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by ben_w 629 days ago
Who aligns the aligners?

Taking Sam Altman's statements about AGI power and timelines seriously (for the sake of discussion), his position as CEO directs more power than all presidents and kings combined. Even if he was widely regarded as being amazing and nobody had a word to say against him right now, the USA has term limits on presidents. Taking him seriously, he should also.

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On this specific claim however, requiring people to step down due to unsubstantiated allegations, without proof, is trivial for his political opponents to take advantage of. And he has many political opponents.

The huge problem with such abuse is that it's simultaneously very common and very difficult to actually prove.

Both halves of the current situation are independently huge problems:

Absent physically surveilling almost every home, I don't know what can even be done about proving who did what.

If you could catch everyone… between the fact that this is a topic that gets people lynched so suggesting anything less than prison time is unlikely to be possible, and the estimates moonmagick gave of how many people do that (x4-x10 the current USA prison population), I think it may be literally beyond most national budgets to be able to imprison that many people and they would try anyway.

1 comments

It's not about proving he did it. This isn't a court of law, it's the court of public opinion. This isn't just deciding whether someone goes to prison, this is deciding who gets to control a big chunk of humanity's future. It's not some random naysayer claiming he did it, it's his own sister. It's very likely he did it, so he should step down. Simple as that.
Make the court of public opinion binding? Sounds like a way to force companies to become subject to democratic votes. Not sure how I feel about that for other reasons.