Comment by himata4113
7 days ago
Do you know how to build a nuke? You might know the technicaly details of how a nuke is made, but do you know everything that's required, all the parameters and pressure values that are required? I find that unlikely, but AI seems to be increasingly more capable of providing such instructions from cross referenced data.
That's based on a silly belief (that's becoming more obvious with AI, but is silly in general) : just because you can read about something it means you learned it.
Even if I gave you exact instructions on how to use even basic stuff like power tools - if you had no experience using stuff like grinders/saws/routers and I gave you full detailed instructions on how to do something non-trivial - you're more likely to cut off body parts than achieve what you intended. There's so much fundamental stuff that you must internalize subconsciously/through trial and error - before you can have enough mental capacity to think about the higher level objectives.
Actually AI demonstrates this perfectly - once they get RL harness for programming they start to get better at it. Without experimentation they can ingest all source code/tutorials/books in the world and still produce shit.
Aye, that's the kind of thing I had in mind for the difference between information and competency.
(It's also why I wrote that I know what a calutron is and not claimed that I could build one today; the "and a few years" was not decorative).
Even if sources have been lying to me, which is certainly possible, I believe I understand enough to determine cross sections by experiment and from that to determine critical masses; for isotopic enrichment I know about the calutron, which is meh but works and can be designed from scratch with things I know (though caveat have not memorised, just that I know the keywords "proton mass" and "Lorentz force" and what to use them for); for trigger, I would pick a gun-type design rather than implosion, again this is meh but works and is easy.
A few tens of millions of USD mostly spent on electricity, a surprisingly large quantity of natural uranium (because the interesting isotope is a very small percentage), and a few years, and I expect most people on this forum could make a Little Boy type bomb.