Keep in mind also, that humans often seem to just want to hurt each other, despite what they claim, and have more motivations and rationalizations for this than you can even count. Religious dogma, notions of "justice", spitefulness, envy, hatred of any number of different human traits, deterrence, revenge, sadism, curiosity, reinforcement of hierarchy, preservation of traditions, ritual, "suffering adds meaning to life", sexual desire, and more and more that I haven't even mentioned. Sometimes it seems half of human philosophy is just devoted to finding ever more rationalizations to cause suffering, or to avoid caring about the suffering of others.
AI would likely not have all this endless baggage causing it to be cruel. Causing human suffering is not an instrumentally convergent goal. So, most AIs will not have it as a persistent instrumental or terminal goal. Not unless some humans manage to "align" it. Most humans DO have causing or upholding some manner of suffering as a persistent instrumental or terminal goal.
This is equivalent to the game Westley played with Vizzini. You know, if Westley didn't cheat. I like to call it "Sicilian Chess" for that reason, though that's just me.
Trump shot an arrow into the air; it fell to Earth, he knows not where...
Probably one of the best succinct summaries of every damn week that man is president lmao
LOL @ the AI-warped book in that guy's hands
Now you can!
Gwern seems to think this would be used as a way to get rid of corrupt oligarchs, but... Wouldn't this just immediately be co-opted by those oligarchs to solidify their power by legally paying for the assassinations of their opponents? Markets aren't democratic, because a small percentage of the people have most of the money.
To be fair, my position is less described by that Quirrell quote and more by Harry's quote when he's talking to Hermione about moral peer pressure:
"The way people are built, Hermione, the way people are built to feel inside, is that they hurt when they see their friends hurting. Someone inside their circle of concern, a member of their own tribe. That feeling has an off-switch, an off-switch labelled 'enemy' or 'foreigner' or sometimes just 'stranger'. That's how people are, if they don't learn otherwise."
Unlike Quirrell I give people the credit for actually caring, rather than pretending to care, about people. I just don't think that extends to very many people, for most people.
Fun fact for those reading this in the far future, when Eliezer said "effective altruist" in this piece, he most likely was using the literal meaning, not referring to the EA movement, as that name hadn't been coined yet.
Maybe hypocrisy in the sense that someone acts like they agree with the social consensus in order to avoid persecution, when in fact they don't and are doing things which don't conform to it. Legalized blackmail would encourage people to not mind their own business and become morality police or witch hunters even about things which don't actually hurt them or anybody else.
Consider the effect legalized blackmail would have had on the gay community before widespread acceptance for a particularly brutal and relatively recent example