A tinfoil hat conspiracy theory some AI risk deniers are spouting:
Saying that completely normal AI laws and treaties, widely supported by the public, are a conspiracy by a Shadowy Cabal Of Elites Trying To Take Over The World! It would like somebody proposing monitoring ebola outbreaks and some crazies crying “You’re trying to create a world government to spy on me!” It would be like labs working with smallpox saying that any government oversight is “a global surveillance state that will end all biological research” Creating treaties and laws to protect the public is not creating a “global surveillance state” and it’s absurd to call it that. This is paranoid conspiracy theory thinking. --- One source of this conspiracy theory is some AI safety folks saying something along the lines of “if we wanted to stop superintelligent AI forever with a 100% guarantee, we’d need a global totalitarian surveillance state - which is obviously incredibly bad and impossible - so we can’t stop superintelligent AI forever with a 100% guarantee”. And then the AI risk deniers selectively quote and say “tHey SaiD GLobAL TotaLItariAN SurVeiLLancE StaTE!!!” Then it takes on a life of its own online and nobody actually checks the source and context, like so much nonsense on the internet. One source for a subset of them is likely delusions of persecution. Can’t diagnose from afar, but delusions of persecutions are a very common psychiatric condition, and if somebody keeps talking about shadowy cabals of elites trying to create a world government to spy on him, you have to consider the hypothesis. Another source is it’s a debate tactic. It’s hard to fight against a law saying that a corporation should be liable for causing mass casualties. But you can fight against a global surveillance state. Nobody wants a global surveillance state! They’re having their minds killed by political motivations so that they don’t have to stop building the shiny ice-nine that might destroy humanity but is so damn interesting. It’s just classic sensationalism leading to more internet points and this leading to a lot of nonsense.
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