Comment by ls612
11 hours ago
Historically it almost always takes actual fatalities rather than near misses to ground an aircraft, and aviation is famous for its obsession with safety compared to other industries.
11 hours ago
Historically it almost always takes actual fatalities rather than near misses to ground an aircraft, and aviation is famous for its obsession with safety compared to other industries.
Airplanes have pretty bounded damage. Generally you kill at most a few hundred people. Even weaponized a few thousand. This is a risk profile that allows risk taking with near misses and waiting until something goes wrong to fix it (though doing so is rightfully uncomfortable and frequently unethical).
The people worrying about AI risk are worrying about "it goes wrong once and kills billions of people". That's not a risk profile that allows for waiting to see if the risk is real, you have to prevent it before it happens. It's akin to the risk of the cold war going hot, not even "just" a nuclear reactor irradiating half of europe (which has yet to happen, but is a risk with nuclear reactors, chernobyl got uncomfortably close but ultimately was well contained).
The story of the safetyists has the convenient property of being unfalsifiable, so they can always claim doom is just around the corner. It’s the secular/EA version of the second coming.
Chernobyl was “well-contained?” Blue dogs and generations of cancer would disagree.
The question was what would you want. You did not answer the question.