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Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

> but neither is pseudoephedrine itself a methamphetemine and yet we regulate its access

I don't think it's a correct argument.

I believe it's not a secret how metamphetamine is made (though I don't know it myself, but I'm too lazy to research for a sake of argument), and it's known pseudoephedrine is a precursor chemical. Thus, the regulation.

No one - I believe - knows how to build an AGI. There is no recipe. It is unknown if transformer models, deep learning or something else is a component, and if that's even a correct path or a dead end. What is known that neither of those is an AGI, and there's no known way to make those AGI. Thus, I'd say the comparison is not correct.

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First of all, pseudoephedrine is an analogy. But with AGI there is literally no historical event to compare it to as a perfect analogy, including the ones I gave above.

> it's not a secret how metamphetamine is made

I didn't say it was a secret. But try sharing the recipe to methamphetamine virtually anywhere online and see how long it stays up; we do in fact try to at least make it moderately difficult to find this information. Perfect is the enemy of good here.

> No one - I believe - knows how to build an AGI.

The problem is that if we wait until someone does know how to build an AGI, then the game is up. We do not know if the weights behind GPT-4 will be a critical ingredient. If you make the ingredients common knowledge before you know they were in fact The Ingredients, you've let the cat out of the bag and there's no retrieving it.

How about we just ban all new research, just in case it turns into something bad? Because - I’m sorry - but what you’re saying sounds to me exactly like this, just less generalized.

I’m pretty sure that if someone figures out AGI they’ll think of the potential dangers before publishing. And even after - AGI, once developed, won’t magically hack the world and spread everywhere, or somehow build itself an army of robots to eradicate humanity, or steal the elections, or cause whatever harm it’s supposed to cause. It’ll be just another human (probably a slow one), except for being not a human. It’ll be a long story before it’ll have any chances to do something impactful, and we’ll have plenty of time to figure out the details. Just like with drug precursors.

Also, meth is a bad analogy. And turns out the recipes can be found just about anywhere, I’ve just checked: https://kagi.com/search?q=how+to+make+methamphetamine so I don’t think “see how long it stays online” is valid either.

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