Comment by Gare
2 years ago
The best way to not get nuked is to develop nukes first. That's the gist of their usual rebuttal to this argument.
2 years ago
The best way to not get nuked is to develop nukes first. That's the gist of their usual rebuttal to this argument.
Except the argument, projected to the dimension of WMDs, is not that AI is like nukes - rather, AI is like bioweapons. Nukes are dangerous when someone is willing to drop them at someone else. Bioweapons are inherently dangerous - the more you refine them, the worse it gets; eventually, you may build one so deadly that one careless handling mistake ends the world.
covid a great recent example of this
It might be an example of that, but the reason so many dismiss the lab leak hypothesis in favour of wet markets is that the markets were already expected to be the breeding ground for "the next pandemic" well before Covid actually happened. Wet markets were also associated with the outbreaks of H5N1 avian flu, SARS, and monkey pox.
If those CEOs really thought AI was as bad as nukes they would actually dissolve their companies, destroy all their data, and go churn butter with the Amish instead. The US, having developed nukes first, now has the most nuclear warheads pointed at it.
That argument doesn't hold water when they also argue the mere existence of nukes is dangerous. I would love to hear when Hinton had this revelation when his life's work was to advance AI.
Apart from Japan, I'd say America is the country that has historically come closest to being nuked, with the Soviet Union a close second.