L. Rudolph L

When those conventions are challenged, it collapses almost immediately.

I have watched equivalent dynamics in AI governance.

I have sat in meetings where everyone present knew that a proposed deployment was risky where no one was willing to be the person who stopped it.

The social costs of objection were immediate and certain.

The costs of acquiescence were diffuse and probabilistic.

Every time, acquiescence won.

Dostoevsky understood that civilizations do not collapse because they are attacked by overwhelming external force.

They collapse because their internal coherence decays to the point where even modest pressure can break them.

The revolutionaries in daemons are not impressive people.

They are provincial mediocrities.

They succeed because the society they attack is even more mediocre.

The possession Dostoevsky describes is not primarily a matter of ideas entering minds from outside.

It is a matter of capacities being developed without the corresponding wisdom to use them, of intelligence outrunning conscience, of means being cultivated without attention to ends.

The characters in Demons are not possessed by socialism or liberalism or nihilism as external forces.

End quote.

The AGI Uniparty.

The AI research community is not a collection of separate tribes.

It is a single social organism that happens to be distributed across multiple corporate hosts.

Consider the actual topology.

Researcher A at OpenAI dated Researcher B at Anthropic.