Comment by fruitworks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fruitworks | Hacker News Reader

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>Are you claiming a lack of gun / AI control is democratizing?

This is obviously the case. It results in a greater distribution of power.

>That's not working for (the lack of) gun control in the US at the moment though.

In the US, one political party is pro gun-control and the other is against. The party with the guns gets to break into the capitol, and the party without the guns gets to watch. I expect the local problem of AI safety, like gun safety will also be self-solving in this manner.

Eventually, Gun control will not work anywhere, regardless of regulation. The last time I checked, you don't need a drone license. And what are the new weapons of war? Not guns. The technology will increase in acessibility until the regulation is impossible to enforce.

The idea that you can control the use of technology by limiting it to some ordained group of is very brittle. It is better to rely on a balance of powers. The only way to secure civilization in the long run is to make the defensive technology stronger than the offensive technology.

>> Are you claiming a lack of gun / AI control is democratizing?

> This is obviously the case. It results in a greater distribution of power.

That's the theory. In practice, it doesn't work.

Most people don't spend a lot of time looking for ways to acquire and/or retain wealth and power. But absent regulation, we'll gradually lose out to those driven folks who do. Perhaps they do so because they want to serve humanity and they imagine that their gifts make them the logical choice to run things. Or perhaps they just want to dominate things.

And the rest of us have every right to insist on guardrails, so those driven folks can't take us over the cliff. Certainly those folks can make huge contributions to society. But they can also fuck up spectacularly — because talent in one field isn't necessarily transferable to another. (Recall that Michael Jordan was one of the greatest basketball players of all time. But he wasn't even close to being the GOAT ... as a baseball player.)

Sure, maybe through some combination of genetics, rearing, and/or just plain hard work, you've managed to acquire "a very particular set of skills" (to coin a phrase ...) for making money, or for persuading people to do what you want. That doesn't mean you necessarily know WTF you're talking about when it comes to the myriad details of running the most-complex "organism" ever seen on the planet, namely human society.

And in any case, the rest of us are entitled to refuse to roll the dice on either the wisdom or the benevolence of the driven folks.

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