Comment by upwardbound | Hacker News Reader

Comment by upwardbound | Hacker News Reader

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I work in the AI safety field (my team discovered Prompt Injection) and I absolutely advocate the Dune solution. I even have a tattoo on my arm that I got so that people will ask me about this and I can explain the proposal. The tattoo says "The 1948 Initiative" which has two layers of meaning:

    (1) It is a proposal for humanity to protect ourselves from being slaughtered by AGI by pre-emptively implementing a total global ban on all integrated circuit fabrication, voluntarily reducing ourselves to a ~1948 level of electronics technology in order to forestall our obliteration.

    (2) The year 1948 represents the power of human unity for the purpose of saving our species.  The west, the Soviets, and China united together to fight and defeat the Nazi's (perpetrators of the Holocaust) and the Empire of the Rising Sun (perpetrators of the Rape of Nanjing).  America, the USSR, Western Europe, and China united to stand against the forces of pure evil, and we won.

A ban on IC's (integrated circuits) still allows spaceflight (compellingly illustrated in the setting of the Star Wars universe if you pretend that droids are powered through magic or by having souls, not IC's) and this 1948 level of electronics tech also still allows sophisticated medical technology including the level of genetic engineering which will be necessary to unlock human immortality.

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Disclaimer: OP @upwardbound doesn't hide, and in fact, takes great pride in their involvement with U.S. state-side counterintelligence on (nominally) AI safety. Take what they have say on the subject with a grain of salt. I believe the extent of US intel community's influence on "AI safety" circles warrants a closer look, as it may provide insight into how these groups are structured and why they act the way they do.

"You’re definitely correct that [Helen Toner's] CV doesn’t adequately capture her reputation. I’ll put it this way, I meet with a lot of powerful people and I was equally nervous when I met with her as when I met with three officers of the US Air Force. She holds comparable influence to a USAF Colonel."

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38330819

Agreed.

I see this less as a matter of jingoism (though I do love the US as the "least bad" nation in a world where no nation is purely blameless) and more as a matter of pragmatism and embracing what power I can in order to help save our species

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I also think the US Constitution + Thirteenth Amendment is quite noble and it's something I genuinely believe in.

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Ha! Good one!

Let's just roll back all our healthcare research, logistics, environmental advancements etc. because some boogey man tech might do something bad perhaps at sometime in the future maybe!

The majority of our healthcare research, logistics, and environmental advancements, and most other aspects of 21st-century living can be switched over to alternative technologies that do not require computers. The main thing we will definitely lose is social media, which many people would be glad to see removed from our lives, as it provides shallow and addictive dopamine hits, much like cigarettes, while diminishing the amount of time left in the day that people get to spend together in person.

Moving to non-computer-based technological alternatives takes significant cleverness. The engineers of the analog electronics era were geniuses compared to us today, and we can re-attain that lost level of skill. I welcome the challenge.

No one, not the most screen addicted teenager nor the smarmiest snake-oil beauracrat, is gonna stand by ANYONE that suggests we need to remove ALL computers from society. Even the people critical of AI and social media are more than fine with computers and smartphones.

How would you even begin to enforce that?

Regarding enforcement: Semiconductor foundries are physically large and require extremely high-precision equipment and very pure materials. They can easily be detected and can be isolated via blockades. Once the global superpowers are on board with the Initiative, each superpower can enforce the ban within the territories of their sphere of influence. There is no motive to cheat, none, because this is a matter of our children's survival. Cheating on the ban even a little bit directly threatens the survival of your own children and grandchildren. Additionally, all of the superpowers possess satellite surveillance capabilities which can be used to track global supply chains and ensure everyone is being honest.

The most important thing is to prevent all new fabrication of IC's, but I believe that as a compromise, it is acceptable to "grandfather in" already fabricated IC's.

Existing computers and phones could be allowed to continue to exist for as long as they can be kept running. With careful stewardship of this resource they should probably last for several centuries, with batteries being swapped for new ones every few years. Current computers are probably not fast enough to run true AGI, so this should be an acceptable level of risk and makes the Initiative more palatable to society.

Who's going to agree to take on all that cost for no good reason? Why incur all that cost, even if it was feasible, for a mere unquantified possibility of something bad happening. Even if there was a firm date and "bad stuff" readily understood, e.g., Skynet going self-aware sometime in mid 2037, then folks will just do the bare minimum to forestall it at minimum cost.

Social media is going nowhere, especially if it currently makes money, just because of some idea of it potentially being bad.

(here are some pictures of the tat, in case anyone would like to get similar artwork done)

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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y7uy5qyyY80t9DeWWLWUfD-aekz...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JoPSfsAzHfMbQhsl8dPGvs12Fln...

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Buddy, you’re a cool dude for doing this but you could have told your artist about kerning.

Hahaha true... :)

Damn that's very good joke or very stupid comment. Damn can't really distinguish between them.

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