Hacker News Reader

Comment by uuddlrlrbaba | Hacker News Reader

Part of me questions the ethics of taking money as an employee to build something dangerous, and at the same time seeking protections to speak about it. If truly concerned why still work there?

View on HN

Maybe not as instantly catastrophic and detrimental but all their efforts have “we had to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki without a warning as the tech and power was too cool” vibes.

I doubt a warning would have changed the moral calculus anyway (it's dubious that the warning would result in a civilian evacuation), but given the war mentality at the time it would have been asking quite a lot from the guys fighting. This was a war in which guys were collecting skulls as trophies, well into a "not in the mood to take prisoners" mentality, in a "not surrendering after your capitol city is firebombed for two hours, killing 100 thousand" mentality. Given this context, expecting one side to warn another about an impending air raid just doesn't seem realistic.

The warning was on the table, so it was realistic, but the people dropping the bomb wanted to blow up a city. The warning was in the form of a demonstration of the power away from a city that could have caused the Japanese to change their path in the war. Instead we destroyed them because we were greedy.

Hand waving away a warning as not valuable because people were extra vicious back then is the exact kind of ignorance I’m talking about. To not even try is pathetic, and just blood lust.

The same for OpenAI, to guarantee you can preach about AI danger to the public while developing the danger is just ignorance of one’s own deeds.

The bomb may have stopped the war for the Japanese but in no way was it ever “the only option” or “the best option”. They did it because they could.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com