Comment by sigmoid10
12 hours ago
Usually, any functioning government that wants their country to keep existing would never let normal people anywhere close to such a remote. You wouldn't want your nuclear power plant to be accessible like a music festival either. But governments are slow and people were also allowed to freely buy and own uranium as late as the 1970s.
Hence many people are using this as an example of AI now.
It wasn't generally dangerous, but we've starting refining AI enough that if you pile enough in one model you get an emergent fissile reaction out of it and it starts to become a really big danger.
The hard part is to figure out where the danger is and where to cut it off. The information freedom people are never going to agree that information could be dangerous for example and will fight you all the way down.
At the same time people are going to get real fucking tired of clumps of information hacking their bank accounts and stealing their money and want to do something about it.
It is a thought experiment, not a real scenario
It was an explanation for why we see this allegedly insane behaviour. History is full of stuff that we consider ridiculously unsafe today with the benefit of hindsight. But people were not that different. They just didn't know better.