[crngefest]

All you need for dictatorship in general is a critical number of human accomplices. I don’t see how an LLM in the mix would make it worse.

IMO mass communication technologies (radio, TV, internet) are much more important in building a dictatorship.

[anileated]

The quote was mostly a flourish (and apparently too open to interpretation to be useful).

In any case, it is about hypothetical “machine dictatorship” in particular, not human dictatorships you describe. Machine dictatorship traditionally invokes an image of “AGI” and violent robots forcing or eliminating humans with raw power and compute capabilities, and thus with no substantial need for accomplices (us vs. them). In contrast, it could be that the more realistic and probable danger from ML is in fact more insidious and prosaic.

What you say about human dictatorship is trivially true, but the quote is not about that.

> I don’t see how an LLM in the mix would make it worse

How about a thought experiment.

1. Take some historical persona you consider well-intentioned (for example, Lincoln), throw an LLM in that situation, and see if it could make it better

2. Take a person you consider a badly intentioned dictator (maybe that is Hitler), throw an LLM in that situation, and see if it could make it worse

Let me know what you find.

[tgv]

Don't forget the deceptive aura of objectivity that machines have. It's easier to issue a command when "the machine has decided" or "God has decided" rather than "I just made this up".