Comment by adrians1
5 hours ago
Remember the debate about how nuclear was stopped in the 70s because of NIMBYism? We are now wondering "how could people then be so stupid and shortsighted?". Well, there you go, here's history repeating before our eyes.
Not at all. The risks and rewards of nuclear power were extremely well know back then, and any objective analysis showed that we should build more of it.
AI is completely different. The risks are not well understood, but are plausibly catastrophic along multiple dimensions. The potential upside is also not well understood.
I remember the optimism of the early internet, when it seemed like it was going to be this incredibly free and liberating realm for everyone to learn and express themselves freely. But now nearly all of that has been reduced or destroyed by the greed of powerful people. The exact same people who are set to control super powerful AI.
Do you really think someone like Elon, who gleefully destroys lives for fun, is going to willingly cede immense amounts of power just to improve the lives of a bunch of normies he'll never meet?! That completely flies in the face of how he and his contemporaries have acted their entire lives, so count me as a little skeptical.
Not really. Nuclear power (in both the weapon and energy sense) is and always was relatively easy to manage compared to AI.
If the deployment of nuclear energy required the distribution of radioactive material to every smartphone in America and for unstable isotopes to be plugged into the core operating infrastructure of every industry, then they'd be a lot closer to analogous.
Of course. Those people back then were stupid and irrational and couldn't see they were wrong.
Today we are much more enlightened and smart, and our convoluted arguments, that sound very smart and somehow reach the same conclusion that the technology must be stopped, are totally right. We're not opposed to AI due to irrational fear and NIMBYism, like those simpletons before.
Excellent work responding to the argument put in front of you!
You are so rational!
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I have a feeling that comparing a safe, sustainable energy source to large language models is disingenuous. If you support LLMs and the field, you can just state it outright, without insincere comparisons.
Obviously there are components of nuclear energy that are not intrinsically safe, which is why people freaked out about it
If you oppose LLMs and the field because of pure irrational instinct, like those people in the past, you can just state it outright, no need for complicated arguments.
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