Comment by Jamesbeam

Unpopular opinion. It depends.

I totally agree with your statement if we are talking about the average citizen starting to throw Molotovs at his house. If you’re afraid AI is taking your job, just do something else. It’s not the end of the world changing careers.

Plenty of work AI won’t be able to do, or allowed to do without a human assisting in some way that secures the human a good income and way of life.

So if this is done by an individual citizen, they need to be hunted down, arrested, and get the full force of the justice system to deter others from doing the same.

On the other hand, right now, Sam Altman is a valid military target for assassination in the US / Iran war.

OpenAI did snatch up the contract from Anthropic at the Pentagon, and their technology is in some capacity used to murder Iranian HVTs (High Value Targets). Altman is therefore technically a legal HVT for the Iranians.

If you say it’s valid and not a war crime for the US to assassinate former political Iranian figures and their families for aiding the new regime and therefore becoming enemy combatants in the eye of the US Military, it’s also valid to assassinate Altman and his family for doing the same to the other war party.

It’s a bit of a Schrödinger situation. He is technically a valid target in a current war, but not for the private citizen.

In both cases, though, I’d advocate that violence is neither a solution to solve the problem that AI might be creating for a lot of people in the future, nor should he be treated as an enemy combatant and his infant child and wife bombed to smitherens.

Diplomacy is key here, just like it would have been the better solution than going to war with Iran.

If you disagree with Altman, send him a letter, show up at his workplace, talk to the man, gather people who think the same of him you do, write letters to your voted representatives, make calls, vote politicians into office that are anti AI and who will go after him and regulate his company to shit. Bureaucrats can make Altman’s life more miserable than a thousand Molotovs ever could.

If you gather enough support, you can reach the same goal, taking his power over your life away, without any violence.

But are you really surprised people chose violence over the democracy toolbox in the US if they get told by the people in charge of their country that violence is indeed a good way to solve problems, that you should have a "warrior" spirit and everything is up for grabs, even sovereign countries like Greenland because you can outviolence any other nation on the planet?

Violence only creates more violence and as long as there is a president who chooses to put oil in the fire and pretends it’s ok to murder US citizens like Alex Pretti, you don’t really need to wonder if the average citizen starts murdering tech CEOs in the near future.

They just follow the Top-down approach to using violence as a tool the leadership lives by example.