Terrorism is bad actually
Every once in a while, someone will snidely suggest that perhaps AI safety people should be bombing datacenters, and the fact that they aren’t is evidence that they’re not serious. This is in good faith approximately 0% of the time; it’s always someone who already doesn’t like AI safety people gleefully clutching their pearls in response to a hypothetical that they have concocted; meanwhile, all AI safety people I know, including people who don’t agree with each other on very much,1 are united in condemning violence.
Aside from the obvious deontological reason, there are two main reasons why terrorism is bad, one philosophical and one pragmatic. The philosophical one is that our civilization is underpinned by the idea that conflicts should be resolved with words instead of violence; the pragmatic one is that it’s empirically ineffective, in large part because people rightly punish it to uphold the philosophical idea.
It is one of the greatest innovations of the modern age that disputes of vast impact are resolved primarily through arguments and ideas, rather than violence. By granting the state a monopoly on violence, we make it possible for disputes to be governed by right rather than might. Even the scrawniest unarmed individual can sue someone who could beat them up, or a large corporation with immense power, or even the United States government itself; and if the truth is on their side, they have a good chance of winning. Although this system has many flaws, the fact that this is possible whatsoever is a huge improvement over the state of nature, and in the process of creating an ever better civilization, we should never forget the progress we’ve made.
A society where truth gets to put its finger on the scale is a fundamentally better society. It allows the powerful to be bound by the same rules as everyone else. It makes trade and innovation possible, because if you have good ideas and invent useful things you can get rich, and people can’t simply beat you up to steal your inventions. Societies where stealing and extorting wealth through physical might incentivize stealing and extorting, instead of creating more wealth through innovation.
It enables the peaceful transition of power that is an essential foundation of democracy. Leaders can be chosen through popular elections rather than military coups. They no longer need to fear being executed or jailed if their political enemies seize power, and so they have less incentive to stay in power at all costs. Journalists can cover unsavory facts about the reigning government without paying the ultimate price.
Everyone thinks their cause is the most important one. Many throughout history have believed they were fighting against the forces of evil to save the country or the world; some correctly so, others not. But if all of them resorted to violence, and society failed to restrain them, then this social contract would collapse and everyone would be worse off.
Everyone generally agrees this system is good, so society has developed many mechanisms for punishing defection; if it didn’t, then defectors would be able to benefit at the cost of everyone else, so everyone would defect, so the social contract would collapse.
Most obviously, defecting and breaking the law means you will be put in jail. But for some people, jail is just a room, and so society has additional mechanisms to deter them as well. People who previously were sympathetic now shift against you, because they care about the social contract. The assassinated become martyrs. The silenced are listened to more intently. Empirically, committing terrorism is not good for your cause.
Things become more complicated at the international level, because there is no monopoly on violence internationally. Ultimately, every international agreement between countries has to be backstopped by the physical might of the signatories in a way that is not true for people who live under the umbrella of a monopoly on violence. But even there, the post-WWII international order has converged more towards economic competition and sanctions than war.
Even a group whose entire reason for existing is that they got kicked out of a different group for being too extreme, where that other group itself was formed because they felt MIRI and co were not being extreme enough, has been 100% consistently anti-violence.
As a longtime LW reader (and even early (small) MIRI donor!) I'm broadly sympathetic to the ideas here, but I find it harder to dismiss the skeptics' concerns. Like, suppose you thought international cooperation was hopeless (a common view) and also thought AI dangers were imminent (also a common view). Maybe violence does nothing to alter the long-term trajectory…but could it buy a month or two of normalcy for your loved ones? What if that's all that can be done? Arguably, at that point fretting about our democratic institutions has already become irrelevant. MIRI's "death with dignity" pseudo-slogan leaves open the question of what counts as dignity. Empirically, for many humans, going down in a futile blaze of glory is an archetypal case of preserving one's dignity! Personally I see the honor in *not* going down that path, but I think that requires a bunch of extra steps that are not inherent in the reasonable AI safety worries themselves. So it just seems like an uncomfortable reality that the prospect of violence will always be lingering in the background.
"terrorism is empirically wrong" is one of the worst arguments on the planet. Nobody remembers the successful cases of terrorism, because 'terrorism' is a descriptive label; the cases that succeed end up rebranded as liberators post-hoc.
Witholding violence as an option is *necessary* to build a truth aligned society, but not *sufficient*. Although many truths are easier to convey and propagate in the absence of violence, there are certain truths which are inherently harder to disseminate in its absence (safe example: importance of military defense).
I think the deontological reason is the only real reason. EA/Safety doesn't bomb datacenters, because they don't like violence.