Academic research has always progressed and pushed the boundaries. Is that a $badthing to you?

josephg 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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

	▲	Aurornis 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Humanity's strategy so far has been to pull marbles out of the bag as fast as we can. > But why are we rushing so much? Talking about these things with elaborate analogies only obscuring the point you already stumbled into: Humanity advances because humans are curious, driven, like to discover things, and like to push the boundaries. Talking about humanity like one entity that operates together misses the point: There are billions of people in the world and some of them are going to discover new things. There is no general counsel where humanity gets together and decides what humanity works on. There is no singular bag with a singular “humanity” pulling marbles out one at a time. The analogy is too broken to be useful for the discussion.

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

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?

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miltonlost an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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