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Comment by littlestymaar | Hacker News Reader

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Possible outcome: Gray goo scenario (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo)

A recent "popular culture" reference to the scenario mentioned in the article is the video game, "Horizon: Zero Dawn."

Powerful self assembling machines controlled by artificial intelligence more capable than the average human, not your flavor of the month then I guess?

More seriously, are there public examples where inventors/technologists have ever actually said "we could do this but we won't"?

Common excuse for this kind of behavior is "evil people will do it regardless, so the only option for us is do it too to be prepared for when evil people use it for evil purposes".

It's weird that no one thinks to build an Iron Dome until well after the nuclear arms race has been chugging along for a while. The goal should be to checkmate potentially ruinous branches of a tech tree, not to be in perpetual check with them as they grow ever longer and spikier.

In practice, it's always the evil guy saying that though.

Or if you flip cause and effect, power corrupts.

That's a common saying, but honestly I don't really buy it anymore: I feel like it's just a selection bias: in average one does not climb up to the top unless they are a psycho.

That has basiscally been the cringeworthy stunt of Sam Altmann playing chuunibyou claiming his AI is oh so dangerous.

Demonic scientists are thinking hard how to feed our planet to machines.

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