> It's not up to Dario to try to make absolute statements about the future.

Thats insane to say, given that he's literally acting in the public sphere as the mouth of Sauron for how AI will grow so effective as to destroy almost everyone's jobs and AGI will take over our society and kill us all.

How about the present and his personal beliefs?

"I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries."

This reads like his objection is not on "autocratic", but on "adversaries". Autocratic friends & family are cool with him. A clear wink to a certain administration with autocratic tendencies.

This doesn’t read to me like it was personally written by one person. It’s not Dario we should read this as being written by, it’s Anthropic as an entity.

He does it all the time.

And yet he’s quite happy to make just that when it’s meant to drum you up his own product for investors

He’s one of the most influential people when it comes to what future we’ll have. Yes, it’s up to him.

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> Do you want a tech company to say “the military can never use our stuff for autonomous systems forever, the end”?

Yes. Absolutely.

I'd prefer companies not help the military develop the most powerful weapons possible given we're in the age of WMDs, have already had two devastating world wars and a nuclear arms race that puts humanity under permanent risk.

Yes, I absolutely don’t want tech companies to use the money I pay them to harm people. How is that remotely controversial?

But then a person can be blamed for the outcome. We can't have that!

And that's the end of democracy. One of the safe guards of democracy is a military that is trained to not turn against the citizens. Once a government has fully autonomous weapons its game over. They can point those weapons at the populous at the flip of the switch.

Right - for the same reasons a Waymo is safer than a human-driven car, an autonomous fighter drone will ultimately be deadlier than a human-flown fighter jet. I would like to forestall that day as long as possible but saying "no autonomous weapons ever" isn't very realistic right now.

If they had access to them in Ukraine, both sides would already be using them I expect. Right now jamming of drones is a huge obstacle. One way it's dealt with is to run literal wired drones with massive spools of cable strung out behind them. A fully autonomous drone would be a significant advantage in this environment.

I'm not making a values judgment here, just saying that they will absolutely be used in war as soon as it's feasible to do so. The only exception I could see is if the world managed to come together and sign a treaty explicitly banning the use of autonomous weapons, but it's hard for me to see that happening in the near future.

Edit: come to think of it, you could argue a landmine is a fully autonomous weapon already.

It's only Anthropic with their current models saying no. Fully autonomous weapons have been created, deployed, and have been operational for a long time already. The only holdout I've ever heard of is for the weapons that target humans.

Honestly, even landmines could easily be considered fully autonomous weapons and they don't care if you're human or not.

Considering he slept naked with his grandniece (he was in his 70s, she was 17), I'd say there are a lot of them in the corporate world. Though probably more in politics.

If we are talking about what's best for humanity in the long run.. thinking about human values in general, what makes American citizens uniquely deserving of privacy rights, in ways that citizens of other countries are not?

Snowden revealed that every single call on Bahamas were being monitored by NSA [1]. That was in 2013. How would this be any worse if it were US citizens instead?

(Note, I myself am not an US citizen)

Anyway, regardless of that, the established practice is for the five eyes countries to spy on each other and share their results. This means that the UK can spy on US citizens, the US can spy on UK citizens, and through intelligence sharing they effectively spy on their own citizens. That's what supporting "foreign surveillance" will buy you. That was also revealed in 2013 by Snowden [2]

[1] https://theintercept.com/2014/05/19/data-pirates-caribbean-n...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/02/nsa-files-spyi...

do you really need to be told there is a difference in 'magnitude of importance' between the decision to send out an office memo and the decision to strike a building with ordinance?

a lot of white collar jobs see no decision more important than a few hours of revenue. that's the difference: you can afford to fuck up in that environment.

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Shh! there's a lot of money riding on this bet, ahem.