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Comment by glonq | Hacker News Reader

As is often the case, John is right.

The peasants deserve crossbows ;)

Does this idea work at all though? Like for one, did peasants ever in history actually have crossbows and if they did, did it ever actually help them? Like to me the crossbow sounds like an expensive weapon that would likely be issued to soldiers in an army and the idea that a peasant would have one of their own seems unlikely. I don't know the history but it just doesn't sound right at all to me. Also the closest modern analogy I guess is America where everyone has a gun and the idea that those guns actually pose a threat to the US government or the hegemony of large corporations is... fanciful. The practical effect is inner city gun violence and school shootings, not some balancing effect against corporate greed.

I'm just saying... if the analogy you're using to justify your position seems to be entirely wrong doesn't that kind of undermine your position? It's not obvious to me that "peasants with crossbows" is helping here.

Look up the history of guerilla warfare.

And yet we are not given nukes. Going to be interesting where the lines end up in this new world.

Language models are not nukes and there is no real world evidence that they will become anywhere near this dangerous, or dangerous at all really. Meanwhile you can buy an AR-15 in many states if you can fog glass, or order the supplies to do CRISPR gene editing yourself.

We have people calling for bans on code and math based on nothing more than sci-fi.

I too agree with Carmack that AI doomerism has a definite subtext of concern for changes in power dynamics.

"no real world evidence that they will"

what is that mean, anyways?

let's break it down

no:

"there isn't any"

real world evidence:

"reason to believe"

that they will become dangerous

i think he's referencing how the only reason anyone would think that there's any kind of existential threat is from sci-fi doomerism

however i feel like perhaps i missed the point of your comment, if so could you explain?

Evidence necessarily belongs to the past. It is something that already exists - a known fact, an event, etc. How on earth there could be evidence of things that have never been?

"There is no evidence that a black swan will be ever found". Hmm. OK.

So far, there hasn't been evidence that AI poses an actual danger to human society. There are lots of predictions that it could, or fictional scenarios where it does. But no actual real-world cases.

Let me rephrase.

There hasn't been evidence that AI doesn't pose an actual danger to human society. There are lots of predictions that it could not, or fictional scenarios where it does not. But no actual real-world cases.

See my point?

There is no evidence you will become a serial killer, but there is no evidence you won’t. I could certainly construct plausible scenarios where you do and even write a book about it. Therefore we should lock you up now.

Banning things on the basis of evidence free speculation is a really dangerous road to go down.

Probabilistically there is some evidence you'll become a serial killer.

For example, if you were being hired by law enforcement and you had written a number of books that stated that being a serial killer was a good thing, then you wouldn't get hired.

There appears to be a particular type of black and white response in this thread that seemingly ignores that the world is black and white.

I'm not asking anybody to ban anything. I'm just pointing at a flawed piece of logic.

Again - there is no evidence (and cannot be! - by definition) of things that never happened before.

Forecasts and opinions are not evidence, that's it.

This is like someone saying there's no proof of God and then responding with there's no proof that there isn't a God. It's safe to say that the burden of proof falls on the one making outrageous claims which is you.

By this very logic you should deny global warming. 1) no human-made global catastrophe ever happened before (no evidence) and 2) it's an outrageous claim with severe implications to the economy, social life, etc - so, why bother?

Except there is evidence that climate change is happening today and it's caused by human soceity. We also have evidence of very different past climates on earth that we know are uninhabitable for humans.

Meanwhile AI dooms day scenarios use sci-fi movies as evidence and humanity has "survived" many technological revolutions in the past. Do you think everyone would care as much if the Terminator movies weren't so popular?

Personally I think there's some risk and problems to solve but it doesn't warrant the authoritarian panic responses it gets.

In my opinion, AI carries an existential risk to the humanity. It has nothing to do with Sci-Fi, but rather is a mere observation of what happens to forest inhabitants when humans come and start building houses. I live in such area. Shall we ban it? No - it's impossible. Too late.

How do you think AI threatens humanity? What do you think will happen?

> or order the supplies to do CRISPR gene editing yourself.

woah what and why

The destructive power of nukes is not the stuff of fantasy and fiction.

The destructive power of human intelligence isn't the stuff of fantasy and fiction either.

Nukes are not that useful for stuff other than extremely destructive explosions.

Besides, we have knives. I'm afraid this mindset will soon demand everything to be pre-cut in licensed facilities and make the knives illegal.

This desire for censorship and restrictions is infinitely ridiculous. Instead of addressing the issues of why would someone want to hurt someone or themselves, they try to eliminate the tools.

This is going to fail, maybe people in UK or in the USA might end up not knowing how things work without formal licensing but people in Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, China, Vietnam will know.

This attitude can actually lead to the downfall of the western societies. WTF the computer wouldn't tell me how to cook meth? That's something that junkies do and it's not the lack of knowing how to cook it that keeps me from doing it. I'm just curious, not looking to harm myself or anybody but I'm being lectured by a computer.

> Nukes are not that useful for stuff other than extremely destructive explosions.

I would like to mention that in the Fallout series, a game that depicts a different version of history where nuclear power was widely accessible, cars and robots have their own nuclear generators. The reality is that if nuclear power was common, we would not have any problems with energy or a power grid.

Nukes and nuclear energy are different things.

It’s also not a secret how to do these things, they teach it to kids. The complexities come from the engineering the device and that’s actually the secret part.

They aren't that different, all told. There is a reason IEDs are a huge safety concern. I'm failing to see how that wouldn't be worse with nuclear power sources.

Or am I mistaken and you could make it so that IEDs from nuclear energy couldn't be done?

IED's are not that much of safety concern actually. The people who intend to use those are. The risks of IEDs don't modulate by the number of people who know chemistry but by the number of people pissed of or delusional enough to make and use one.

Portugal is not much safer from IEDs than Irak because Portuguese are bad at chemistry and Iraqis are all heisenbergs.

I mean... you aren't wrong, having people willing to use an IED is the dangerous thing. More, they are as dangerous as the supplies that they can get ahold of.

I... don't see how that doesn't put a massive hazard on the availability of nuclear power generators everywhere? We have people willing to make and deploy IEDs today. Why would we not have them if nuclear sources were ubiquitous?

(If the idea is we would have the nuclear plants, but that the ubiquitous electronics would not have their own nuclear sources, I can see that. :) )

I don't see how this is relevant. Knowing how to do something is not the same as doing it.

Personally, I'm not anti-nuclear but I'm also not for proliferation of it simply because I don't trust that there are enough serious people to operate a nuclear plant in every city at the same safety levels we have today. That said, I will never advocate for hiding the knowledge for building those.

I am pro nuclear, but portable nuclear generators would be a whole new can of worms.

IEDs are a huge safety concern in battle zones, this isn't terry gilliam's brazil

as the old analogy goes, how big of a chunk of metal do you need to weld to the rail to kill everyone on the train? which part of that should be more illegal?

gun violence is a culture problem, not a security problem

know your threat model

I am only questioning nuclear generators. Such that comparing them to relatively inert metal welded to a rail seems disingenuous.

You can power spaceships with nukes via the Orion drive. Still the highest known to work thrust/ISP ration we have right now.

You can fantasise about it, sure. Knowing how things work helps with that. Thanks to knowing thins, you can even calculate how it would work, write science fiction about it but if the contemporary mentality was in charge during the nuclear age a category of fiction wouldn't exists or would suck badly.

what about giving all humans guns? the crossbow seems a loaded and limited example

Carmack says in one of the subthreads on there that he's pro-second-amendment, so that tracks I suppose.

But it's kinda futile, it's just the illusion of having power and self-governance, when the others have machine guns and worse.

What about a crossbow with a warhead that can kill 100 people?

Sounds like something good to have if you need to make your government behave.

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