I think the issue is that those stories are rooted very much in the failures of human systems that we see every day. They are us imagining what could go wrong based on what has gone wrong and is going wrong.

It would be a lot easier to set those warnings aside if we didn't have so many examples of the very things they warn about happening in real life.

We currently have a system where private individuals can fund private science and then deploy the results globally to their own profit with very few mechanisms for enforcing restraint and caution. And we've seen this backfire with horrific consequences over and over again.

Lead in the gasoline. Microplastics in the water. Pesticides widely applied to the biosphere. In my area PCBs are a massive risk due to past soil contamination. In other areas fracking biproducts make the water undrinkable.

Hell the AI rush in the face of climate change. We literally have heatwaves killing massive numbers of people while a tiny handful of investors and the companies they control are drastically increasing our carbon emissions in the race for AI.

It's easy to imagine all the ways in which synthetic life could go horribly wrong, even with out those sci-fi stories, especially since all but the youngest of us have been through a brutal pandemic in living memory.

It's very, very hard to imagine our current system showing proper restraint with this technology.

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Zambyte an hour ago | parent [-]

It's important to emphasize that cars are the leading source of carbon emissions. Anyone fighting against AI on the basis of climate change should be fighting for safe and reliable alternatives to driving everywhere.

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dbingham 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This is "whatabboutism" which is a logical fallacy.

Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI. Both have climate impacts, independently of each other, and we should be dealing with the climate impacts of both simultaneously.

Regardless, don't assume the person you are talking to isn't consistent. Peruse my personal blog and you will see that I, in fact, ran a whole city council campaign on a platform of "to fight climate change we should not be driving".

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CamperBob2 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI.

Actually they do, because the best way to get cars off the road is to replace many if not most of their occupants with AI.

Private ownership of cars is not the problem. The assumption that people have to drive all over the place to get stuff done is the problem. Let's work on that.

	▲	feoren 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> the best way to get cars off the road is to replace many if not most of their occupants with AI. I'm so confused by this. Instead of one person driving a car to the store and parking, now the car is driving itself to the store with one person in it, dropping them off, and then either parking, or driving itself around more, back to the house or to a distant parking facility. In crowded cities, the car is just going to drive around the block empty for an hour instead of paying $12 for parking. Single-occupancy vehicles are a big problem now; I don't understand how introducing a bunch of zero-occupancy vehicles are an improvement on that? It seems very obvious to me self-driving cars are going to significantly increase the total number of miles driven every day in the world.

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NetMageSCW 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That’s just wrong. Transportation is 24% of carbon emissions with 18% road transportation and about 10% of that from cars. Electricity and heat production is the largest source of carbon emissions.

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flurpitude an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Should also be fighting for that.

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CamperBob2 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

And the most promising of those alternatives is, ironically enough, AI itself. Fighting data centers is literally like fighting nuclear power. If you just want more carbon emissions, then by all means, proceed.

Of course most people who commute to work don't need to be doing that now, but that's the other big elephant in the room with AI. We don't use the intelligence we already have, so what makes us think the emergence of ASI/AGI will change anything?