Comment by aorloff
4 hours ago
The very best outcomes involve us intentionally and collectively turning our attention away from this technology.
4 hours ago
The very best outcomes involve us intentionally and collectively turning our attention away from this technology.
> The very best outcomes involve us intentionally and collectively turning our attention away from this technology.
To expand on the "pure fantasy" sister comment: There is just no way this will happen. It's in the spirit of "we can just stop all wars" and "we can just end world hunger". Technically it's very easy to do. Socially it's impossible to do. Unless you ignore realities.
That is pure fantasy.
Why? There are numerous technologies we have ignored or abandoned for numerous reasons. Many of the benefits of AI is "requires less humans", but in an age where we question what work people could possibly do in the future, human labor isn't that hard to find.
If the amish can do what they do for whack religious reasons, people could manage it with ai for cultural and social reasons. And I never saw an amish person starve to death. And that is if people don't get pissed enough to start burning stuff down and instead try to be peaceful hippie homesteader types.
But notably the amish don't preclude the rest of us from existing. Some subset of humans could turn their attention away from AI but it would presumably still exist and continue to be developed.
I can't think of any economically beneficial technologies that we've collectively ignored. If you manage to come up with a counterexample then that's an opportunity to make some money for yourself. It's a fundamentally unstable state given our economic system.
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> There are numerous technologies we have ignored or abandoned for numerous reasons.
Are there? Nukes are a thing. Chemical weapons are a thing. Cluster bombs are a thing. Biological weapons are a thing. What is not a thing that shouldn't be? We say certain things should not be a thing, but then behind the scenes we made them a thing anyway.
Because "we" embodies a hugely diverse set of beings with different wants, needs, goals, and priorities. Not to mention different morality and ethics.
So sure, let's say you get 95% of the world to not use or work on LLMs. 5% is still enough to build something that brings forth the End Times.
That's the old checklist trope of "Your idea won't work because: [x] it requires that everyone in the world agrees to do something, all at the same time."
As the GP said: pure fantasy.
You can't just stop AI without also stopping progress in computer hardware. You have to do both.
The real implication of what they're saying extends beyond just AI.
You have to stop the entire compute stack in order to prevent or slow down AI progress.
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Watch, very soon this is going to politically divide. They’re sowing the seeds right now with “antiai” campaigns.
The right will for a change be for it but will be able to be talked into regulation because you know “small government” and all only when convenient. The left will bitch and moan about fairness and copyright and automation and UBI, they’ll be the doomers and worldwar chicken littles. The Uniparty will be for it, but only against the public having anything good.
What will be funny to me is that normal tech people outside the frontier model companies are about to find themselves without a home on this topic.
The world isn't the American political nonsense.
> What will be funny to me is that normal tech people outside the frontier model companies are about to find themselves without a home on this topic.
Already happened, just from agentic coding.