Comment by game_the0ry
18 hours ago
Ai is just a tool. You can kill with hammer, doesn't mean you ban hammers. And they could have used stack overflow instead of ai.
18 hours ago
Ai is just a tool. You can kill with hammer, doesn't mean you ban hammers. And they could have used stack overflow instead of ai.
The tools we use are not neutral. A sword can be made to work like an axe, but we use axes for chopping wood because a sword makes a shitty axe. A sword is designed to kill people. The handle, the mass, the weight distribution, and every other aspect I am not qualified to get in to, means swords are designed to kill. They are a tool, and their use is not neutral.
This is a clear example, but I don't believe any tools are neutral. Your immediate fallback was to a hammer, not a mouse, with the obvious corrollary being to bludgeon, but the same line applies. Tools are not neutral, and that's why when you looked for something that causes harm, you grabbed something that's objectively been serving a dual-purpose for hundreds of years. Nobody's using a computer mouse to bludgeon someone to death; it makes a shitty bludgeon, and the design of the tool reflects that.
That's also why these comparisons always fall back to knives, or hammers, or the AK-47: they are dangerous tools that are designed to make killing easier. Nobody is making these comparisons to more benign tools, like desk lamps, coffee cups, or car stereos, and it's because tools are not neutral, and none of my examples are designed to make direct, bodily harm, easier.
Murder by computer keyboard: https://www.deseret.com/1997/7/6/19322063/mother-charged-wit...
Murder by ethernet cable: https://www.gainesvilletimes.com/news/dead-woman-found-in-pa...
Murder by laptop: https://www.riverfronttimes.com/william-lynn-gunter-sentence...
Murder by cellphone charger: https://lawandcrime.com/crime/pennsylvania-man-admits-to-str...
Murder by desk lamp: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2009/01/08/man-beaten-to-death...
Stabbing by coffee mug: https://www.muscalaw.com/blog/north-port-two-women-attack-co...
The fact that you had to find an article from three decades ago for an instance of killing with a keyboard is telling. All the others aren’t exactly that recent and are mostly isolated cases. Meanwhile, on gun related deaths, there are entire Wikipedia pages for it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_mass_shootings_in_the...
There are more mass shootings in the US per year than there are days in a year. It’s so bad they need pages for each individual year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
Meanwhile, pages of deaths perpetrated with household items are curiosities. You parent comment stands: tools are designed for specific purposes and are used for those purposes.
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My larger point is that nobody - nobody - defaults to telling us the coffee mug is unregulated, as AI allegedly ought to be. They always compare it to something much more commonly used as a weapon; something that, when asked to name a household object likely to be used as a weapon, the average person would guess.
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My god, they didn't say ban ai they said it makes vandalism easy.
No need to knee jerk react to an argument that hasn't been made.
It's not knee jerk to respond to an obvious contextual implication.
Absolutely wasn’t where I was going with that.
I was sort of admiring the devastation a malignant actor can cause with a good tool.
It’s usually used for morally neutral neutral or good work.
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That’s a non-sequitur. You don’t need to defend AI, your parent comment isn’t attacking it, simply making an observation.
> doesn't mean you ban hammers
They didn’t suggest banning anything.
> You can kill with hammer
Not if you don’t have a hammer available. Which is the point. Ready access to a tool makes misusing the tool easy. And some tools are more conductive to misuse than others. You can kill maybe a couple of people in a crowd with a hammer, a few more with a handgun, a ton more with a machine gun or a bomb. The tool itself matters, and you should regulate each accordingly to their capacity and likelihood of harm. For example, plenty of countries restrict gun use significantly more than the US. Those countries have much fewer gun-related deaths and violence. This isn’t (shouldn’t be, in an honest discussion) hard to understand.
You are the first person in this conversation to mention banning. I am not sure what your comment has to do with anything.