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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

You lump "gun control" and "nuclear weapons" together here but those are already two wildly different things. Nobody is doing US-style-gun-access for nuclear weapons. It's not "only good guys have nukes" but everyone seems to prefer "only certain governments have nukes" to "both good guys and bad guys have nukes."

Training an AI model is easier to do with off the shelf supplies than building a nuke, but it's not necessarily true that some of the worst dystopian results of AI people are afraid of are equally likely to arise from random smaller private interests vs giant corporations or government. An AI directly plugged into the systems that control the nukes is far scarier than an equally powerful model on your home computer.

(I think this particular pause talk is largely silly, though.)

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> You lump “gun control” and “nuclear weapons” together here but those are already two wildly different things.

And both are radically different than AI.

> It’s not “only good guys have nukes” but everyone seems to prefer “only certain governments have nukes” to “both good guys and bad guys have nukes.”

And yet, even with willingness to wage wars to contain nuclear proliferation, net proliferation continues. And that’s despite the infrastructure and materials being more obvious and less shared with diverse non-problem uses than the infrastructure and raw materials for AI. There’s no way to have an AI non-proliferation regime. It can’t be done, short of conquering the world with a single, massively authoritarian, totalitarian regime (and then, it still can’t be done, because while the first generation of leaders might be AI true believers, we know from the history of authoritarian regimes that that can’t long be guaranteed, so eventually you’ll have a global authoritarian regime with no counterbalancing force that decides to use AI for itself while keeping it out of the hands of its citizens.)

Governments always have their own assault rifles and, usually, access to nukes or nuclear defense by proxy. By extension, they will have their own AI and we can only try to achieve some kind of parity with our own access to AI as citizens. Also, if there was a large personal incentive to own a nuclear bomb in a suitcase or something, wealthy people would probably hire personal security to carry one around. In the distant future, their spaceships will almost definitely have nukes or the equivalent. It seems like this all mirrors the weapons of war debate in some ways.

Suppose P is a bad thing.

We pass a law saying: "You cannot have P."

Only people who follow laws will not have P.

Suppose P has a 1% chance that it destroys the Earth as soon as it's created, whether it's in the hands of people who follow laws or not.

We pass a law saying: "You cannot have P."

The market incentive for producing P is now vastly reduced, because the black market is a fraction of the size of the real market, so P never gets built in the first place because it takes a lot of investment and expense to do so.

Your argument seems to rely on the assumption that the black market doesn’t grow when the legal market is eliminated, which every attempt to regulate things in history contradicts.

It only assumes that the black market doesn't grow to the same size as a legal open market. I don't think history disagrees with that. You can look at the cannabis business as just one example. How many VCs were plowing big money into cannabis operations before legalization was on the menu? How does that compare with after legalization?

>whether it's in the hands of people who follow laws or not.

This is basically doing all of the work in your comment.

I don't agree that AI in malevolent hands carries a risk that is equal to AI in neutral of good hands.

I agree that with sufficiently good hands, who are sufficiently confident that they are not in a competitive race, they might be able to wait until they are supremely confident that P will not destroy the world before they switch it on for the first time. But with even just a little fear of someone else getting it first, that prudence might well go out the window, even if there are no malevolent hands involved.

That depends entirely on what P is, as the nukes example clearly shows.

More nations have nukes than they used to, but far fewer than have guns. Life is lived in a gray area that the "not everyone will follow the law therefore the law is useless" mindset somehow ignores.

And if "P" is "an AI that controls weapons deployed/used in the US," say, then enforcement is likely to be more effective than just "nobody can have AI at all."

So it's probably worth thinking about what specific things we do and don't want AI to be used for, and which of those are more or less practical.

EDIT: oh, and it also assumes that P is something people want for itself, vs "if they're gonna do it I better do it too" or "it's 10% cheaper and the externalities don't directly effect me THAT much" or other similar behaviors that can emerge without regulation. Banning leaded paint and leaded gas vs banning alcohol, say.

An important factor in nuclear proliferation that may or may not be relevant to AI: there are at most half a dozen "lineages" for nuclear weaponry - countries that developed gaseous centrifuges on their own without assistance from an existing nuclear state. By my count they boil down to 1) US, 2) Germany via WWII R&D, 3) UK, 4) Russia, 5) URENCO, 6) South Africa.

None of the most recent entrants to the nuke club did so on their own. China got help from Russia while Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea gained it via Abdul Qadeer Khan's URENCO espionage.

It'll be interesting to see if AI will see the same kind of limitation. If so, then maybe there will be some chance at limiting a catastrophic spread.

Bad people will have less P than otherwise. Still a win to ban P. As evidenced by all the other countries with sane gun control and relatively low gun violence.

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