Just this guy, you know?
Can you explore a bit more about why you can't ethically dump it on the internet? From my understanding, this is information you have not broken any laws to obtain, and have made no promises as to confidentiality.
If not true publication, what keeps you from sending it to prosecutors and police? They may or may not act, but that's true no matter who you give it to (and true NOW of you).
People who have a lot of political power or own a lot of capital, are unlikely to be adversely affected if (say) 90% of human labor becomes obsolete and replaced by AI.
That's certainly the hope of the powerful. It's unclear whether there is a tipping point where the 90% decide not to respect the on-paper ownership of capital.
so long as property rights are enforced, and humans retain a monopoly on decisionmaking/political power, such people are not-unlikely to benefit from the economic boost that such automation would bring.
Don't use passive voice for this. Who is enforcing which rights, and how well can they maintain the control? This is a HUGE variable that's hard to control in large-scale social changes.
Specifically, "So, the islanders split into two groups and went to war." is fiction - there's no evidence, and it doesn't seem particularly likely.
Well, there are possible outcomes that make resources per human literally infinite. They're not great either, by my preferences.
In less extreme cases, a lot depends on your definition of "poverty", and the weight you put on relative poverty vs absolute poverty. Already in most parts of the world the literal starvation rate is extremely low. It can get lower, and probably will in a "useful AI" or "aligned AGI" world. A lot of capabilities and technologies have already moved from "wealthy only" to "almost everyone, including technically impoverished people", and this can easily continue.
What does "unsafe" mean for this prediction/wager? I don't expect the murder rate to go up very much, nor life expectancy to reverse it's upward trend. "Erosion of rights" is pretty general and needs more specifics to have any idea what changes are relevant.
I think things will get a little tougher and less pleasant for some minorities, both cultural and skin-color. There will be a return of some amount of discrimination and persecution. Probably not as harsh as it was in the 70s-90s, certainly not as bad as earlier than that, but worse than the last decade. It'll probably FEEL terrible, because it was on such a good trend recently, and the reversal (temporary and shallow, I hope) will dash hopes of the direction being strictly monotonic.
This seems like a story that's unsupported by any evidence, and no better than fiction.
They could have fought over resources in a scramble of each against all, but anarchy isn't stable.
This seems most likely, and "stable" isn't a filter in this situation - 1/3 of the population will die, nothing is stable. It wouldn't really be "each against all", but "small (usually family) coalitions against some of the other small-ish coalitions". The optimal size of coalition will be dependend on a lot of factors, including ease of defection and strength of non-economic bonds between members.
- If you could greatly help her at small cost, you should do so.
This needs to be quantified to determine whether or not I agree. In most cases I imagine (and a few I've experienced), I would (and did) kill the animal to end it's suffering and to prevent harm to others if the animal might be subject to death throes or other violent reactions to their fear and pain.
In other cases I imagine, I'd walk away or drive on, without a second thought. Neither the benefit nor the costs are simple, linear, measurable things.
- Her suffering is bad.
I don't have an operational definition of "bad". I prefer less suffering, all else equal. All else is never equal - I don't know what alternatives and what suffering (or reduced joy) any given remediation would require, and only really try to estimate them when faced with a specific case.
For the aggregate case, I don't buy into a simple or linear aggregation of suffering (or of joy or of net value of distinct parts of the universe). I care about myself perhaps two dozen orders of magnitude more than the ant I killed in my kitchen this morning. And I care about a lot of things with a non-additive function - somewhere in the realm of logarithmic. I care about the quarter-million remaining gorillas, but I care about a marginal gorilla much less than 1/250K of that caring.
One challenge I'd have for you / others who feel similar to you, is to try to get more concrete on measures like this, and then to show that they have been declining.
I've given some thought to this over the last few decades, and have yet to find ANY satisfying measures, let alone a good set. I reject the trap of "if it's not objective and quantitative, it's not important" - that's one of the underlying attitudes causing the decline.
I definitely acknowledge that my memory of the last quarter of the previous century is fuzzy and selective, and beyond that is secondhand and not-well-supported. But I also don't deny my own experience that the (tiny subset of humanity) people I am aware of as individuals have gotten much less hopeful and agentic over time. This may well be for reasons of media attention, but that doesn't make it not real.
This was my thinking as well. On further reflection, and based on OP's response, I realize there IS a balance that's unclear. The list contains some false-positives. This is very likely just by the nature of things - some are trolls, some are pure fantasy, some will have moved on, and only a very few are real threats.
So the harm of making a public, anonymous, accusation and warning is definitely nonzero - it escalates tension for a situation that has passed. The harm of failing to do so in the real cases is also nonzero, but I expect many of the putative victims know they have a stalker or deranged enemy who'd wish them dead, and the information is "just" that this particular avenue has been explored.
That balance is difficult. I philosophically lean toward "open is better than secret, and neither is as good as organized curation and controlled disclosure". Since there's no clear interest by authorities, I'd publish. And probably I'd do so anonymously as I don't want the hassle of having potential murderers know about me.