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Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

"We are able to think of thousands of hypothetical ways technology could go off the rails in a catastrophic way"

Am I the only one here saying that this is no reason to preemptively pass legislation? That just seems crazy to me. Imagined horrors aren't real horrors?

I disagree with this administrations approach, I think we should be vigilant, and keeping people who stand to gain so much from the tech in the room, doesn't seem like a good idea, but other than that, I haven't seen any real reason to do more than wait and be vigilant?

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Just because we haven't seen anyone die from nuclear terrorism doesn't mean we shouldn't legislate against it. And we do: significant investments have been made into things like roadside nuclear detectors, and during large events we even go so far as to do city-wide nuclear scans from the air to look for emission sources.

That's an "imagined" horror too. Are you suggesting that what we should do instead is just wait for someone to kill N million people and then legislate? Why do you value the incremental economic benefit of this technology over the lives of people we can predictably protect?

“Just because we haven't seen anyone die from nuclear terrorism”

I mean, we have…for debatable definitions of “terrorism”.

Predicted horrors aren't real horrors either. But maybe we don't have to wait until the horrors are realized and embedded into the fabric of society before we apply the brakes a bit. How else could we possibly be vigilant? Reading news articles and wringing our hands?

There's a difference between the trolley speeding towards someone tied to the tracks, versus someone tied to the tracks but the trolley is stationary, and to someone standing at the station looking at the bare ground and saying "if we built some tracks and put a trolley on it, and then tied someone to the tracks the trolley would kill them! We need to regulate against this dangerous trolley technology before it's too late". Then instead someone builds a freeway because it turns out the area wasn't well suited to a rail trolley.

The tracks have been laid by social media and smartphones, we've all been tied to the tracks for awhile and some people have definitely been run over by trolleys, and the people building this next batch of monster trolleys are accelerationists.

I think it's worth noting that we can't even combat the real horrors. The fox is already in the henhouse. The quote that sticks with me is:

"We've already lost our first encounter with AI" - I think Yuval Hurari.

Algorithms heavily thumbed the scales on our social contracts. Where did all of the division come from? Why is extremism blossoming everywhere? Because it gets clicks. Maybe we're just better observing what's been going on under the hood all along, but it seems like there's about 350 million little cans of gasoline dousing American eyeballs.

Make Algorithms Govern All indeed.

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