Nathaniel Whittemore

It would be a grave mistake in my estimation to view everything that is happening in the isolation of the AI industry itself.

Instead, I believe that AI has become the recipient of a much bigger trend.

That trend is a pipeline from real economic pain to even greater perceived inequality to political violence.

The TLDR is that the discourse on X about pause AI has very little to do with the larger meta issues and context in which this violence is happening.

It is certainly the case that AI X-risk creates something of a perfect boogeyman.

It is by definition existential.

It is also unfalsifiable.

in that it is an argument that is completely about the future and that involves extrapolating a trend line rather than reviewing disprovable evidence that exists right now.

Certainly, the way the AI industry has chosen to communicate feeds into a general sense of the hugeness of the issue.

But in no way is this type of political violence isolated, and frankly, for anyone who's been paying attention,

A lot of it is very reminiscent of the way that the discourse has evolved over the last couple years.

Paula on X wrote, I didn't realize how bad it was until I saw this comment section on Instagram.

She shared a set of comments from a story about the attack, each of which had between hundreds and thousands of likes, and which featured such gems as, Please nobody, throw another Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house which is pictured here that would be easy to find since you now know which neighborhood it's in.

703 likes.

Where can we support their bail fund?

3,357 likes.

I hope that Molotov is okay, 4,631 likes.

Now one might be tempted to write that off as the rambling of the degenerate side of the internet, or perhaps even Russian bot farms trying to sow discord.

And sure, maybe that's a part of it.

But it is not the first time that we've seen something like this.