Comment by JumpCrisscross
2 days ago
> the fear is that if we wait for this type of evidence, it will be too late
I could make this claim of anything. Not any technology. Literally, anything.
If we give anyone freedom, they'll eventually use it to ruin everything.
I'm simply arguing for something stronger than faith to cause action. Otherwise, this is just another religion.
You’re right; you can make this claim about anything. We have to be careful about which things we spend resources worrying about, and if we’re overzealous with restrictions we pay a lot of opportunity cost.
The thing is, AI is not a normal technology; it is already vastly more powerful than any technology we could compare it to, and more resources are being poured into its development right now than the development of any other technology; we are in uncharted waters. If there is any new technology to be careful with, it is this one. In this case, it is worth paying the opportunity cost.
Imagine if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were never destroyed. People would be arguing that fear of nuclear war is "just another religion".
> Imagine if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were never destroyed. People would be arguing that fear of nuclear war is "just another religion"
If Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Trinity never occured, that would be justified scepticism.
You can, in fact, predict the effect of an atomic bomb without detonating it. Sure, you can't have the same certainty as if you'd detonated it -- empiricism is important; they tested the Fat Man design for a reason. But you may also recall that they were sufficiently confident in the Little Boy design that that one they didn't bother testing, and as it turned out, they were correct in their confidence. That's the power of understanding.
Which is to say, empiricism is important, but if your practice of empiricism is purely looking at what happened before and predicting that things will continue in that vein, rather than using your empirical observations to actually form a model of the world that will allow you to make more general predictions, you're not really using the full power of your intelligence. This is the sort of mistake that led many to not prepare for the covid pandemic, for instance! Meanwhile, others looked at what was going on, realized it wouldn't stay confined like it currently was, realized that it would get much bigger, and prepared.
"I'll believe it when it happens" can be a decent guideline a lot of the time, yes, but at some point you have to actually think. Evidence often comes not in the form of prior similar events, but in the form of models or arguments. To discount these as non-evidence is to blind oneself!
Clearly, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just staged as marketing stunts for the US to intimidate the Soviets into standing down in Europe.
"Nuclear war" risks aren't real - wake up, sheeple!
It's weird to say this sarcastically like it's not a widely-held opinion among elite historians.
"first, that the first use of these terrible weapons was unnecessary; second, that this was understood by decision makers at the time; and third that there was very substantial though not absolutely definitive evidence that by the late summer of 1945 the decision was primarily influenced by diplomatic considerations related to the Soviet Union"
- Gar Alperovitz, founding fellow of the Harvard Institute of Politics and author of "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth"