The core of my morality around ASI risk is very simple
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The core of my morality is very simple.
If one of my friends of many years eventually became a billionaire building ASI and risking human extinction, and they had deranged beliefs that this would get us a utopia, and slitting their throat with a razor was the only way to save my life, then ofcourse I kill my (ex-)friend and save my life.
(In practice I don't think any single asassination is likely to solve ASI risk. In practice, I also don't think xrisk is certain, we are facing more like a russian roulette of atleast 10% xrisk by 2030, atleast another 5% more xrisk by 2035, and all this is a martingale process where the numbers go up and down with every passing year. All this makes reality more complicated than this thought experiment.)
If one of my friends of many years eventually became a billionaire building ASI, and they had deranged beliefs that this would get us a utopia, then ofcourse I stop having a close friendship with them, and ofcourse I try to get them ostracised from any close friend group (I don't do group interactions much in general, but let's say I did).
If one of my friends of many years went to work at an AI company building ASI, and they bought the AI company koolaid, I obviously stop trusting their judgement on basically everything to do with ASI and also on 10 other topics.
I can look my friends in the eye and tell them these basic facts. It's not some big secret.
I have long track record over many years of considering violence as a way to solve problems. This is in practice, not just in theory.
For privacy reasons, not listing examples here.
I am not that squeamish watching actual rape or murder videos.
So far, I have been able to solve or atleast placate all the major problems in my life without actual violence. I definitely seem to impliticly operate on some sort of harm minimisation principle, if I look at my past actions. It is just that harm minimisation when solving a problem as big as ASI risk still means harming atleast some people.
For anyone else reading this: I am not saying your friends should have the same moral weight as strangers. I am saying that if you are willing to kill even your friends over this, then ofcourse you'd be willing to do that to people you barely know.
Everything else is complexity around my identity (for instance my identity as a pro-democracy pro-capitalist), or parts of people I like (I like high openness-to-experience technical people), or complexity around social consequences (my reputation, long-term consequences, ingroup coordination and trust, coordination against shared outgroup, what behaviour I will inspire of others) or complexity around managing day-to-day emotions (should I be activated or numb or curious? its a marathon not a sprint). All this complexity shouldn't blind me to the fact that the core is very simple.
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