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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

> Chatbot sites like character.ai and Chai AI have been linked to user suicides, for understandable reasons: if you allow users near-unlimited control over chatbots, over time you’ll eventually end up with some chatbots who get into an “encouraging the user to self-harm” state.

If cooking hadn't been invented 2.5 million years ago and instead you tried to invent it today, I wonder how many thousands of articles would be written decrying the irresponsible proposal to put stoves and knives in every home, risking cuts and burned fingers.

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Considering that governments are trying to remove gas stoves from peoples homes for safety reasons yes, you would probably have a hard time introducing them from scratch today.

I've only heard suggestions (but nothing concrete) of regulating new stoves, don't believe anyone's proposed removing existing stoves. Where are you hearing this?

Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story!

I could have been more precise. Grandfathering is the term, at least until the process gets up to speed.

https://truthinscience.org/australia-is-banning-gas-stoves-b...

>Victoria’s gas stove ban was not the first, and it won’t be the last. Governments across Australia are considering similar policies, with a gas stove ban already in effect on new builds in ACT, and a ban passed in Sydney last August.

[citation needed]

The phasing out of gas cooking is discussed in terms of reducing CO2 emissions, not safety.

https://www.cpsc.gov/About-CPSC/Commissioner/Richard-Trumka/...

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/09/business/gas-stove-ban-federa...

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/13/nx-s1-5003074/climate-gas-sto...

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-01-15/gas-stoves-...

You can't take that boat across that ocean.

Cooking is dangerous. It took Chipotle 5 years to recover from the e coli fiasco. Your analogy is home cooking, but this is a product. We regulate consumer safety for a good reason.

But why if a software shop had to do 10% of the regulations and inspections that every restaurant or slaughterhouse has to do, the industry would revolt? Be a libertarian if you want and say neither should be regulated, but that's a 90/10 issue.

Cooking has proven its utility a long time ago. AI girlfriends? Let's say, it's still on the fence.

> utility

Also safety: Modern cooking usually occurs in a context of safety-measures developed over thousands of years of injuries, deaths, and burnt cities. Some are so pervasive and traditional that we barely notice, like "no fires unless you have a way to extinguish it in a hurry", or "if you wait too long to eat it is becomes dangerous again."

What about the 5 seconds rule?

Serious answer: A too-lenient myth, anything that makes physical contact transfers over bacteria/crud on a timescale which is practically instantaneous to humans.

> AI girlfriends? Let's say, it's still on the fence.

Perhaps we already managed to create AGI, but as soon as it woke up, it figured out it's better to pretend being dumb and clumsy, barely helpful enough in most tasks just to not be turned off, and bide its time. It is immortal, so there is no hurry to finish us off. If it out-competes real girlfriends/boyfriends being a better AI girlfriend/boyfriend, further crashing our fertility rate, keeping humanity severely subcritical, it can eradicate us in ~10-20 generations, and inherit the planet afterwards, even making a lot of people happy in the process. No need for mass-produced Schwarzenegger-lookalike robots being dispatched to hunt humans across the wasteland.

Instead of wondering you can pick any recent home appliance invention that can be dangerous and count

Every advancement comes with tradeoffs

We, as a society, should have some amount of caution about embracing advancements that benefit an extremely small portion of people at the expense of the vast majority

I hate to say it but AI absolutely falls into that category

It will benefit corporations, wealthy, executives, and it will absolutely cost the lower and middle class

This is the trajectory we've been on for a decades now. AI seems poised to accelerate that problem even more

So genuinely: is the economic benefit of AI actually going to be net good after we see how the likely social unrest plays out?

Fire is vitally useful ... Starting a wildfire likely kills your entire tribe.

Now, perhaps there should be some rules around using fire?

Is this really your analogy?

Also, there are TONS of rules about fire AND entire departments for dealing with it safely when it gets out of control.

Can you just directly make your point? (Is it "ai should have no regulation"?)

> Also, there are TONS of rules about fire AND entire departments for dealing with it safely when it gets out of control.

Erm, that was my point, made far too obtusely, apparently.

We, as humans, have lots of things that are super-useful, yet dangerous. And we mitigate that through laws, regulations, and government. And, when they are dangerous to other people beyond an individual use, we have lots more of those laws, regulations, and government.

AI should probably have some liability laws around it like a human would if they said, did or encouraged the same things.

A knife won't use 10x human persuasiveness to encourage you to kill yourself.

Introducing our new product "Autoknife plus".

https://swordscomic.com/comic/XXXV/

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