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Comment by vhlhvjcov | Hacker News Reader

For those of us who don’t think you are an idiot (I don’t), could you maybe give us your insights and a history lesson?

I am most intrigued, particularly regarding Oppenheimer and Einstein.

The tldr is that both of them urged Roosevelt to develop the weapon, and only later when the destructive potential of the bomb was obvious expressed regret. Einstein's 1938 letter to Roosevelt was the first step toward the Manhattan project. See https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Resou... if you want to read more.

So it's weird to say Einstein "warned us" about the x-risk of nuclear weapons prior to their development when his letter to Roosevelt was begging for more money to speed up the development of nukes.

I think the entire saga is mostly an unrelated red herring -- AI is nothing like nuclear bombs and reasoning by analogy in that way is sloppy at best.

Mostly? It's just kind of funny that x-risk people point to Einstein and Oppenheimer as positive examples, since they both did literally the exact opposite of "warn the public and don't develop". The irony makes you chuckle if you know the history.

Particularly given the weird fetish for IQ in the portion of the x-risk community that overlaps with the rationalist community, it's also really funny to point out that what they should be saying is actually something like "don't be like those high-IQ fools Einstein and Oppenheimer! They are terrible examples!" ;)

Not at all. My point was that while Einstein said (warned) that nukes are possible and while they were being built in Los Alamos, the lower key physicists,academics and apparently people like you were saying that nuclear explosion is impossible. It was the quite laughable. And it's exactly the situation now, Agis are being built and laymen are in denial.

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