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.

It is immoral, and also it is ineffective. It would be immoral even if it were effective. Nothing hurts your cause more.

Do not do this, and do not tolerate anyone who does.

The reason I need to say this now is that there has been at least one attempt at violence, and potentially two in quick succession, against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

My sympathies go out to him and I hope he is doing as okay as one could hope for.

Awful Events Amid Scary Times

Max Zeff: NEW: A suspect was arrested on Friday morning for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home. A person matching the suspect’s description was later seen making threats outside of OpenAI’s corporate HQ.

Nathan Calvin: This is beyond disturbing and awful. Whatever disagreements you have with Sam or OpenAI, this cannot be normalized or justified in any way. Everyone deserves to be able to be safe with their families at home. I feel ill and hope beyond hope this does not become a pattern.

Sam Altman wrote up his experience of the first attack here.

After that, there was a second incident.

Jonah Owen Lamb: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home appears to have been the target of a second attack Sunday morning, a mere two days after a 20-year-old man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at the property, The Standard has learned.

The San Francisco Police Department announced (opens in new tab) the arrest of two suspects, Amanda Tom, 25, and Muhamad Tarik Hussein, 23, who were booked for negligent discharge.

Stephen Sorace Fox News (Fox News): An OpenAI spokesperson told Fox News Digital Monday morning that the incident was unrelated and had no connection to Altman, adding that there was no indication that Altman's home was being targeted.

We have no idea what motivated the second incident, or even if it was targeted at Altman. I won’t comment further on the second incident until we know more.

Nor is this confined to those who are worried about AI, the flip side is alas there too:

Gary Marcus: One investor today called for violence against me. Another lied about me, in a pretty deep and fundamental way. They are feeling the heat.

It also is not confined to the AI issue at all.

As Santi Ruiz notes, there has been a large rise in the salience of potential political violence and violence against public figures in the past few years, across the board.

That holds true for violence and threats against both Republicans and Democrats.

This requires a non-AI explanation.

Things still mostly don’t spiral into violence, the vast vast majority of even deeply angry people don’t do violence, but the rare thing is now somewhat less rare. A few years ago I would have been able to say most people definitively oppose such violence, but polls indicate this is no longer true for large portions of the public. This is terrifying.

Indeed, the scariest reaction known so far has been a comments section on Instagram (click only if you must), a place as distinct from AI and AI safety spaces of all kinds as one can get. This is The Public, as in the general public, for reasons completely unrelated to any concerns about existential risk, basically cheering this on and encouraging what would become the second attack. It seems eerily similar to the reaction of many to the assassination of the CEO of United Healthcare.

The stakes of AI are existential. As in, it is likely that all humans will die. All value in the universe may be permanently lost. Others will be driven to desperation from loss of jobs or other concerns, both real and not. The situation is only going to get more tense, and keeping things peaceful is going to require more work over time. It will be increasingly difficult to both properly convey the situation and how dire it is, and avoid encouraging threats of violence, and even actual attempts at violence.

Then on the other side are those who see untold wonders within their grasp.

This goes hand in hand with what Altman calls the ‘Shakespearean drama’ going on inside OpenAI, and between the major labs.

Most Of Those Worried About AI Do As Well As One Can On This

The vast majority of major voices in Notkilleveryonism, those worried that we might all die from AI, have been and continue to be doing exactly the right thing here, and have over many years consistently warned against and condemned all violence other than that required by the state’s enforcement of the law.

Almost all of those who are worried about AI existential risk are very much passing this test, and making their positions against violence exceedingly clear, pushing back very hard against any and all extralegal violence and extralegal threats of violence.

Demands for impossible standards here are common, where someone who did not cause the problem is attacked for not condemning the thing sufficiently loudly, or in exactly the right away. This is a common political and especially culture war tactic.

Perhaps the worst argument of all is ‘you told people never to commit or threaten violence because it is ineffective, without explicitly also saying it was immoral, therefore you would totally do it if you thought it would work, you evil person.’

They will even say ‘oh you said it was immoral, and also you said it wouldn’t work, but you didn’t explicitly say you would still condemn it even if it would work, checkmate.’

The implicit standard here, that you must explicitly note that you would act a certain way purely for what someone thinks are the right reasons or else you are guilty of doing the thing, is completely crazy, as you can see in any other context. It is the AI version of saying ‘would you still love me if I was a worm?’ and getting mad that you had to ask the question to get reassurance, as opposed to being told unprompted.

The reason why people often focus on ‘it won’t work’ is because this is the non-obvious part of the equation. With notably rare exceptions, we all agree it is immoral.

Andy Masley offers thoughts, calling for caution when describing particular people. He draws a parallel to how people talk about abortion. Here is Nate Soares at length.

This is Eliezer Yudkowsky’s latest answer on violence in general, one of many over the years trying to make similar points.

Some Who Are Worried About AI Need To Address Their Rhetoric

Almost all and vast majority are different from all.

There are notably rare exceptions, where people are at least flirting with the line, and one of these has some association to this attempt at violence, and a link to another past incident of worry about potential violence. Luckily no one has been hurt.

Speaking the truth as you see it is not a full free pass on this, nor does condemning violence unless it is clear to all that you mean it. There are some characterizations and rhetorical choices that do not explicitly call for violence, but that bring far more heat than light, and carry far more risk than they bring in benefits.

Everyone involved needs to cut that right out.

In particular, I consider the following things that need to be cut right out, and I urge everyone to do so, even if you think that the statements involved are accurate:

1. Calling people ‘murderers’ or ‘evil.’

2. Especially calling them ‘mass murderer’ or ‘child murderer.’

3. Various forms of ‘what did you expect.’

4. Various forms of the labs ‘brought this on themselves.’

5. Saying such violence is the ‘inevitable result’ of the labs ‘not being stopped.’

You can and should get your point across without using such words.

Also, no matter what words you are using, continuously yelling venom at those you disagree with, or telling those people they must be acting in bad faith and to curry lab favor, especially those like Dean Ball and even myself, or anyone and everyone who associates with or praises any of the AI labs at all, does not convince those people, does not convince most observers and does not help your cause.

Note, of course, that mainstream politicians, including prominent members of both parties, very often violate the above five rules on a wide variety of topics that are mostly not about AI. They, also, need to cut that right out, with of course an exception for people who are (e.g.) literally murderers as a matter of law.

Also: There are not zero times and places to say that someone does not believe the things they are saying, including telling that person to their face or in their replies. I will do that sometimes. But the bar for evidence gathered before doing this needs to be very high.

Please, everyone, accept that:

1. Those who say they are worried that AI will kill everyone are, with no exceptions I know about, sincerely worried AI will kill everyone.

   1. Even if you think their arguments and reasons are stupid or motivated.

2. Those who say they are not worried AI will kill everyone are, most of the time, not so worried that AI will kill everyone.

   1. Even if you think their arguments and reasons are stupid or motivated.

3. A bunch of people have, in good faith, concerns and opinions you disagree with.

(Dean Ball there also notes the use of the term ‘traitor.’ That one is… complicated, but yes I have made a deliberate choice to avoid it and encourage others to also do so. It is also a good example of how so many in politics, on all sides, often use such rhetoric.)

My current understanding is the first suspect was a participant of the PauseAI (Global) discord server, posting 34 messages none of which were explicit calls to violence. He was not a formal part of the organization, and participated in no formal campaigns.

We do not know how much of this is the rhetoric being used by PauseAI or others reflecting on this person, versus how much is that this is him being drawn to the server.

PauseAI has indeed unequivocally condemned this attack, which is good, and I believe those involved sincerely oppose violence and find it unacceptable, which is also good.

I think they still need to take this issue and the potential consequences of its choices on rhetoric more seriously than they have so far. Its statement here includes saying that PauseAI ‘is that peaceful path’ and avoiding extreme situations like this is exactly why we need a thriving pause movement. This is an example of the style of talk that risks inflaming the situation further without much to gain.

There is one thing that they are clearly correct about: You are not responsible for the actions of everyone who has posted on your public discord server.

I would add: This also applies to anyone who has repeated your slogans or shares your policy preferences, and it does not even mean you casually contributed at all to this person’s actions. We don’t know.

For the second attack, for now, we know actual nothing about the motivation.

But yes, if you find your rhetoric getting echoed by those who choose violence, that is a wake up call to take a hard look at your messaging strategy and whether you are doing enough to prevent such incidents, and avoid contributing to them.

Similarly, I think this statement from StopAI’s Guido Reichstadter was quite bad.

Speak The Truth Even If Your Voice Trembles

If one warns that some things are over the line or unwise to say, as I did above, one should also note what things you think are importantly not over that line.

Some rhetoric that I think is entirely acceptable and appropriate to use, if and only if you believe the statements you are making, include, as examples:

1. ‘Gambling with humanity’s future.’

2. ‘If [X] then [Y]’ if your conditional probability is very high (e.g. >90%), or of stating your probability estimate of [Y] given [X], including in the form of a p(doom).

3. Calling Mythos or something else a ‘warning shot.’

4. Calling Mythos or other similarly advanced AIs a ‘weapon of mass destruction.’

5. Most of all: To call all the act of creating minds more powerful than humans an existential threat to humanity. It obviously is one.

If you believe that If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, then you should say that if anyone builds it, then everyone dies. Not moral blame. Cause and effect. Note that this is importantly different from ‘anyone who is trying to build it is a mass murderer.’

I could be convinced that I am wrong about one or more of these particular phrases. I am open to argument. But these seem very clear to me, to the point where someone challenging them should be presumed to either be in bad faith or be de facto acting from the assumption that the entire idea that creating new more powerful minds is risky is sufficiently Obvious Nonsense that the arguments are invalid.

Here is a document about how Pause AI views the situation surrounding Mythos. It lays out what they think are the key points and the important big picture narrative. It is a useful document. Do I agree with every interpretation and argument here? I very much do not. Indeed, I could use this document as a jumping off point to explain some key perspective and world model differences I have with Pause AI.

I consider the above an excellent portrayal of their good faith position on these questions, and on first reading I had no objection to any of the rhetoric.

False Accusations And False Attacks Are Also Unacceptable

There has been quite a lot of quite awful rhetoric in the other direction, both in general and in response to this situation. We should also call this out for what it is.

There are those who would use such incidents as opportunities to impose censorship, and tell people that they cannot speak the truth. They equate straightforward descriptions of the situation with dangerous calls for violence, or even attack any and all critics of AI as dangerous.

At least one person called for an end to ‘non-expert activism’ citing potential violence.

We have seen threats, taunting, deliberate misinterpretation, outright invention of statements and other bad faith towards some worried about AI, often including Eliezer Yudkowsky, including accusing people of threatening violence on the theory that of course if you believed we were all going to die you would threaten or use violence, despite the repeated clear statements to the contrary, and the obvious fact that such violence would both be immoral and ineffective.

This happened quite a bit around Eliezer’s op-ed in Time in particular, usually in highly bad faith, and this continues even now, equating calls for government to enforce rules to threats of violence, and there are a number of other past cases with similar sets of facts.

At other times, those in favor of AI accelerationism have engaged in threats of and calls for violence against those who oppose AI, on the theory that AI can cure disease, thus anyone who does anything to delay it is a murderer. The rhetoric is the same all around.

Some Examples Of Attempts To Create Broad Censorship

This is from someone at the White House, trying to equate talking about logical consequences with incitement to violence. This is a call to simply not discuss the fact that if anyone builds superintelligence, we believe that it is probable that everyone will die.

I that kind of attack completely unacceptable even from the public, and especially so from a senior official.

One asks what would happen if we applied even a far more generous version of this standard to many prominent people, including for example Elon Musk, or other people I will decline to name because I don’t need to.

Here is the Platonic form:

Shoshana Weissmann, Sloth Committee Chair: This is insane behavior. And those promoting the idea of AI ending humanity are contributing to this. It has to stop.

As in, you need to stop promoting the idea of AI ending humanity. Never mind how you present it, or whether or not your statement is true. No argument is offered on whether it is true.

This is the generalization of the position:

florence: It would appear that, according to many, one of the following are true:

1. It is a priori impossible for a new technology to be an existential threat.
2. If a new technology is an existential threat, you’re not allowed to say that.

Indeed, one of the arguments people often literally use is, and this is not a strawman:

1. You straightforwardly say sufficiently advanced AI might kill everyone.

2. But if someone did believe that, they might support using violence.

3. Therefore you can’t say that, or we should be able to use violence against you.

While I don’t generally try to equate different actions, I will absolutely equate implicit calls for violence in one direction to other implicit calls for violence or throwing your political enemies in jail for crimes they obviously are not responsible for, indeed for the use of free speech, in the other direction, such as this by spor or Marc Andreessen.

Nate Soares (MIRI): “even talking about the extinction-level threat is incitement towards violence”

No. High stakes don’t transform bad strategies into good ones. Let’s all counter that misapprehension wherever we find it.

michael vassar: This is probably my number one complaint about the current culture. The false dichotomy between ‘not a big deal, ignore’ and ‘crisis, panic, centralize power and remove accountability’.

That’s the same thing or worse, especially in this particular case, where the accusation is essentially ‘you want government to pass and enforce a law, we don’t like that, therefore we want the government to arrest you.’

There is also the version, which I would not equate the same way, where #3 is merely something like ‘so therefore you have a moral responsibility to not say this so plainly.’ For sufficiently mid versions, as I discuss above, one can talk price.

A variation is when someone, often an accelerationist, will say:

1. These people claim to be worried about AI killing everyone.

2. But you keep condemning violence.

3. Therefore, you must not care about these supposed beliefs.

Or here’s the way some of them worded it:

bone: Nice to see all the LessWrong people fold completely on their philosophy. Very good for humanity. They have no beliefs worth dying or killing for. It's nonsense from a guy who never had the balls to stand up for his words once push came to shove.

Yudkowsky stands for nothing.

bone: remember: if they actually believe all this stuff and they are unwilling to be violent, it means they are cowards, that they refuse to measure up to their own words, that they will not do what they believe needs to be done to save mankind.

they are weak, they believe in nothing

Zy: AI doomers are like “attacking key researchers in the AI race is an ineffective strategy to prevent AI doom which pales in comparison to my strategy of paying them $200 a month to fund capabilities research”

Lewis: Rare Teno L. If you actually think Sam Altman is going to genocide children then it makes sense to try to hurt him. So you need to pick one. It’s either completely insane or it’s totally sensible. Which one is it?

L3 Tweet Engineer (replying to Holly Elmore): If you’re such a good person, and stopping AI is so important, why don’t you go bomb a data center? Why waste your breath tweeting about this stuff and writing grand narratives, go make it happen.

phrygian: You've already talked about how it would be moral to nuke other countries to stop asi. The only logical reasons you have for not engaging in smaller forms of violence to stop ASI is that they aren't as effective. On a fundamental level, your views justify violence of any kind.

Ra: maybe this is just me and explains some things about me, but *personally* i would much rather be seen as a potentially dangerous radical than as a feckless and insincere grifter, especially if i believed the world was ending soon and was personally responsible for stopping that.

Trey Goff: Look do you people not realize how silly you look

“AI is going to literally kill your children and all future humans, but we strongly condemn any violence committed in order to stop that from happening”

Have the courage of your convictions or STFU

The Platonic version of this is the classic: ‘If you believed that, why wouldn’t you do [thing that makes no sense]?’

The trap or plan is clear. Either you support violence, and so you are horrible and must be stopped, or you don’t, in which case you can be ignored. The unworried mind cannot fathom, in remarkably many cases, the idea that one can want to do only moral things, or only effective things, and that the stakes being higher doesn’t change that.

Teortaxes: Uncritical support
this is a bad faith attempt to elicit a desirable mistake
essentially a false flag by proxy of stupidity
I think decels are holding up well btw

Eliezer started a thread to illustrate people using such tactics, from which I pulled the above examples, but there are many more.

João Camargo (replying to a very normal post by Andy Masley): No one believes you actually think this. If you think that Altman and other pivotal AI leaders/researchers will likely bring human extinction, assassinations are clearly justified. "This guy is gonna cause human extinction, but no one must prevent him by force" is not coherent.

Other times, they simply make fun of Eliezer’s hat.

Or they just lie.

taoki: i assume eliezer yudkowsky and his pause ai friends love this?

Oliver Habryka: False, they definitely hate it.

taoki (May 6, 2024): also, i LIE like ALL THE TIME. JUST FOR FUN.

Or they flat out assert ‘oh you people totally believe in violence and all the statements otherwise are just PR.’

Another tactic of those trying to shut down mention of the truth of our situation is to attack both any attempt to put a probability on existential risk, and also anyone who (in a way I disagree with, but view as reasonable) treats existential risk as high likely if we build superintelligence soon on known principles, including dismissing any approach that takes any of it seriously as not serious, or that it is ‘using probability as a weapon’ to point out that the probability of everyone dying if we stay the current course is uncomfortably and unacceptably high.

I close this section by turning it over to Tenobrus:

Tenobrus: "stochastic terrorism" is, quite frankly, complete fucking bullshit. it's a unfalsifiable term used to try to tie your political opponents speech to actions that have fucking nothing to do with them, attempting to weaponize tragedy and mental illness for debate points. it was bullshit when AOC tried to accuse the republicans of "stochastic terrorism" for criticizing her, it was bullshit when the right claimed the left was committing "stochastic terrorism" for engaging in anti-ICE protests, and it remains bullshit now when you assign responsibility for attacks against sam altman to AI safety advocates and journalists who wrote negative things about him.

fuck your garbage rhetorical device! that's not how responsibility or blame works! you do not get to suppress any and all speech you disagree with and can find a way to vaguely deem "dangerous"!

Kitten: "who will rid me of this troublesome priest"

Tenobrus: yeah that's an entirely different thing. that's not "stochastic terrorism" dawg that's just straightforward incitement of violence.

Grant us the wisdom to know the difference.

The Most Irresponsible Reaction Was From The Press

I really do not understand how you can be this stupid. I realize that yes, you could still get this information if you wanted it, but my lord this is nuts from the SF Standard.

The San Francisco Standard: Just in: Sam Altman’s home appears to have been the target of a second attack Sunday morning, a mere two days after a 20-year-old man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at the property: Jonah Owen Lamb.

spor: printed his home address and even added a picture of the exterior, for good measure... in an article about how his home is being targeted by psychos that want to kill him !!!

this reporter, their editor, and the entire Standard should be ashamed of this

Mckay Wrigley: this is absolutely disgusting and anyone involved in the publishing of this has absolutely zero morals.

Sam Altman Reacts

Sam Altman has my deepest sympathies in all of this. This must be terrifying. No one should have a Molotov Cocktail thrown at their house, let alone face two attacks in a week. I hope he is doing as well as one can when faced with something like this, and that he is staying safe.

I have no idea how I would respond to such a thing if it happened to me.

Sam Altman’s public reaction was to post this statement.

I very much appreciate that Sam Altman has explicitly said that he regrets the word choice in the passage below. ‘Tough day’ is absolutely a valid excuse here, and most of the statement is better than one can reasonably expect in such circumstances given Altman’s other public statements on all things AI.

But I do need to note that this importantly missed the mark and the unfortunate implication requires pushback.

Sam Altman (CEO OpenAI): Words have power too. There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me. I brushed it aside.

Now I am awake in the middle of the night and pissed, and thinking that I have underestimated the power of words and narratives. This seems like as good of a time as any to address a few things.

The article in question, presumably the piece in The New Yorker I discussed at length last week, was an extremely long, detailed and as far as I could tell fair and accurate retelling of the facts and history around Sam Altman and OpenAI. To the extent it was incindiacy, the facts are incendiary.

Those who are not Sam Altman do not get the same grace, when they say things like this in reference to that article:

Kelly Sims: It turns out when you string a bunch of quarter-truths together exclusively from someone’s bitter competitors it has consequences.

Given what we know about who attacked Altman, and various details, I find it unlikely that the timing of these two events was meaningful for the first attack. My guess is the trigger to someone already ready to blow was anxiety around Mythos, but even if it that article was the triggering event, it was not an example of irresponsible rhetoric.

For the second attack, unfortunately, we should worry that it was triggered in large part by coverage of the first attack, including publishing details about Altman’s home.

Sam Altman Reflects

The rest of the post is personal reflections and predictions about AI overall, so I’m going to respond to it the way I would any other week.

Sam Altman (CEO OpenAI): [AI] will not all go well. The fear and anxiety about AI is justified; we are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever. We have to get safety right, which is not just about aligning a model—we urgently need a society-wide response to be resilient to new threats. This includes things like new policy to help navigate through a difficult economic transition in order to get to a much better future.

AI has to be democratized. … I do not think it is right that a few AI labs would make the most consequential decisions about the shape of our future.

Adaptability is critical. We are all learning about something new very quickly; some of our beliefs will be right and some will be wrong, and sometimes we will need to change our mind quickly as the technology develops and society evolves. No one understands the impacts of superintelligence yet, but they will be immense.

Altman is essentially agreeing with his most severe critics, that he should not be allowed to develop and deploy superintelligence on its own. He tries to have it both ways, where he says things like this and also tries to avoid any form of meaningful democratic control when time comes to pass laws or regulations.

His call for adaptability is closely related to the idea of building the ability to control development and deployment of AI, and having the ability to pause in various ways, should we find that to be necessary.

His disagreement is that he thinks we collectively should want him to proceed. Which might or might not be either the decision we make, or a wise decision, or a fatal one.

He mentions that it ‘will not all go well’ but this framing rejects by omission the idea that there is existential risk in the room, and it might go badly in ways where we cannot recover. To me, that makes this cheap talk and an irresponsible statement.

The second section is personal reflections.

He believes OpenAI is delivering on their mission. I would say that it is not, as their mission was not to create AGI. The mission was to ensure AGI goes safety, and OpenAI is not doing that. Nor is Anthropic or anyone else, for the most part, so this is not only about OpenAI.

He calls himself conflict-averse, which seems difficult to believe, although if it is locally true to the point of telling people whatever they want to hear then this could perhaps explain a lot. I was happy to hear him admit he handled the situation with the previous board, in particular, badly in a way that led to a huge mess, which is as much admission as we were ever going to get.

His third section is broad thoughts.

​My personal takeaway from the last several years, and take on why there has been so much Shakespearean drama between the companies in our field, comes down to this: “Once you see AGI you can’t unsee it.” It has a real “ring of power” dynamic to it, and makes people do crazy things. I don’t mean that AGI is the ring itself, but instead the totalizing philosophy of “being the one to control AGI”.

We can all agree that we do not want any one person to be in control of superintelligence (ASI/AGI), or any small group to have such control. The obvious response to that is ‘democracy’ and to share and diffuse ASI, which is where he comes down here. But that too has its fatal problems, at least in its default form.

If you give everyone access to superintelligence, even if we solve all our technical and alignment problems, and find a way to implement this democratic process, then everyone is owned by their own superintelligence, in fully unleashed form, lest they fall behind and lose out, or is convinced of this by the superintelligence, and we quickly become irrelevant. Humanity is disempowered, and likely soon dead.

Thus if you indeed want to do better you have to do Secret Third Thing, at least to some extent. And we don’t know what the Secret Third Thing is, yet we push ahead.

He concludes like this:

Sam Altman (CEO OpenAI): A lot of the criticism of our industry comes from sincere concern about the incredibly high stakes of this technology. This is quite valid, and we welcome good-faith criticism and debate. I empathize with anti-technology sentiments and clearly technology isn’t always good for everyone. But overall, I believe technological progress can make the future unbelievably good, for your family and mine.

While we have that debate, we should de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics and try to have fewer explosions in fewer homes, figuratively and literally.

It is easy to agree with that, and certainly we want fewer explosions. But it is easy for calls to ‘de-escalate’ to effectively become calls to disregard the downside risks that matter, or to not tackle seriously with the coming technical difficulties, dilemmas and value clashes, or to shut down criticism and calls to action of all kinds.

Violence Is Never The Answer

Once again: I condemn these attacks, and any and all such violence against anyone, in the strongest possible terms. I do this both because it is immoral, and also because it is illegal, and also because it wouldn’t work. Nothing hurts your cause more.

My sympathies go out to Sam Altman at this time, and I hope he comes through okay.

Most people worried about AI killing everyone have handled this situation well, both before and after it happened, and not only take strong stances against violence but also use appropriate language, at a standard vastly higher than that of any of:

1. Those who are worried about those worried about AI killing everyone.

2. Those who are worried about mundane AI concerns like data centers or job loss.

3. Politicians and ordinary citizens of both major American political parties, and the media, on a wide variety of issues.

I call upon all three of those groups of people to do way better across the board. Over a several year timeline, I predict that most concern about AI-concern-related violence will have nothing to do with concerns about existential risk.

But there are a small number of those worried about AI existential risks who have gone over where I see the line, as discussed above, and I urge those people to cut it right out. I have laid out my concerns on that above. We should point out what actions have what consequences, and urge that we choose better actions with better consequences, without having to call anyone murderers or evil.

Eliezer has an extensive response on the question of violence on Twitter, Only Law Can Prevent Extinction, that echoes points he has made many times, in two posts.

I also condemn those who would use who use this situation as an opportunity to call for censorship, to misrepresent people’s statements and viewpoints, and generally to blame and discredit people for the crime of pointing out that the world is rapidly entering existential danger. That, too is completely unacceptable, especially when it rises to its own incitements to violence, which happens remarkably often if you hold them to the standards they themselves assert.