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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

I tend to think the car comparison is cause for optimism. Prior to mass car ownership you would assume that such things in the general population would be enormously more dangerous than they have proven to be.

We live with the dangerous aspects of cars as the utility they provide is so high. The same will prove true of AI.

Humanity also has a huge problem with the mortality of the species as a whole. At some point we will be extinct. Will we have evolved into something else before this? Or will we choose to replace ourselves with machines? It is a valid choice to make in the face of changing circumstances which will occur no matter what we do.

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> We live with the dangerous aspects of cars as the utility they provide is so high. The same will prove true of AI.

I'm not so sure on the utility of cars. If you replace "car" with "internal combustion engines", I would agree 100%. But most social utility of ICEs is in cargo transport and utility vehicles (ambulances, firefighter trucks...). Mass use of small cars solve mostly the problems they create themselves. For example, car-centric cities suffer from sprawl, so everything is far away and you can't even buy bread without owning a car, because walking to the bakery would take too much time.

Mass car ownership has been a disaster; the entirety of society was reorganized around them causing urban sprawl and long commutes; nevermind the myriad conflicts around the world caused in the pursuit of oil.

The road deaths are an incredibly minor party of the harm caused by cars.

> Prior to mass car ownership you would assume that such things in the general population would be enormously more dangerous than they have proven to be.

An assumption that was correct and involved large-scale propaganda efforts to blame pedestrians for the harm inflicted upon them, including blaming children for their own deaths. U.S. car accident fatalities are also still to this day at developing country levels and every actually developed country largely has public transportation infrastructure. And this is before we get into the blight that is American urban design, evolving to serve the needs of this mass car ownership, with all its down stream environmental harms.

> We live with the dangerous aspects of cars as the utility they provide is so high. The same will prove true of AI.

And along the way we have arranged our physical surroundings, legal system, and cultural mores in such a way that cars are significantly more dangerous than they need to be.

200 years of internal combustion engines and we're slowly waking up to the fact we might have fucked up our atmosphere beyond repair, hn take: cars are amazing with only slight drawbacks

Humanity will never learn

While I mostly agree, we had state driver licenses almost immediately at the advent of the consumer automobile.

I am not sure we could do that today. I think the push would largely to be to ban the automobile completely as too dangerous if we had to do it in 2024.

This is all just a mirror being held up to such a wealthy society and the changing risk preferences that come with that over time.

Self-replicating, super intelligent pieces of software are a little different than cars though.

> Or will we choose to replace ourselves with machines?

Bio-engineering seems much more likely.

You're missing the point of the car section. The point isn't that cars were a dangerous technology.

The point is that just as the car replaced the horse, programs on computers are set to replace the human mind. Right now, we see only the beginnings of the trend; inventions which look interesting but limited. But eventually, and perhaps sooner than many believe, the replacement of human cognition will radically transform the world in unprecedented ways.

And you missed my point

> The point is that just as the car replaced the horse, programs on computers are set to replace the human mind

My point is this is not inherently a bad thing. At some point either the human mind is overtaken by another species or AI. We must learn to accept this inevitability.

Right now we are not so much choosing to replace ourselves with machines as stumbling into it through hubris and ignorance. If the argument is we should accept our demise to make way for something better, we should be more explicit and deliberate about that. Most people are not imagining that future. And there's not convincing reasons to believe our current path will lead to something "better".

I think you're right that I misread your first two paragraphs though. Sorry.

That sounds pretty bad to me. "At some point" would probably be millions of years in the future, but you're ready to force the issue this decade. If you asked everyone in a developed country what they think about completely upending life as they know it and replacing it with something unknown; that might be better, or might be horrifically worse, we'll just have to see what happens; most people would be strongly opposed to that proposition.

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