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Comment by tenpies | Hacker News Reader

> to take ownership of the pace of technological change.

I'm trying to think of a time humanity has tried to do this with an emerging technology and I'm drawing a complete blank.

Imagine pausing during the industrial revolution. Your country would be completely left behind. Internet era? Even worst.

It also occurs to me that in each of these technological changes, there is an educational leap that your populace has to make in order to be competent with the new technology. Schools were standardized and reformed to produce good factory workers. The curriculums were adjusted to make students at least functionally competent with computers.

It seems reasonable to believe that a pause will not just leave you behind economically, but to recover it will take a generation of students to be properly educated before you can actually harness the technological change.

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> I'm trying to think of a time humanity has tried to do this with an emerging technology and I'm drawing a complete blank.

Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asilomar_Conference_on_Recombi...

Agreed. You simply cannot pause an emerging technology as powerful as AI. We all know the US Government will not stop especially within defense circles much less other countries. This same dilemma has appeared multiple times and just has to evolve through learning and development.

I don't really find these "left behind" arguments terribly compelling. They smell of FOMO.

Just looking at the industrial revolution and the internet as examples, many of the "left behind" nations did just fine.

Which ones do you mean? From my coarse understanding, seems like most places that didn't industrialise got colonised by ones that did. Maybe that's not the case with the development of the internet, but still it's the case that the main center of innovation during the early phases (Silicon Valley) is still way ahead of everywhere else (example: OpenAI is based in SF)

> most places that didn't industrialise got colonised by ones that did.

Since the colonization started prior to the industrial revolution, it's not clear that the two are connected.

Examples I would include are Canada, Mexico, and several European nations.

> is still way ahead of everywhere else

Sure. I'm not questioning that. I'm questioning the proposition that whoever isn't ahead of everyone else will have a terrible standard of living.

To directly address one of your examples (but offer no further comment): Bill Clinton once said "We know how much the Internet has changed America, and we are already an open society. Imagine how much it could change China. Now there's no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet. Good luck! That's sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall."

Reminds me of the original use of the term luddite.

https://www.history.com/news/who-were-the-luddites

> I'm trying to think of a time humanity has tried to do this with an emerging technology

The nuclear test ban treaty is close but by then nukes were an established technology.

The biggest corollary to AI is the printing press, whose invention was followed by decades of religious wars because its “early adopters” used it as to mass distribute the violently anti-Semitic ravings of Martin Luther.

Eventually, we arrived at widespread literacy and the greater distribution of knowledge and skills we see today, but it was a quite bumpy and deadly ride to get there. The greatest threat facing us is state, corporations, or rogue cells doing a repeat of the above with LLMs. Arguably this has already happened to a lesser extent with things like QAnon and social media.

I don’t think you can put the genie back in the bottle, but also we must acknowledge that “progress” has often come at a quite steep cost.

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