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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

I would not recommend that people "suck it up", but I think people have to come to terms with the fact that AI is a legitimate technology that is going to transform the way people live and work. That is just a fact of life, as surely true about AI as it was true about the internet, or smart phones, or cars, or radio, or the train.

You can close your eyes and pretend that it is not coming, or you can organize politically to mitigate the damage it is going to do while harnessing the benefits of it. Because it absolutely _is_ going to harm a lot of individuals, even if the best case scenario of benefiting humanity as a whole comes to pass.

There is no possible universe where AI is banned, or it just fails and goes away as a technology. None. People have to just accept that and focus on realistic ways to regulate it and tax it, instead.

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This is the central problem with the dismissals of the tech's capability. Public discourse needs to shift to planning for the economic impact in particular, but the kind of High Brazilism from the naysayers who insist it's a proof of psychosis to even mention AI's potential, makes the inertia in policymakers much easier for them to maintain. Waiting for the financial effects to arrive and then improvising policy is the stupidest way of handling an upheaval on this scale - even if the precise form of those shocks can't be anticipated.

> There is no possible universe where AI is banned

Yes there is

It's just a whole lot more violent than you're imagining

No, there isn't. At this point you would have to wipe out humanity to get rid of AI.

And then hope nothing else ever evolves intelligence.

You'd have to wipe out, like, at MOST about ten executives and star engineers.

Why do you imagine this would change _anything_?

There's a voluminous amount of code and documentation on how to build and run LLMs. You can build your own chatgpt literally in a weekend and run it on a home server, based on publicly available models.

If OpenAI and Anthropic literally evaporated overnight, there would still be Chinese labs training and releasing new models.

Well then the Chinese labs need to evaporate too

Do you think that's going to erase every copy of "Attention is all you need"?

We don't have to get rid of AI entirely to reverse this trend

Society is just 3 meals away from going that route

I'm sorry - but you're not going to ban AI no more than you can ban the transistor. You could limit & limit the potential of who uses it - but historically that seems to benefit the few rather than the many.

Banning doesn't mean the thing you ban disappears, you're stretching the definition quite a lot. The limit you're talking about is what a ban is. I would personally support a complete ban on AI technology impersonating humans. At no point would I expect that would completely get rid of the phenomenon. But it should be seen as extremely cringe and face meaningful push back, given how antisocial and antihuman that is.

> you can organize politically

Can you? Maybe if you can afford an AI powered social media bot farm. What a great technology.

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