> I can think of no example in history of the entire world deciding to just forsake the development of a technology because it seemed like it could prove to be too dangerous. The same psychological logic always applies.
Can't you? Haven't many (most?) countries agreed to nuclear disarmament? What about biological weapons? Even anti-personnel mines, I think?
Those weapons are still all being developed and would be brought out in any actually existential war where they seemed useful. The agreements would last only as long as the wars were not existential, or as long as the various countries involved believed that use of them, and the resulting retaliation in kind, would be more destructive than not using them. But one way or another, countries still develop them.
I don't think it needs to be a binary to be effective. Yes, those weapons still exist, but understanding of existential risk and political pressures have slowed them considerably and resulted in a safer, more cautious world.
> Haven't many (most?) countries agreed to nuclear disarmament?
This misses the point. He specifically said the entire world because the point is that someone will develop AGI (theoretically; I’m not making a statement about how close we are to this).
9 nations have nuclear weapons despite non proliferation agreements and supposed disarmament. It’s not enough for most countries to agree not to build nuclear weapons if the goal is to have no nuclear weapons. Same for AGI. If it can be developed, you need all nations to agree not to develop it if it don’t want it to exist. Otherwise it will simply be developed by nations that don’t agree with you.
(Also arguably the only reason most nations don’t have nuclear weapons is the threat of destruction from nations that already have them if they try.)
> but only inside your own personal enclosed house.
Isn't it usually illegal to smoke things like cigarettes inside rented homes, legality aside? And don't most people rent? That seems like a whole can to deal with.
Puzzle Pirates was a very big part of my growing up. One of the first online games I had the pleasure of playing. I still download and check in every few years :)
> Far better to spend those $$ on weddings rather than funerals though !
Is it though? Can you elaborate why you think that?
To me, they seem to serve basically the same purpose. They are both, at the end of the day, a way for family & friends to get together and bond over a person/people.
In my experience (60 yrs, almost equally in India and the US) are that weddings are typically more suited as social occasions with fun, cheer, enjoyable music, food & drinks. Funerals also bring folks & families together, but its a sombre and more disciplined/rigid vibe. I know which one I prefer ..
That sounds like a very rewarding job. Sure, you have to deal with the grief that so many death-adjacent fields have to, but at least you get the satisfaction of really helping people through those terrible times.
I think it's more disrespectful to judge so harshly a company - that puts out wonderful, free, open source software - asking for donations 1 or 2 times a year with a message that is easy to close.
Things like star and galaxy formation/interactions are (relatively) straightforward, with fairly simple processes/mechanics at the heart of it. It's easier to predict on such a large-scale what's going to happen.
Things are far more complex on a biological level, which makes it harder to make generalized predictions. I see no reason to infer that life would only consistently evolve into organic life as we know it.
we're talking about the fucking industrial revolution, of course this defaults to the European perspective. Unless you wanna spit some new bars about Aztec foundries and train lines connecting meso-america in the 19th century, then the point stands. At that time, the world appeared to the industrialists of the industrial revolution to be infinite. Nor had humanity discovered the terrible side effects of fossil fuels on the atmosphere.
Sure, of course it's convenient to ignore the native peoples and pretend that prior to the Industrial Revolution the rest of the world outside of Europe was some untapped well of resources that Europeans had a natural right to.
Who might be swept underfoot in this "Information Revolution", I wonder?
Yes, just the other day I saw someone make a comment about write performance in SQLite without considering the plight of the Baltic peoples in the Northern Crusades. It was really convenient of them to do that, fucking typical.
How do you think they're enabling the mass surveillance tech? SQLite got reach bruv.
Your continued erasure of the Baltic people's continues to cut deep into my heart, and your callous candour to their plight, as you discard any chance to mention them, continues to shock me.
Nobody said anything about Europeans having a "natural right". Bad enough to derail a conversation with irrelevant political nitpicking, unforgiveable to use a strawman to do so. Boo.
GP made a comparison between what we're going through and the Industrial Revolution. Ignoring the negatives of that revolution - like by acting as though the "new world" was uninhabited/unused and so Europeans had a right to its resources - seems like a bad idea.
Also doesn't justify doing the same damn thing again, which is exactly what all the people long on this technology fully expect to be allowed to do. Any further investment they have to do to ensure the outcome will just be chocked up to cost of doing business. And the capital funding all this is in so few hands, and in the hands in particular of such characters that don't concern themselves with not repeating atrocities of the past in new and interesting ways, that it is virtually guaranteed we're on the road to societal scale disruption. 'Tis the reason such inconvenient points are in need of being pounded home until they are impossible to ignore.
> not repeating atrocities of the past in new and interesting ways
sorry, are you suggesting that colonialism and LLMs are equivalent in terms of atrocity? I don't feel like they're really comparable.
> 'Tis the reason such inconvenient points are in need of being pounded home until they are impossible to ignore.
and what do you think is going to happen here? People so basic that this will never happen. At best you gotta create a grassroots political movement with political representation and clear legal aims and get that past the electorate. However see how the casuals lap up generated content for how ambitious an vision that is. LLMs will prevail and even if public boycotts were extreme, it will just move further and further behind the curtain and the end outcome will still be the same.
I don't see how derailing conversations on hacker news by taking issue with a particular analogy to grind a colonial axe is really furthering that. At the end of the day, regardless of the perspective of our identity, we'll get fucked by network effects and rounded out of systems by those with more influence and power. Sometimes by those who even share our perspective. So to use perspective as a point of division just further fragments what needs to be a whole to enact change.
