>campaign of negativity against ai.

People are starting to panic, and few things bring out full blown idiocy and disregard for ground truth faster than widespread panic.

"Inevitable" means "same technological progress would be achieved anyway, even if these people have made less damaging choices".

So yes, they are 100% responsible for damage they caused and did not had to happen. And no, "I had no choice, because it was the only way to become billionaire" is not an excuse.

They were NOT "instrument". No one manipulated them. No one forced them. Nothing forced them. They themselves wanted to and did not cared

Was it? We nearly destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons several times in the last century. I don't think it was a good call just because we've gotten lucky so far.

Imagine a bag filled with marbles. We can't see inside the bag, we can just pull marbles out of the bag. Some marbles are white - they improve the world in some way. Wifi. Trains. Electricity. Some marbles are grey - they are useful but dangerous. Firearms. Nuclear weapons. Gene editing. And some marbles are black. If we pull a black marble out of the bag, we hurt or destroy ourselves.

Humanity's strategy so far has been to pull marbles out of the bag as fast as we can. And that's been working out, because most marbles are white. But we're insanely lucky we haven't had a nuclear war. The USSR's early warning systems picked up 5 incoming american missiles in 1983. They didn't fire back because one of the officers on shift didn't believe the reports (why only 5 missiles?), and he declared the reports were fake.[1] If a different person was on shift, there's a good chance nuclear war would have broken out because of a sensor glitch. And that's far from the only instance. The list is terrifying: [2]

And now we're improving AI capabilities as fast as we can, despite it being pretty clearly another grey ball. AI has a lot of amazing uses. But why are we rushing so much? Doesn't seem wise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls

It's not about merely knowing how to build a "badthing". It's about knowing why not to.

With AI, the point is who uses it for what.

Think about it like a magic wand that makes your wishes come true. Would you really want everybody to have one? Who should and who shouldn't? Who gets to decide?

And this sort of blanket argument is how you get bad science on the order of Prison experiments to Nazi scientists. Yes, academic research that pushes boundaries can be a $badthing

You're acting like international treaties (or cartels) don't exist. Yes, these are structures where parties have incentives to defect, and we counter those by creating incentives not to, with checks and sanctions.

Additionally, you don't need all the leaders of the world to agree to anything, you only need US and China.

Additionally x2, if you agree with the common stance that China makes the vast majority of their progress by distilling US models, you don't even need them to agree to anything.

The "world" isn't just what humans currently make of it. You deny the possibility of alternatives for society based on what amounts to ignorance.

Transitioning from the current "order of things" to one compatible with the existence of things like AI is a necessity, not a "fantasy".

When you imagine people as savages to be outdone in their savagery, you become one yourself. Spend more effort on finding ways not to.

>Fantasizing about alternative realities where all the leaders of the world unite and halt technology development without any of them secretly defecting and developing it further isn’t very useful to discuss. These things aren’t going to happen.

it has kinda worked for nuclear weapons

> it's the one that best matches the reality of nature (competition)

This doesn't seem right: it doesn't match the history of reality, in which capitalism has repeatedly stymied rather than fostered competition.