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Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

How much do you think Asilomar slowed down DNA research? Do you think without it we'd more more than 10 year ahead? I doubt it. Optimistically we'd maybe have 6 months to a year of additional progress in those fields without it.

And this would only slow it down in a handful of countries. That's not going to keep China from trying to build AGI. If we are in a world where building an AGI is possible and near, I trust OpenAI far more than the CCP to both align it with it's creators, and for that alignment to match up with my values.

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This has been repeated often, but even if it's true, I have to wonder why it's treated as a given with no further exploration. Is it because we as a species will inevitably accept any technological progress once sometime after it's been discovered, before the consequences can be suffered? What will that imply for any other species intelligent enough to get to where we are?

The kinds of theories I mull over tend to delve into the realm of speculative fiction more often than not. The comments section here feels like it could be replicated in the opening chapters of such a novel. We might never know if the speculation pans out before it's too late.

This is all speculative, but not fiction at this point clearly. Sci-fi authors have explored this possibility for decades, maybe their ideas could be of some help? I struggle to see how though; how to train Asimovs three laws for example?

The very point of Asimovs laws is that you can't just make up a couple simple laws and rest assured nothing bad will happen

Alternately, we just let things go on as they are, and China can steal the technology. Much better!

It’s dangerous parrot talking to keep saying “China”. I mean we really have no idea about their thoughts on it because we’re clearly not talking to them.

China has good people living there too you know ?

I'm sure China is filled with wonderful people, I've met plenty of them. But are you saying you think the CCP is always so kind and altruistic they would never research an AGI?

> China has good people living there too you know ?

Are they in charge? If not, are they at least able to elect good people into office?

You can substitute pretty much any country with sufficient resources. From China's perspective, there's the exact same argument in reverse wrt the USA.

(And, of course, it would be more appropriate to talk about governments here rather than countries, but the two have always been conflated colloquially.)

China has amazing peeps. CCP less so.

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