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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Oh good grief, not another we should do this before we do that post. As if the entire human species is incapable of walking and also chewing gum simultaneously.

Let’s stop Nick Bostrom and a load of AI experts from doing their current work, put them all on a plane and send them to China to solve political oppression. I’m sure that will work.

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From your remark you'd think these were two entirely different problems. I'll try to say it more clearly. There are people deliberately promoting fear of long-term problems as an excuse to not address these short-term problems.

I'm ok with people working on both. I just feel so much less attention is being placed on these more immediate problems. Tesla has deployed to production software for driving that is unable to detect pedestrians. So at least Tesla can't do both.

Every time there's an autopilot related accident, they're all over the mainstream news, and prominently voted up and extensively discussed on HN. That isn't going to stop because the media will be too busy reviewing Nick Bostrom's next book to report on the latest Autopilot death.

I see it quite differently. raising the long term issues is absolutely part of highlighting the risks of these immediate issues. They are part of the same problem, so raising their profile is synergistic, not competitive.

> As if the entire human species is incapable of walking and also chewing gum simultaneously

Do you believe that attention is an infinite resource?

No I don't, but 6 billion people is a lot of attention to spread around. Why?

Do you believe human capacity is infinitely fungible and specialization is a myth?

Because many communist regiemes already found out how they are not with command economic failures. Even if the specialization is misapplied reaiming them takes time - like how you start with training a battlefield useful longbowman's grandfather.

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