Reading the comments here, let’s take a moment to mourn another technology that so called HN hackers want to see regulated en masse by their big daddy government.
Like drones, 3D printing, and now the simple pleasure of building your own e-bike. It seems like a certain demographic of NIMBY/Karen has taken over and is hell bent against makers and anything remotely cool, DIY, that could even be slightly more dangerous than a game of Pickleball.
Like it or not, if people who aren't big brained HN genius hackers like yourself do reckless things with powerful technology, like a stupid teenager killing someone's baby by running them over with an e-bike at max speed on a sidewalk around a sharp corner, then broader society will hate that technology, and then that woke freedom you crave will get wiped out by those small brained normies. The point is that it is better to set some rules ahead of garnering that hatred, so that the whole practice doesn't get wiped out by the 95% of the public who are those aforementioned idiots (at least as you see them).
But as a morally righteous big brained HN edgelord, feel free to live your anarchist life on a seastead in the middle of the ocean running drones into icebergs and enjoying the whiz of throttling your exquisitely powerful ebike on the deck of your boat if you please.
This doesn't seem to actually be the case. A stupid teenager ran over a baby by driving onto the sidewalk and killing the child there and broader society does not actually hate cars. In fact, last night another stupid person killed a two-year old by my home. The eye-witness accounts are unholy things (you can go find them on /r/sanfrancisco but I honestly am trying to purge it from my mind). It is not actually the case that the "woke freedom is wiped out by small-brained normies" in my experience.
Every time a cool thing becomes popular I only envy the early adopters who didn't have to worry about regulation too much, and build their companies or brands when the rules were still light. Then with the resources they get, they can spend some of them on adhering to the new requirements, which newcomers have to struggle with. Oh well.
Gotta keep on the edge if you want to enjoy things or be successful.
Have you ever owned a motorcycle or are you making up dramatic terminology to prove a point?
The quick e-bikes aren’t motorcycles, not even close. Something in the Sur Ron class (30-40MPH) would be equivalent to a 50cc 2 stroke which you can ride with nothing more than a drivers license. Even then hopped up Talaria’s are a pit bike and don’t remotely approach a low end sports bike.
Fast e-bikes aren’t bicycles but they aren’t motorcycles. We already have a term for that, mopeds and scooters. Instead of banning everything the clear solution would be to treat them the same as mopeds (Have to be 18, wear a helmet, may or may not need a license) and call it a day without all the drama.
> But if they have to launch 10-14 times in order to get the propellant to the LEO depot in order to fuel the Lunar Starship, can we actually deliver that many launches worth of LOX and LNG to the launch pads in the timeframe needed
If only Starbase was located somewhere near abundant gas pipelines, within spitting distance of of the Texas Shale Oil boom…
Symmetry is not guaranteed. If someone creates a deadly pathogen with a long pre-symptomatic period (which we know is possible, since HIV works this way) it could infect essentially everyone before discovery. Yes, powerful AI would likely rapidly speed up the process of responding to the threat after detection, especially in designing countermeasures, but if we don't learn about the threat in time we lose.
There are people today who could create such a pathogen, but not many. Widespread access to powerful AI risks lowering the bar enough that we get overlap between "people who want to kill us all" and "people able to kill us all".
This is not a gotcha argument, this is what I work full time on preventing: https://naobservatory.org The world must be in a position to detect attacks early enough that they won't succeed, and we're not there yet.
For every person that thinks about creating the HIV-like deadly pathogen, there will be millions more thinking about how to defend people against such pathogen, how to detect it faster before symptoms arise, how to put up barriers to creating them, and possibly even how to modify our bodies to be naturally resilient to all similar pathogens. Just like what you're doing here. I don't think we should mark knowledge or intelligence itself as the problem. If that's true then we should be making everyone dumber.
We were woefully under prepared for COVID despite many people predicting that very event. At the very least, we should have had stockpiles of PPE from the beginning.
It's not enough for a handful of people to predict something. You have to get the entire nation onboard to defend against it.
This is just not thinking clearly. There are bad things that are asymmetric in character, dramatically easier to do than to mitigate. There’s no antidote or vaccine to nuclear weapons.
This is exactly the thinking that has characterized responses to new sources of power through history, and has been consistently used to excuse hoarding of that power. In the end, enlightenment thinking has largely won out in the western world, and society has prospered as a result.
Centralizing power is dangerous and leads to power struggles and instability.
It is not easy to create weapons. Why do you think the physical and legal barriers that exist today that prevent you from acquiring equipment and creating nuclear weapons will go away when everyone becomes smarter?
If they are deemed a supply chain risk under the DPA anyone doing business with them and has government contracts has to drop them, including Google and Microsoft. The $200M is small potatoes compared to this.
Maduro is being prosecuted and there was a warrant out for his arrest. There is no magic soil exemption if you commit a crime against the United States and flee to another country.
I've spoken with engineers who worked on nuclear weapons systems, the consensus is that the public is deeply misinformed about how they work, the dangers, and the implications of weapons being used. The AI is actually right here.
The biggest danger of a nuclear weapon is being hit by flying debris.
Fusion airburst bombs of the modern era are incredibly clean and radiation is only a risk in a very small area (tens of miles) for a short time (days to weeks). In a modern conflict a significant fraction of nukes would be intercepted before they reached the United States. There are far fewer of them than there were in the 1980s (A few 1000's vs 40,000). Most would be used on strategic military targets, ships, bases, etc. Not to say it would be a good time, but it wouldn't be the "end of humanity" or anything even remotely like it.
> it wouldn't be the "end of humanity" or anything even remotely like it
It's very likely that a nuclear conflict between major nuclear-armed states (US, China, Russia, but it could be starting in India or Pakistan as well) would bring an end to humanity as we mean it today.
I really hope that behind all the today's communication bullshit there are deep state masterminds that do not have personal interest in dominating a doomed world.
If nuclear winter was real (It isn’t), and if things completely collapsed (They won’t) you still have places like Argentina with self sufficient economies in the Southern hemisphere and natural resources independent of the USA, Russia, or China.
Nuclear war would be terrible but it would be a lot more like Ukraine than The Day After or Threads. If you’re not at ground zero, don’t act stupid and quickly evacuate, manage not to be impaled by debris your chances of walking away are far higher than anyone realizes. They literally did hundreds of atomic tests in Nevada to prove this.
The more completely fissile material is used up, the higher the explosive yield, so it seems intuitive that fission and fusion bombs should have become cleaner as technology progressed. However, in many cases, even the U.S. has had to play catch-up just to reproduce what they did half a century ago. e.g. Fogbank[1] Delivery vehicles have advanced quite a bit, but the payloads themselves, perhaps not so much.
Even if we assume fission and fusion bombs have become completely efficient in using up their fissile materials, there's still the threat of nuclear winter. Nuclear winter has nothing to do with residual radioactivity. Powerful explosions loft fine particulate matter so high into the atmosphere that it takes years or decades to settle. While it's up there, it blocks sunlight and it spreads around the world. If enough bombs explode and enough sunlight is blocked, agriculture fails and the environment collapses globally. Even a completely unopposed unilateral strike, were it large enough, could doom the aggressor to starvation, social breakdown, and civilization collapse. An exchange on the other side of the planet (e.g. between China and India) poses a direct threat to the U.S., the same as every other nation.
There are people who will be happy to throw shade on the research on nuclear winter, and AI are no doubt lending them equal weight. However, even if they were just as likely to be right as the research that has highlighted these risks, is the risk worth taking? Are you willing to make that bet? An AI that doesn't reason as humans do and can't do basic math without making mistakes might say, "yes".
So, assume 10 of them do make it through defenses. One hits Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, DC, Norfolk, Miami, Chicago, San Diego, LA, SF. That's 28 million people and most of the political, financial, administrative, logistical, shipping and naval centers.
Sure, humanity survives. But in a state akin to Europe in 1918. Massive casualties, destruction, horror, economic calamity, famine, general chaos, which will persist for at least a decade. And this would be in every major developed nation. So... perhaps it is not a good idea to use them. Perhaps the "misconception" that the world will end is the only reason they haven't been used.
A full scale exchange would be much, much worse than Europe in 1918. Against a peer adversary, ABM systems can protect 1 city at the very most.
There will be people on both sides who know how many warheads are required, and in which locations, to destroy the capability to generate electricity and refine petroleum at a national scale. This kind of industrial capacity, once destroyed, takes years to replace. Reserves of fuel, food, and clean water will not last nearly that long. You are looking at hundreds of millions of deaths in weeks or months.
The only people who can seriously entertain this live close enough to a high value target to be assured of their immediate demise.
>Reserves of fuel, food, and clean water will not last nearly that long [i.e., years].
Untrue. A survey done by nuclear-war planners in the 1980s found that there is enough food stored on or near farms to feed half the US population for about 3 years. During peacetime, most of this food is fed to farm animals, but there is no reason it cannot be used to keep people alive instead.
This food, mostly grains and soybeans, must be milled to be nutritious to people, but the (diesel-powered) equipment to do the milling tends to be stored near the food, so the trucks that bring the food from the farms to the population centers can just bring the milling equipment, too (and maybe the equipment for toasting grains, which I understand is widely done to grains fed to farm animals).
Water is continuously falling out of the sky and can also be obtained from underground.
You cannot sustain a population center of any size on rainfall. For that, you need electricity to operate municipal pumps (which will likely be absent, as above - if not immediately after generation and distribution is destroyed, then a few weeks later when fuel for the generators is exhausted). Without that the bulk of the population is dead in under a week.
Repurposing feed grain reserves is interesting, but you need fuel for that as well (plus significant coordination, which seems unlikely in a scenario where many people with the required knowledge and authority may be dead and telecommunications infrastructure is destroyed).
The average person in the US uses about 80 to 100 gallons of water per day. Of course, just to survive, he or she would need vastly less than that (mostly for cooking and drinking, a little for washing and rinsing wounds). A person can of course survive for years without bathing or showering. Indirectly, the average consumption rate is a lot more -- about 2000 gallons. Food production accounts for about 90% to 95% of that, but again during the months and years right after a massive nuclear attack, the survivors of the attack can obtain most of their protein and calories from food grown before the attack. So, you can sustain a "population center" on rainfall, ground water and surface water especially of the members of the "population center" can relocate if they find themselves in a place (Phoenix AZ?) where there is not enough water to go around.
Fuel is similar: the amount currently used by the average person is much higher than the amount needed (i.e., to transport food and other essentials) just to keep people alive until our industrial base can be reconstituted enough that survival becomes easy again, so we can expect to be able to survive for a few years on fuel that was produced before the attack. Most motor vehicles will probably survive the attack, for example, according to analyses made by US war planners during the cold war, and the fuel tanks of each of them will on average be about half full even if no warning of the attack reaches the general public. Home heating is not strictly necessary for survival except maybe on the coldest nights of the year, which is good because I doubt there is enough firewood in the continental US to keep the survivors of the attack warm every night for a few years.
Food collection, consumption is usually way too high at the outset of such a disaster and production later is in no way assured. Look at WWI, The Depression, The Dust Bowl, WWII. Many countries were effectively starving. Both rainfall and ground water assume you aren't having a drought.
Urban centers are not set up for large-scale rainwater collection. There literally isn't enough open space for all the people in cities to leave a pot outside to collect rain water, when it is raining, and it won't be enough water anyway. Even if every person in a city had a receptacle large enough to collect all the water they needed, many of them simply won't be able to haul it up and down stairs. It's completely infeasible.
What would actually happen is the military and national guard would be mobilized. They would use pumps and water trucks to visit acquifers and wells, and distribute water by truck neighborhood by neighborhood. A continuous stream of trucks constantly resupplying cities. If things got really bad they would get water from streams and boil it before distributing, but that wouldn't last long as it would take too much fuel and time. And they would need to completely secure the water supplies, both as a security concern, and to stop all removal of water except for what was absolutely necessary. Water isn't just for drinking and sanitation, it's also needed for a wide variety of processes, businesses, etc. Water really is a huge problem.
There is no way that gasoline, diesel, LPG, etc production/distribution would remain stable. It would be severely hampered and there would be shortages everywhere. Even during previous "normal" wars, fuel was a huge issue.
I don't know where you got the idea that heating wouldn't be necessary in winter? If you mean "humanity would survive", sure, but also a huge chunk of the population in cold places would die from cold and malnutrition over the first and second winter. Most people do not have a -20F sleeping bag, snow boots, wool underwear, etc even in cold places, because they have heating.
> Urban centers are not set up for large-scale rainwater collection.
This is correct. Even in suburban areas, rainfall may be irregular and supplies to collect it (and render potable, depending on the manner of collection) also unavailable to most people.
> What would actually happen is the military and national guard would be mobilized. They would use pumps and water trucks to visit acquifers and wells, and distribute water by truck neighborhood by neighborhood. A continuous stream of trucks constantly resupplying cities.
At this point, I will be explicit concerning my opinion of your 28 million direct casualty estimate upthread. I think this only makes sense if you think in terms of individual city centers being destroyed, which is a massive underestimation. Modern weapon systems with independent reentry vehicles and warheads yielding around 100 kilotons do not destroy cities; they erase whole metroplexes.
In such a scenario there are no major population centers left to supply or contingents of military to supply them at a meaningful scale. I don’t have much interest in arguing how survivors in outlying areas might migrate in response to the supply chain collapse that follows.
With only 10 large metro-areas destroyed, there are still other very large cities and metro areas. Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, Jacksonville, all have over 1M people. San Jose, Austin, Charlotte, Columbus, Indianapolis, Seattle, Denver, Oklahoma City, Nashville, all have from 700K-1M. And there's 20 more with 500K+ people. We have a big-ass country. Military and national guard are spread all over, as well as "industry" that is tapped in time of war (we don't have much of it left, but enough to be useful)
I'm not defending whatever OP's point was, I'm just saying we would have a whole lot of people left. Very few resources, and very poorly distributed, but a lot of people. If we lost 40% of the population it would still be a lot of people.
I think the 10 U.S. metro number itself is somewhat arbitrary here. It’s impossible to say precisely without looking at all parties’ deployed warhead counts and operational plans, but I have seen estimates that put the number of direct casualties over 100 million. (Russia and the United States each have well over 1000 warheads deployed.)
I do accept that towns far from both major metropolitan areas and high value military targets could survive. However, the short term social impact of supply shortages and the longer term agricultural effects of atmospheric changes are difficult to predict.
Would they really be intercepted though? IIUC, no country on Earth has an appreciable number of antiballistic missiles, and the success rate isn’t great.
>The biggest danger of a nuclear weapon is being hit by flying debris.
I thought it was being burned alive in the resulting firestorm because the intense light starts fires over a large area: way beyond the blast zone. This risk could be reduced if we painted everything white- a double win since it would also help reduce the city heat island effect.
You do realize firebombing all major cities could develop into "end of humanity" (no, not everyone will die) for reasons not at all to do with radioactivity?
Nah they actually sound reassuring, I don't trust them but I would like to believe if some crazy president decided to start a nuclear war it wouldn't be the end of humanity.
You might want to go look at the laws that were passed in the wake of WWII. The US could trivially nationalize Anthopic if they want to play games with a weapons technology.
This could kill the golden goose. There is a strong argument to be made that Anthropic has a leading model because of the principled people who built it, and I don’t see how they won’t leave, like many did to go to Anthropic from OpenAI and Google.
Forcing those people to make weapons to be used against citizens is nothing like the total war in WW2. Why wouldn’t the pentagon just buy from another LLM supplier?
The US operation to depose the dictator of Panama in 1989 is one example.
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