Defend the Atlanta Forest/Stop Cop City

A lot of thoughts on the recent two attacks on Sam Altman, most obviously it’s terrible and I’m completely against any extra judicial violence for any cause. My main worry here is just that this needs to stop. I think it’s both true that people with extreme views need to be allowed to say them directly, but also that this needs to come with a strong expectation to not talk about individuals in ways that incite violence, as if those individuals are demons who the problem is emanating from. I both want to make sure people with high odds of doom from AI are completely free to say so without being read as incitement, but would also like to see more policing of language around how specific people are talked about. Talking about individuals making bad decisions or showing bad character is totally within bounds, but imo talking about individuals having blood on their hands or implying they’re single-handedly destroying civilization isn’t. This seems similar to the animal welfare movement (which I’m a part of) and the pro-life movement (which I’m not). I want people in both to be allowed to say “I think billions of animals are being tortured” or “I think millions of children are being killed.” Both could be read as very broadly incitement, but imo they both need to be allowed to be said for actual meaningful discourse to happen between people who deeply disagree. Socially punishing them would steamroll the basic norms we have set up to allow for pluralism. But both communities also have a strong responsibility to not say things like “This specific head of a meat company is torturing millions of animals, they have blood on their hands” or “This specific doctor or politician is a murderer who’s single-handedly causing these deaths.” It’s obvious that this language puts specific people in danger and needs to be strictly policed and punished by each movement. I think people with higher odds of doom than me absolutely need to be able to say so directly. I’ve been worried seeing a few posts implying that merely saying you have high odds of doom is a kind of incitement. I agree this is a dangerous idea you need to be careful with, but under this way of thinking animal welfare and pro life views could also easily be called incitement. A basic fact of a pluralistic large country is that a sizable number of people are always going to believe you’re involved in something profoundly evil. I’ve been happy with how a lot of thought leaders in AI safety have spoken, but I do think there’s a disturbing growing tendency in popular discourse about the labs where individual lab leaders are framed as basically the sole cause of dangerous AI progress. Sam’s become the avatar of the AI industry in some places that goes waaay beyond the influence he has. This always reads to me as similar to the bad cases of individuals being targeted by animal welfare or pro life people. I haven’t policed this much myself because I don’t actually spend much time reading material from very high p(doom) people on AI risk specifically, and when I do it’s people I like reading or talking to who don’t pull these moves. But the recent attacks have convinced me I need to look out for this way more and I’d encourage others to as well. I think a pretty basic rule for me as someone who’s pro-choice is just asking whether I’d worry if similar language were being used to describe pro-choice politicians. If I would, that’s a clear sign that the language is crossing a line that goes beyond the two of us having deep moral or factual disagreements. Finally, I wanna be clear that this last point is not an attempt to punt responsibility for AI safety people like me to be careful with language, but I think a lot of people haven’t thought enough about how terrible it is that political violence seems to be more normalized. Seeing the way Luigi and the Kirk shooting were talked about was a big wake up call for me. The culture more broadly is moving in a very bad direction here and it could use more people willing to look uncool.