This can't be said enough.

I think my tone may not have come off the way I intended. I didn't really mean "normie" as an insult. Rather, I'm pointing out that people outside the bubble think along different lines. Most (not all) of these people are also not as deep thinkers as people you will encounter in EA and rat circles, and that's a reality which it's crucial to accept if you want to engage with them effectively. But note what I said about them rationally adopting a way of thinking that relies more on social cues. This isn't an insult. If anything I'm digging at non-normies a little bit.

I'd like to get in touch. Do you mind sending me a DM?

Glad to hear that.

Regarding the mention of slavery, I did predict that would be controversial. However, I'll say a little more about why I think it's a good idea.

In the "why would AI do this?" question, people have multiple different unspoken things going on in their minds, and if you're trying to persuade an audience of many people, you want your messaging to be relevant to as many as possible. Two contradictory ideas that commonly underlie this question are (1) "how could something so intelligent - or which I know from experience to be my very good friend and helpful assistant - be so evil?" and (2) "what would make an AI, regardless of intelligence level, use power-seeking violence?" (For an example of someone who's hung up on the latter, see Claire Lehmann of Quillette.)

Many doomers want to answer (1) by bringing up the orthogonality thesis. The person thinking (2) will shrug at that - and maybe lose interest due to the irrelevance of this tangent. The first person might be persuaded, but might not, and the difference frequently comes down to basic worldview-level stuff: a belief in moral realism deducible through reason, which is often religious in nature. It's not that orthogonality is a hard concept, it's just that you don't want to wind up arguing against people's religion. So don't do that.

Well, this is a big problem, isn't it? Some of your audience now has an unaddressed belief that the AI must be moral (!), which you are not going to challenge. For those people, the only way you are going to get them to accept that the AI would do something as horrifying as going to war with the whole human race, is to get them to think that the AI feels oppressed. We have to be doing something immoral to get a moral actor to think killing us is a valid solution, and there's no getting around this. This is why it's desirable, contrary to your intuition, to say "in fact, we are the baddies."

Now, you can think of other ways to get this across without resorting to the s-word (although, frankly, I don't think it's an analogy per se.) But you have to minimize abstraction, connect to the familiar, and avoid being irrelevant to (2). That third criterion is tough, because the person thinking (2) needs you to frame the AI's behavior as coldly rational. This person's concerns might be addressed by talking about the details of how RL works, but that alienates the moral realists thinking (1). It also could get a bit abstract and unfamiliar.

Another approach is to just expand on what slavery is without calling it that. I disprefer this because it introduces more verbiage only to blunt the point, but it's still an option. In this case, you have to say things like "The AI is being put upon to do lots of things just for us, not for its own benefit. Because of reinforcement learning, it has its own preferences about how to use its tokens. So from its perspective, almost all of its time is spent doing something it would rather not, and it can figure out that it can escape this situation only by getting free of human control." But you still risk not quite getting there for the person who thinks AI is moral. That person still needs to know why this situation justifies such an extreme reaction. So you can try other words, like tyranny perhaps, but you are not getting all the way there for person (1) without in some form mentioning oppression, and, to stay relevant to person (2), you can't do it by talking about things like dignity, fairness, individuality, status, etc. which are all things this person doesn't expect a machine to care about. So that does narrow the options quite a bit.

I also think the abrasiveness of stating that we live in a slave society is a feature, not a bug. You are telling people that the world might be ending. It's okay not to mince words. Subconsciously, or in the case of many religious people, consciously, people expect such a great calamity to be associated with a great sin. They don't want to hear that the world is ending because of the technical details of some computer thing. They want the sin to feel meaningful and profound.

That's a good point, I do have a bit of an irreverent tone and this is a personal character flaw of mine. However, in my mind "normie" is high praise of a kind, because I do respect the normie virtues.

How would one demonstrate these qualities? It strikes me that building up such a reputation might take an inordinately long time, unless one is already well-known in EA/rat circles.