You could literally develop a hyper-intelligent advisor on how to kill people or perform dangerous hacks using ablated 'open source' AI. You can do this right now, this very moment, and have an extremely adept advisor on how to do really, really bad things.

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trollbridge 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My level of trust in Anthropic/Google/OAI/Microsoft/Meta not to do bad things is about zero, so why should I trust them with this?

	▲	quantum_state 7 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		These companies are using anything at hand to trick people out of their money … be very careful…
	▲	catigula 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		“We clearly can’t “trust” these companies not incentivized to randomly kill lots of people, so we might as well give everyone the ability to randomly kill lots of people”.

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OkayPhysicist 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So? The primary thing stopping people from doing really really bad things is, and always has been, most people not wanting to do bad things.

It's never been difficult. Literally, right this second, you could grab a pen off your desk and pretty easy ram it into the neck of your nearest coworker. Killing's easy. You don't need some hyperintellect to tell you how to do it.

The reason you haven't rammed a pen into your coworker's neck is the same reason why most possible really bad things don't happen: People don't want to do them.

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catigula 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s interesting that most of the examples people making this argument give are high consequence, high difficulty (could you actually murder your coworker with a pen? I’m skeptical.) low kill count methodologies of violence.

We’re specifically talking about low difficulty, highly effective, high kill count methodologies of violence.

And yes, being able to kill a lot of people trivially, even with huge consequences is something people do. Most countries don’t let you run around with an armory as a result of that.

	▲	OkayPhysicist 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I live in one of the exceptions to that, and still have zero concern that someone's going to shoot up my workplace. Again, civilization works because the vast majority of people are utterly repulsed by the idea of harming another person. Most of the hypotheticals that people come up with are things that could pretty trivially done by a mad scientist today. But that doesn't happen, because this isn't a comic book, there is nobody hell-bent on turning everyone into dinosaurs.
	▲	iamnothere 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Most countries don’t let you run around with an armory as a result of that. My country allows it!

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wizzwizz4 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I already know how to kill thousands of people. It's not conceptually difficult: more than a day's effort, sure, but what stops people from doing this kind of thing is not the lack of knowing how. https://xkcd.com/1958/

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catigula 5 hours ago | parent [-]

No, you don't. What stops people is actually access to knowledge. There are killers of varying levels of efficacy; making killing easier means more people die. It's 1-1.

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mrguyorama 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How many people have shot up electrical substations, a fairly trivial way to causing widespread harm that was popularized in the news just a few years ago.

But it's only happened a couple times. Because most people just can't be assed to harm a hundred thousand others.

	▲	drdeca 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Most people don’t want to hurt lots of other people in an untargeted way, yes. But there are a lot of people, and, apparently a few of them shot up some electrical substations? If you hold constant the (very small) fraction of people who want to cause mass harm, and increase the average ease with which a randomly selected person could cause mass harm , you would expect the amount of deliberate mass harm to increase, even if the fraction of people who would want to do that is like, 0.000001 of people?

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esseph 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> What stops people is actually access to knowledge.

Very untrue.

I'm a combat vet. I spent years fighting an insurgency and therefore pretty good at that very task. I have the knowledge, so what stops me?

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wizzwizz4 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A bold assertion. How many deaths can you attribute to this xkcd comic?

	▲	catigula 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The ideas are dumb. They wouldn't kill anyone, the barrier to entry is too high and you'd trivially be caught and punished.