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Comment by kajaktum | Hacker News Reader

I dont understand why people are so opposed to or feel its ridiculous to halt progress on AI when we do the same thing for experiments on human genome? Is China going to stop because we do?

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We can't stop and nobody will. This is pretty much a matter of national security soon. Stopping now means being left behind. Maybe some countries will regulate this but I expect gov agencies to steam ahead full blown.

It's a good thing this sort of recklessness hasn't resulted in a nuclear war, despite the massive arms race during the cold war. Difference is that AI is a lot easier to obtain than fissile material.

Because it’s rather expensive and difficult for some random person to do human genome research from home, but anyone with the right knowledge and a laptop can still make significant progress in AI while sitting on their couch at home.

With a laptop and the ability to lease huge clusters from cloud providers, maybe.

But that doesn't explain why US as a government is not allowed to do human genome experimentation (HGE) ? In fact, it makes even less sense to make HGE taboo than AI for the reason you mentioned. It doesn't make sense to ban something that the average person can't do anyways, and who's gonna stop government? The situation is even worse in AI.

By your logic, if HGE is cheap and easy, then it doesn't make sense to ban it and we should just let people experiment with their to-be infants all the time. What are you gonna do? Ban something you can do with some test tubes and a needle?

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