Honestly, I don't think Elon Musk can fairly be described as more evil than Dario Amodei or Sam Altman.
Not sure if the other two CEOs have done that
are you talking about making the Moon and Mars livable?
This does, in all fairness, also imply that he has a higher upper bound for future possible "importance" / "benefit to humanity" - but in even more fairness, it is entirely irrelevant to my question, which was you believe Dario is >= as evil as Musk. An evil man doing good deeds is still an evil man; swapping "good deeds" with "ambition that enriches himself and may possibly help the rest of us in the future" doesn't make things any better. "Higher likelihood of his ambition ultimately benefiting humanity" does not make one less evil. (Neither does expressing clear disdain for a subset of humanity, thoughtlessly cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, cruelty towards your own child, etc).
A parting point: somebody who genuinely wants to save humanity and somebody who genuinely wants to be heralded as a savior of humanity are two very different types of people with very similar outward signals. A savior complex and a messiah complex look the same from the surface.
Leaving out the political ambitions, which would be a separate discussion, I think space bases are _way_ more realistic than machine consciousness (which is what I understand AGI to be). In fact, I can visualize what technology space habitats would require today, whereas I wouldn't even know how to determine whether a machine is conscious.
> An evil man doing good deeds is still an evil man; swapping "good deeds" with "ambition that enriches himself and may possibly help the rest of us in the future" doesn't make things any better.
I'm not sure that saying Musk wants to enrich himself is very fair. AFAICT he doesn't use his wealth in ways that most people would expect a billionaire to. Based on what I can tell of how he spends his money, he seems to genuinely believe in his ambition. So I would argue that any enrichment of himself, in his mind, is for his ambition and therefore for humanity's good.
I think a lot of Musk's actions can be understood as someone who wants to focus on getting humanity to Mars, and who gets tangentially distracted by other things (such as AI, possibly) and who deals with what he considers obstacles (such as the government).
Edit: Here it is: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...
"Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030."
The Lancet's model is a forecasting model and it isn't accurate at all. No excess mortality has actually been recorded.
Sure, you could argue it was going to be dismantled anyway under this administration. But I think that’s pretty close to the “just following orders” excuse. Which falls especially flat when it was a task he volunteered for!
And I don’t want to understate the harms of other AI CEOs, but in terms of direct, quantifiable deaths, Musk is pretty clearly the most evil.
Doing less to save people in other countries that have no legal demand on our treasury is not "being responsible for [their] deaths." It's tragic, and it may even be a bad policy decision, but there's no responsibility (in the "duty to prevent harm" sense) or evil there.
The only way you would do that is if you didn’t understand the shape/limits of the structures being compared.
Elon Musk's actions killed hundreds of thousands of people. While not resulting in any savings at all for the government.
Lots of R's were really angry. It was eventually spun up again, now under the direct control of the State Dept, but the sudden interruption did ungodly amounts of damage in the interregnum.
See USAID