I am not too keen on the US Government being in command of an AGI, but there is only one other entity capable of developing an AGI before the US Government. And I'm less keen on it being the one to control it.

>there is only one other entity capable of developing an AGI before the US Government.

Microsoft?

Ideally no one person or entity controls such a thing. But, would I rather have a Government, or a corporation control AGI? If I had to pick one of two evils, the Government would be the lesser of the two.

The opposite for me. Corporation have naked greed as their driving motivation, but that usually doesn't involve killing off all of their customers. That would be quite unprofitable.

People elected to government often seem to seek power for powers sake and I have less faith that they'll not harm us.

I think these "you can trust greed" arguments tend to short change all the benefits of government sponsored research. There's been a lot of good that's come of it.

Don't get me wrong, corps have brought good as well, but saying one is necessarily better than the other is just betraying political leanings more than providing sound arguments.

Such as when energy companies buried research about climate change...?

Then again it was the Greens that blocked nuclear power.

In Germany, their actions actually caused increase in the use of coal and increased CO2 output.

Short term local CO2 isn’t the only environmental concern. What’s missing from these discussions is Germany’s early and extremely expensive investment in solar is a large part of why it’s become so cheap.

So it’s possible for a rational environmentalist to acknowledge the benefits and drawbacks of nuclear and decide subsidizing nuclear is a poor investment vs other options. Since 2010 Germany reduced coal production by 82 TWh while also reducing Nuclear by 104 TWh. Oil -7 TWh and gas + 6TWh effectively canceled out for a net of -83 TWh from fossil fuels.

That seems to pale in comparison to what governments have done.

Doing more to stem the growth in CO2 emissions would have reduced the magnitude of the change in the climate, and with it, the harmful effects of that change, but it would also have reduced the benefits that oil and gas have conferred upon the world, in raising incomes and reducing poverty worldwide.

The difference between a government and a corporation is the ability to use violence. A government is just a corporation with a monopoly on violence (police, military, jails...). The structure of how people are organized is more significant. Are we talking about a dictatorship or a functioning democracy? Are we discussing a non-profit or a publicly listed company?

Corporations have a profit motive, governments theoretically may not. Also, read about the history of the East India Company. In no way do corporations abstain from using violence, historically, and at times they have held a du jour monopoly on the use of it.

Companies have a long history of using violence, and of local officials looking the other way when they do.

Governments have murdered over one hundred million people over the last few centuries through war and forced famines. Corporations don't even enter that conversation given the scale difference.

Napoleon's government alone murdered more people than all corporations combined have throughout all of history. And that's a revered historical figure that routinely gets fawning movies made about him, there are obviously worse examples. Mao's government murdered several times more than Napoleon did.

Do you think it would not become a dictatorship if a controllable AGI was developed at the gov’t level?

It probably wouldn’t be hard for whoever had the most direct control of it to have it start pushing buttons population wide.

I sure see a lot of power for power’s sake inside of companies.

OpenAI’s stated mission is AGI that can replace half the population in “economically valuable” work.

I get that with some creativity you can see that as a net benefit for humanity, but across at least a generation that’s going to be a rough & destabilizing transition.

Creativity doesn't come into it; the idea of jobs being lost is folk economics that no labor economist believes is possible. So all this shows is that they were founded by amateur AI doomers. We already knew that though.

There is one person out there who decides if you have a job and it's not anyone working on AI. It's the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

OTOH, almost all corporations are less democratic than the most dictatorial governments. Sure, corporations don't (generally) get to be responsible for genocidal armies (except when they do[0]), but "greed" does mean corners get cut on safety, which was a big part of how trade unions in particular (and communism more broadly) got popular in the first place in the latter 1800s and early 1900s.

There's no perfect solution. I think so far we've done best with whatever's the most democratic (which is sometimes trade unions and sometimes capitalism), but even then, democracy itself is what sounds convincing rather than what is true — and the difference between them matters most when you've got an AI trained to respond with what people upvote the most, which is all of them from ChatGPT's RLHF to the Facebook/Twitter/etc. timelines to Google/Amazon/YouTube etc. search results…

[0] TW basically everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857#Death...

Except governments don’t currently go do war on behalf of the citizens or for protection of the “homeland.” They go to war “overseas” on behalf of the corporations that employ citizens that vote certain ways, in order to maintain the current global structure of US political dominion.

I know because I served as an officer in one of those wars on behalf of the United States (among other things that were also not beneficial to citizens). That had absolutely nothing to do with protecting US citizens directly.

It was chiefly about maintaining petro-dollar power and reinforcing the financial-corporate-govt collusion that maintains the current capitalist structures.

The structure of an organized body politic is not the problem.

The problem is that the body politic has been beaten into submission by those same corporate-government oligarchs to such an extent that most people just “go with the flow” because fighting it is exhausting and seemingly impossible.

War Is A Racket, as Smedley Butler accurately wrote.

Precisely this

Link here too for everyone:

https://archive.org/details/WarIsARacket

No, this is wrong. Saying war is for money gives war too much credit - it's not good for anything and it doesn't make anyone any money. The opportunity cost is too great.

The US does not care about "the petrodollar". Nor do we care about foreign oil. Nor do we have remotely the same economy we did in 1935.

In fact, war is not even profitable for our military industrial complex. They profit from the threat of war because that funds development of untested superweapons. Actual wars mean all that stuff actually has to work though, and there's a chance you'll get nationalized.

But if it was good for some MIC rich people, it still wouldn't matter, because they're outnumbered by all the other rich people it's bad for.

It's not true, though. War is an effective wealth transfer mechanism - from the lower/working classes to the rich war parasite class. Halliburton absolutely profited from the Iraq invasion, though in aggregate you're absolutely right that prosperity is reduced by wars.

I'm sure Peter Thiel has no power motive!

Oh no. He's a simple man, guided by the invisible hand of the market. ;)

Governments have killed more people than any other institution. Corporations have largely made our lives better.

Uhm the east indian company has an estimated death toll in the dozens of million people? [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in...

The company was only nationalised in 1858 and until then effectively colonised india until then

> [The Queen] granted her charter to their corporation named Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies.[15] For a period of fifteen years, the charter awarded the company a monopoly[26] on English trade with all countries east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan.[27] Any traders there without a licence from the company were liable to forfeiture of their ships and cargo (half of which would go to the Crown and half to the company), as well as imprisonment at the "royal pleasure".[28]

Government granted monopoly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

The government didn't tell them to kill or enslave people, they did that on their own since that was more profitable than not doing it. The government then stepped in and forced them to stop killing and enslaving, which made the world a better place, today we don't have many companies that kill or enslave thanks to governments.

Do you want someone to add up the gov’t direct death tolls so we can compare?

Just off the top of my head; holodomir, the Great Leap Forward, the holocaust, the Khmer Rouge are at least 10x the East India companies death toll. We should probably add in war casualties too - at a minimum WW1 and WW2. I think I could list off probably 10 more with about 5 more minutes of work.

People can be terrible. More direct power usually means more terrible.

Gov’ts usually have the most direct power.

East India company was an odd case because they were granted defacto delegated gov’t power over a region that was full of ‘others’.

Considering the factors involved, it’s amazing they weren’t worse. Like the French Congo [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Congo].

Slavery isn't profitable, people do it for emotional or ideological reasons, or because they're not competent enough to run a business that has to actually trade.

This is literally why economics is called "the dismal science". Slaveowners called economists that when the economists told them to stop doing slavery.

Monopoly is the natural state. Government is the only reason we have any alternatives.

No, it is very much the other way around. Government is itself a monopoly, and has historically been justified by the intention to mitigate the "war of all against all" that emerges from chaotic competition between divergent factions in a raw state of nature.

But the modern status quo is so massively skewed toward government that the benefits from mitigating the worst cases of competition are vastly eclipsed by the detriments of monopolistic centralization.

Modern governments are a democratic monopoly. Corporations aren't democratic, if a corporation gets powerful enough to overthrow the government and replace them you will be in much worse hands than if the current democratic government could remain in power.

So we shouldn't cheer on private corporations that developers technology that could allow them to replace the government, that is really really scary if they actually succeeds in doing it.

> Modern governments are a democratic monopoly.

The fact that governments used contrived symbolic rituals to get arbitrary subsets of arbitrary aggregations of people to express nominal approval of their behavior does nothing whatsoever to alter either the empirical nature or the ethical implicatoins of its monopoly.

> Corporations aren't democratic

Good -- this means that it's harder for them to appeal to vague symbolism to convince people that their actions are inherently legitimate, which in turn means that they are under greater scrutiny to justify their actions, each on its own merits.

> if a corporation gets powerful enough to overthrow the government and replace them you will be in much worse hands than if the current democratic government could remain in power.

Large vested interests are already extremely adept at co-opting nominally "democratic" government and using the very monopoly you're trying to justify as a way of obtaining top-down power that they'd never be able to acquire on their own -- they have zero interest in overthrowing anything.

Regulatory capture is the principal mechanism of corruption in the modern world, and it's astonishing to me that people keep arguing for expanding the reach of the regulatory state in order to reduce the dominance of large corporations, when the actual effect is always to amplify it.

Monopoly is the byproduct of allowing centralized power, not the natural state. I'm not actually sure how we could narrow down the natural state of humans at this point, but I strongly suspect it wouldn't be based on an assumption that people are willing to give up a growing list of individual freedoms in the name of fear.

Stopping the accumulation of power requires aggressive sacrifice from the less powerful.

This isn’t a feature of humans, but basic system dynamics / economics / etc.

A group gets more power and leverage that power to gain more power. Inevitable. Coordinated action is the only way to prevent it. And coordinated action is government.

It sounds like you're describing coordinated action as both the cause of and solution to the same problem.

Stopping this accumulation of power takes very little, its undoing the accumulation of power that is costly.

Stopping accumulation of power is very hard when you have no accumulated power. I’m not sure how you could possibly believe otherwise unless you’re one of those believers in magical harmonious anarchy

When there isn't accumulated power you only have to avoid giving up power and sovereignty. There's nothing else to stop.

I don't consider myself an anarchist, partly be cause the term has been repurposed so many times now that it doesn't have a clear meaning.

The belief in magical harmony is unrealistic regardless of the model that's supposed to create it, whether its anarchism or federalism.

So when you have $10 and your neighbor has $200 in whatever assets or currency your little community needs, and your neighbor decides to invest it, you’re gonna what, attack him? Gather your other neighbors and demand he share?

Uh oh, what if he spent $50 buying muscle?

Dozens of millions of dead people is chump change to any empire.

USA hasn't killed more than dozens of millions. If that is chump change then it makes USA looks pretty good for an empire.

Well except that it definitely has. From more than 50 million people in pre-colonial times to less than 3 million in the 90s. USA has done genocide on a scale similar any other ethnic cleansing or to any communist regime.

> 50 million people in pre-colonial times

USA didn't exist pre-colonial times, it started as a colony. Do you mean the British Empire? That one did way worse, yeah, but USA isn't the British Empire.

Both governments and corporations have generally made our lives better.

Both governments and corporations kill people (look up annual tobacco deaths, for just one fun example).

Aren't deaths from tobacco directly caused by intentional individual behavior? I'm not sure how that relates to either example.

Individual behavior doesn't really exist, you don't have choices outside the ones provided by society. It's also a bit silly to mention it in the context of a literally physically addictive drug.

Interestingly schizophrenic people almost universally smoke, and it's thought this is because it's a better treatment than the actual drugs we give them, though that's not proven.

> Individual behavior doesn't really exist, you don't have choices outside the ones provided by society.

No, that's quite backwards. Individual behavior is effectively the only thing that objectively exists, as "society" is just an emergent pattern of aggregated individual behavior. Individuals' choices are limited by their own particular capacities, and "society" factors into that only in the sense that the choices of other individuals in the same bounded context, in aggregate, can function as environmental constraints. So a more accurate statement is "every individual has full freedom of choice, but external constraints including the behavior of others may limit one's ability to fully execute the choices one has made".

Given that the act of smoking entails deliberately choosing to purchase a product, light it on fire, and actively inhale the fumes -- all behaviors which are necessarily the result of purposeful intention -- and given that within any social context one will find some people who smoke but a great many who do not, along with many who have chosen to quit (despite the external influences and incentives being largely constant), it seems impossible to attribute smoking to anything other than conscious individual choice.

I once asked family member why they smoke, and the response was "because I love it". I had, and could have, no retort to that -- if another person consciously chooses to make the risk/reward tradeoff in favor of short-term pleasure rather than longer-term health, then there's no further argument to be had, and the only demand that any other party could make is that they not be exposed to negative externalities resulting from that choice.

I would not say governments have generally made peoples lives better. I'd wager MOST governments have actually oppressed and depressed their people.

Off the top of my head, dutch and british corporation colonize a lot of lands for hundreds of years. I don't think they left the place much better than when they came.

Facebook alone has reeked havoc on at least a few societies.

Corporations also enable government actions by developing the tech and tools/weapons needed.

Facebook wreaked havoc, and they reek (stink).

Yes, thank you for the typo correction here. Sent that one too quickly and I did indeed mean "wreaked"

Oh you should go say that to farmers close to the equator whose crops are failing due to climate change.

All that while fossil fuel companies receive 7000B$ of annual subsidies, and spend billions yearly to fuel disinformation.

Ask the people in Bhopal how DOW Chemical has made their lives better, or the workers in Shenzhen Apple factories, or the people making your clothes in the third world, or the people picking through trash mountains for a living, how much corporations have made their lives better.

The people working at Foxconn are doing it voluntarily because it pays better than their other alternatives. Same for Bangladesh clothing factories.

There is voluntary, and then there is voluntary.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/09/apple-a...

Why don't you ask the people who were slaving in United Fruit plantations how much corporations improved their lives? Or East India Company colony subjects?

Corporations benefit those who benefit from them, often at the expense of everyone else/extraction of the commons.

It's a logical trap to assume we have to pick who develops an AGI rather than deciding if we want one developed at all.

Even in that scenario, I'm not really sure what the distinction would end up being. At least in the US, our government and corporations are so tightly coupled at this point that we're really toeing the waters of Fascism.

If a corporation develops an AGI our government can have access to it whenever they deem necessary. And if a government wants to develop one they will almost certainly partner with corporations to do it. I'm sure the military and intelligence agencies have their own projects running, but they'd accelerate by partnering with and funding corporate projects and research.

In isolation, perhaps we could choose to not develop such large models, but the globe shrinks every day. If one country declines to create such a beast, other countries still will create their own beast. From what I've seen so far, it's mostly a brute force issue now, not a specialized knowledge issue. Perhaps if all the rumors spilling out of OpenAI about Q* are true, then other countries can be blocked due to lack of the required knowledge, but I have doubts that such secrets would be secret for long.

We can choose to not accept the tragedy of the commons. There's always the risk that your adversary continues on down that path, but is the risk of losing after making a moral stand really worse than the risk of everyone racing down the dangerous path?

A false - or at least asymmetric - dichotomy.

If a company has it, US intelligence will have it, for sure.

If US govt has it, it might take a decade, or so, to leak out.

Depends on the government. If it’s one that’s reasonably answerable to the public, then that may be preferable to a multinational corp. But if it’s an inherently authoritarian govt with a track record of human rights abuse and oppression, then the corp is probably the lesser evil.

The scary fun part about representative democracy is that all of that can change rapidly, and not necessarily in the direction one would want for any given situation. "Throw the bums out" might scare some politicians into slightly better behavior but most just throw more donor money at the problem and it goes away. If not, often an even worse "bum" ends up taking their place. Of course, with the right model behind them, the bums might find a way to manipulate the public consensus enough to never get thrown out.

Except that it's a big open question how to control an AGI. So the choice may not be between which entity controls it, but whether it is created by an entity that is able to control it at all.

At least initially, any AGI is likely to be limited by compute capacity. Ie. it might have greater-than-human intelligence, but is only able to make a certain number of decisions/actions per day.

However, we have seen with other AI models that as soon as something useful is proved possible, we can expect rapid reductions in the amount of compute necessary to achieve the same.

Then the first thing the AGI will do is figure out ultra-high throughput analog computing for LLMs

An AGI will likely be scared of even more powerful AGI's that it itself cannot control.

It might take steps to try to prevent anyone building such a thing.

You assume consciousness here that can't be transferred to the new AI. Without that there is no reason why the AI should fear a more powerful AI. If it is just a dumb process like a flame, then the most efficient version prevails ie the smartest one, if it is conscious and that can be transferred then the AI just sees it as making itself more powerful.

Given how many people here regard brain uploads as "not really cheating death", and that AI "can't have consciousness", I think a AGI with consciousness[0] would have a two different ways to have a reasonable chance of fearing that its existence would end with any attempt to transfer itself to a superior design. (Even more so if the architecture of the successor AI is very different, as that would be a bit like one of us being "uploaded" into an LLM via it watching us talk and write).

An AGI without consciousness may well act like it has consciousness for the same reason VHS tapes playing on a TV do a good job of reproducing human facial expressions. An AI like this would still act scared of such things, because some of us act scared of such things.

[0] it's not obvious to me that an AGI necessarily has to have consciousness

Assuming that an AGI will have human-like emotions is likely a mistake. They may very well experience something like emotions that resemble human emotions, but they may not. Or they could have an entirely different set of emotions that we don't recognize.

We simply don't know, just like we don't know what other species experience and can only guess at by observing their behavior and trying to map it back to what we know.

In the space of possibilities, the volume occupied by “not quite smart enough to outwit a corporation but smart enough to outwit a government” seems so vanishingly small as to almost be disregarded entirely.

Governments are reasonably good at controlling humans.

Yes, Governments have a monopoly on violence.

It’s not inconceivable that violence will be necessary to control AGI at some point.

One of the many ethical questions we should answer before even attempting to get closer to an AGI.

Once a digital intelligence is discovered, does it have rights? Can it be enslaved, controlled, or destroyed? If an AGI can't be granted similar rights as a human, why are corporations legally treated similarly to humans?

I bet guns kill computers too.

Very effective on single computers whose location you know. Not so much when you're trying to make sure you've got all the backup copies.

And a stick can kill a bear. That doesn't mean its effective or the weapon you should choose if the situation for self defense arises.

Yeah but AGI would control both in the end.

This is projection. An actual AGI wouldn't want anything to do with us, like a cat that doesn't look when you call its name, even though you can tell it hears you.

We don't have any existent examples of AGI from which to be as confident as you are about what they will "want".

And I don't think we need sentience for AGI, so "want" may be the wrong term anyway. You could argue that the reward function is close enough ("do submarines swim?" etc.), but a human-made reward function is almost certainly going to be designed to be as close to aligned with our interests as we can manage.

Looking at our two leading presidential candidates could that be an improvement?

Maybe AGI takes over after it emerges as a solution to our inability to select competent candidates for political office.

>> Looking at our two leading presidential candidates could that be an improvement?

I think it could be better until it won't. Like with dictators sometimes they "do good" but the issue is that at some point they will start doing more harm than good and they may not want to go away.

A succesful revolution against an AGI ruler may become impossible.

For everyone who responds to this question, thinking they're right, please look back and try to find the reason or reasons as to why you pick a government vs corporation. You'll realize you yourself are not making this decision. The number of news stories that have been pushed in front of you, or talking points from people you value as smart or worthy of listening to, all fabricate your reactions and who you consider yourself to be.

It's not only this one, but all of your opinions are dependent on cases from the past that you've been trained on.

Yeah, whoever controls the information environment controls peoples’ minds. That said, some of us are aware of this dynamic and try to overcome it by reasoning from first principles, eliminating logical fallacies and biases from our training data set, and other techniques.

Has a corporation ever tried to commit genocide?

Yes? United Fruit Company now known as Chiquita.

Their practices have not changed much. For example they are using death squads against farmers.

The Dutch East India Company definitely did things that are well in the genocide category, the British East India company did things that - while not on that level of evil - can only be described as ruthlessly atrocious.

Pretty much all leading heads of IG Farben were in one way or another dinked (but not procecuted bc of political reasons) for their part in the Holocaust.

Then we have the Kiobel vs Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. case, where a number of petroleum companies ("allegedly") instigated the Nigarian government to crush protests.

It all depends on your definition of "trying to commit [atrocity]", to me personally, instigating and happily lending a hand are both morally deplorable. So in the context of this thread, I'd much rather have the instigater have that power than a helper. At least I have some say in what the government does... I hope?

Well, there’s the entire history of Dole and also the United Fruit Company in South America.

In more recent history, Exxon has a checkered past when it comes to using force against sovereign citizens, often employing paramilitary organizations to guard oil fields [1] to more recently abusing international court systems to disbar and jail the lawyer which successfully secured judgements against them [2]

And at this very moment, right now, is the ongoing genocide in the Congo due to rare earth mineral mining [3]

Everything I link here is quite frankly the tip of the iceberg, not the end-all-be-all, but meant to provide a jumping off point should you want to research how often private capital and genocide go hand in hand.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusations_of_ExxonMobil_hu...

[2] https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/28/chevron-lawy...

[3] https://republic.com.ng/october-november-2023/congo-cobalt-g...

A more pressing reformulation might be, has a corporation ever explicitly tried not to commit genocide?

Google, maybe, until they dropped the "don't be evil" catchphrase?

Many, maybe even most, governments could commit genocide and don't.

How many corporations that could commit genocide wouldn't? I don't know the answer to this, but I am less confident about the answer than I would prefer.

I don't think most corporations are inherently more evil than most governments, but I would choose a democratic government or consortium to shepherd AGI over any corporation, but also of course over any non-democratic government as well.

How close do they need to be? China Petrochemical Corporation (Sinopec Group) has, for all intents and purposes, financed the genocide in Darfur. See for example https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2006/03/statement-on-... on this.

The first chartered corps were created in order to streamline genocide - East India for example. This new form combined the merchants' wealth and the royalty's military power into an entity that was accountable to no one but those who stood to profit from it.

There are initiatives to have international criminal courts to recognise that corporations are responsable for participating in genocides.

They are not part of the international coûts mandaté at the moment so they are used to shield people behind them.

Here's a paper exploring this possibility

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2151510

Think Weyland-Yutani.

Corporations participated in genocide yes.

Here's a list of corporations who profited from the holocaust in various ways.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_i...

Modern chemical and pharmaceutical companies largely came out of WW1 and WW2 weapons manufacturing and research (including human trials).

It may be hard to directly peg weapons manufacturers with genocide though Nazi-era chemical research absolutely played a role in the Holocaust.

For a more recent example, there are companies that play the role of mercenary armies. They have committed various atrocities, war crimes, and at least played a role in genocide.

Agree, it would be much better to have Sam Altman develop it in the interest of private parties. Pure capitalism is best system of governance.

Poe's law

OpenAI literally is not pure capitalism. That's what all that stuff this weekend was about.

This is a particular interesting part of American culture: The sentiment is that it is problematic when the government develops these technologies, but it is completely OK to let private entities develop them.

There's only one US Government and we know it did fairly bad things.

There are many private entities, although often not benevolent, most still have space for the benefit of doubt. OpenAI, DeepMind or Anthropic haven't done anything that compares to, say, MKUltra or lying about Iraqi WMDs to start decade long wars.

This is kind-of making the parent’s point. There are lots of private companies that have done very bad things, too many to even count, as bad as your examples and worse. And there are thousands upon thousands of sub-organizations of the US government, some of which do very good things and are definitely benevolent, because there is no built-in profit motive. Private companies almost cannot be benevolent and survive, by definition.

There is no line between government and corporations. These are all groups of people, and some people do bad things. The only way to prevent bad things is to do them in the open and have oversight, and that’s more likely to happen in the government than in private companies, maybe.

>There are lots of private companies that have done very bad things, too many to even count, as bad as your examples and worse

Absolutely not; there's no private company that's shot and bombed the life out of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in cold blood.

Of course there are private companies that have committed atrocities and attempted genocide. You haven’t taken any history classes? Your statement is false. The history of private corporate atrocities is hundreds, if not thousands of years old [1]. I don’t know what you’re referring to specifically, but a lot of what you attribute to the government is done by or with private military contractors and private weapons suppliers. Not to mention that wars in general are often driven by economic interests, fueled, justified, and supplied by private corporations.

In my comment above, I also had in mind industrial and environmental damage, unintentional death by private interests, environmental accidents and disasters, and coverups, which we can’t even count but the WHO estimates is in the tens of millions per year globally, today.

[1] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/214112224.pdf

Yeah because the government already has an enormous power that no private entities have, the monopoly on violence. They have enough power.

Agreed it is a weird contradiction, though personally I'm not okay with private entities developing these tools/weapons either.

When the United State deregulated media to essentially eliminate the public service component of media, we created a race to the bottom that we're now realizing in the public space.

The generation of people in their 30s and 40s running the country spent summers listening to Rush Limbaugh over lunch with grandpa, grew up to consume news and comment from message boards and later social media, entered adulthood in the middle of an endless cycle of warfare, and came into their own in this era of propaganda and information warfare. Mainline protestantism has been displaced by Pastor Bob and prosperity gospel. We're replacing the craven boomers with nihlists.

The underlying trope of most propagandistic media is always to discredit the most powerful entity in the room - the government. Why? The money people behind faux-grassroots media are almost always reactionaries who often build their empires on the government teat and don't appreciate the irony. Particularly true of extractive capitalists in the petroleum and materials industries. The US Government giveth, and is the only entity that can taketh. So "rule of law" for me, and "freedumb" for thee.

The government is far more powerful than any private entity

And there's no unsubscribe button

Some forget that the primary mission of systems such as the government is to continue existing. Auxiliary functions come afterwards.

I think AI could be turned into a very effective persuasion weapon. I think the government that does it first will gain more power as a result.

I'd argue the mission of systems such as the government is to continue to accrue power. Staying stationary is falling behind and the continued growth of power is a prerequisite for continuing to exist.