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0xDEAFBEAD 37 minutes ago

People were feeling doomtastic about nuclear weapons during the Cold War as well.

Listen to the words of this song written in 1969: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2JcxHX-8Xc

  When every man is torn apart
  With nightmares and with dreams
  Will no one lay the laurel wreath
  When silence drowns the screams
  Confusion will be my epitaph
  As I crawl a cracked and broken path
  If we make it, we can all sit back and laugh
  But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying
Ultimately, we have made it, through arms control agreements, working to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, and so forth. We can do the same for AI.

You don't have help. But perhaps you could at least avoid discouraging people unnecessarily?

jonahx 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Ultimately, we have made it

Spinning the present situation or the history of nuclear arms as a high-five, "go team human!" success story is... quite the take (Vasili Arkhipov, Cuban missile crisis generally, the current doomsday clock being "the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history").

> You don't have help. But perhaps you could at least avoid discouraging people unnecessarily?

More germanely, you don't have to worry yourself, but at least avoid discouraging people with legitimate worries who want to take precautions. Even the present situation with nuclear weapons, precarious as it is, would likely be more precarious were it not for the political pressure of the people worrying in the 1950s and 1960s and up to today.

astrobe_ 3 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Except we did had a bunch of close calls [1]. Also, we've been warned about climate change for at least 30 years and were unable to avoid it. So OP's remark is entirely deserved.

Until proven otherwise, we are not part of a movie where the hero saves the day at the end. I thought 9/11 made it pretty clear to everyone?

[1] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2020-0...