Disclaimer: This is *not* a call to action in any form, I neither endorse any form of violence nor the hold the radical anti-AI views that might potentially prescribe assasinations. The question was the result of a philosophical debate I had with my roommate yesterday and we did not come to a conclusion, leading to this post here.

Tldr: There's a lot of people in the EA/RAT space alone, who strongly believe in short AI timelines, have a high p(doom) and devote their entire career to slowing down AI. Many of those people have access to money and live in California. Why has nobody even tried to kill Sam Altman or other high impact individuals who heavily contribute to speed up AI?

Underlying Beliefs:
Within EA/Rationality community there's a lot of people with relatively short AI timelines and a high p(doom). Exaggeratedly speaking they might think "we're all gonna die in 5 years". A lot of those people are highly educated in AI, think they know a lot the market hasn't priced in and yet they feel relatively powerless in impacting the AI trajectory. Many of those people strive for having a high impact, devote a significant part of their lifes to an AI safety fight, many yudkowsky-like people think is hopelessly lost. Overall the course of how and how fast AI develops seems to be strongly determined by a very small set of people - even many highly educated AI researchers in SF have negligible impact, while a few high profile people like Sam Altman concentrate a lot of public attention, decision making power and attract capital. If one was to succeed in assasinating him that would probably significantly slow down AI directly for obvious reasons. But addionally even if it failed it would set a precedent making it much less attractive to be a shining AI accelerationist. Potentially this would push some of the decision making behind closed doors, but much of the acceleration happening only works because he's such a shiny individual that attracts investors, users, companies etc. So also indirectly there could be a significant slow-down from making it less cool "to be AI". This makes me think that many of those "high impact saving the world from AI" people, who feel paralyzed because of their complete absence of impact on short AI timelines and their belief that AI kills them soon anyways would spot an opportunity to actually have radical impact and survive, if the...

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