Comment by Loquebantur
10 hours ago
Your idea about the world being inhabited by mindless seekers of short-sighted "competitive advantages" is the fantasy.
Getting people to agree isn't easy, that doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile. There often even isn't any viable alternative to reaching an agreement in social settings.
When your hyper-competitive mode of thinking leads to undesirable consequences, you have to change your mindset. Reality doesn't conform to wishful thinking.
Yes I think this level of pessimism doesn’t actually hold up to the history of the last 100 years as it relates to nuclear weapons, cloning, wars etc. In fact I think the history actually points to the fact that believing such deals were impossible was a source of much of the strife. In many cases as soon as people started to actually speak to each other about what they had been fighting about they quickly realized that they wanted the same thing. No one wanted nuclear proliferation to increase but until someone said it it only got worse: https://www.history.com/articles/reykjavik-summit-nuclear-de.... When Robert McNamara met with a Viet Cong general after the war ended he realized that they both had totally misunderstood the objectives of the other: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0X1YY49rPtg&ra=m. Agreeing to end nuclear testing saved us from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Richard Ngo, an AI safety researcher, often says that none of us are on the pareto frontier and I tend to agree with him.
Almost nobody (I have to say almost) in the world including Xi, the ceo of deep seek, Dario, and even Sam Altman want AI to kill everyone. I really think we just have to
A. Get stakeholders to believe this is a bad idea.
B. show that we’re willing to do it first to prevent this stupid race from continuing.
This is off topic now but yeah the world would have been a different place if someone had listened to the demands of Ho Chi Minh earlier.. and Hammarskjöld had not been crashed
> Agreeing to end nuclear testing saved us from the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The treaty came after the crisis, not before. And it only banned atmospheric, underwater, and space tests. The US and USSR kept testing underground on a large scale, while France and China never signed it and continued atmospheric tests for years.
Fair, I was going off memory and was wrong. I guess I was mostly just trying to get across that communication seems to be more powerful than we give it credit for, but should’ve double checked.