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Comment by hashstring | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this is a good take.

The general discussion is definitely prematurely focused on some sort of end-boss fight, while AI and large scale data collection are causing serious harm and privacy concerns to real humans already. It’s only reasonable to expect that this increases in the future.

I would like to see more discussion focussing on these pressing issues.

Also a pause on AI development is not an option, not a solution and is digressing from the issue at hand. Big capital with their hands on big valuable data will support anything that distracts here.

Finally, I do think that AI also brings many positives, I am not against the technology itself at all- we shouldn’t be.

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name a single reason why a pause is not an option. dont say why it would be hard or unlikely or inconvenient or whatever, to exclude it as a possibility means it has to be physically impossible.

of course it isnt physically impossible. AI requires large compute, large resources. you cant advance the state of the art inconspicuously. the only reason you say it isnt an option is because you dont consider AI an existential threat, really, and therefore extreme measures arent justified. but they actually are.

That's not even a valid request. There is obviously no valid reason to require such a pause in the first place. You've been watching too many scifi movies and don't understand the technology.

We are already facing numerous existential threats at the moment, even ones that are deliberately made to be an existential threat, take nuclear weapons.

“Hey fellow nation states, let’s not create nuclear bombs, but let’s pause developments and keep the current power dynamics fixed please” is completely unrealistic. Mind that creating nuclear weapons actually requires technical operations that are factors more complex than “large compute” in many aspects… like… enriching uranium and working with supercritical masses.

> you cant advance the state of the art inconspicuously.

What evidence has led you to believe this?

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