Technology

I can see how increased integration and automation of various systems consolidates power in fewer and fewer hands. For instance, the ability of Columbia administrators to rapidly identify and deactivate student ID cards and lock hundreds of protesters out of their dorms with the flip of a switch was really eye-opening. That would have been far more difficult to do 20 years ago, when I was in school.

But that's not an AGI issue. That's a "everyone's ability to interact with their environment now requires authentication via a central data hub" issue. And its illusionary. Yes, you're electronically locked out of your dorm, but it doesn't take a lot of savvy to pop through a door that's been propped open with a brick by a friend.

There’s also the scenario (suggested by Randall Munroe) that some ambitious oligarch or plutocrat gains control of a system that can manage an army of autonomous killer robots.

I think this fear heavily underweights how much human labor goes into building, maintaining, and repairing autonomous killer robots. The idea that a singular megalomaniac could command an entire complex system - hell, that the commander could even comprehend the system they intended to hijack - presumes a kind of Evil Genius Leader that never seems to show up IRL.

Meanwhile, there's no shortage of bloodthirsty savages running around Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, butchering civilians and blowing up homes with sadistic glee. You don't need a computer to demonstrate inhumanity towards other people. If anything, its our human-ness that makes this kind of senseless violence possible. Only deep ethnic animus gives you the impulse to diligently march around butchering pregnant women and toddlers, in a region that's gripped by famine and caught in a deadly heat wave.

Would that all the killing machines were run by some giant calculator, rather than a motley assortment of sickos and freaks who consider sadism a fringe benefit of the occupation.