A real nuclear engineer with the knowledge he needed would also have said "no, don't do that and I won't help you." We are programming the knowledge into the ai agent. Giving ai a little discretion makes sense too.
Fair enough, I misread your original comment.
The broader point stands that the limitation on creating nuclear weapons and reactors is not knowledge but materials. Even if he himself had a PhD in nuclear physics he still couldn't have built one in his backyard because he wouldn't be able to get the materials. A nuclear physicist can't build a reactor without materials anymore than a pilot can fly without an airplane.
If a nuclear engineer enabled and instructed him, would there not be liability for the hazard? If ml is going to be an expert instructor for nuclear, hacking, bio hacking, virus research, do the peddlers of the ai product escape ethical or legal responsibility just because "its an app?"
Should the library where he read books about physics also be liable?
E.g. look at programming - people who don't know how what a compiler is, are making things that I could only make after a few years into my programming journey.
You obviously get the same results in chemistry or nuclear physics or whatever, the models are heavily trained on code in particular, but if there's a chance that we've reduced the ease of committing certain kinds of crime that were previously gate-kept by knowledge, we should know about it.
I bet the professional would be able to sate the kid's curiosity safely without creating excessive risks.
I've come across detailed instructions on how to synthesize sarin gas on the internet. Anyone who follows those instructions will probably die horribly. I still thought it was pretty interesting.
This is a pretty different argument though. The comment that started this thread was talking about LLMs making potentially dangerous knowledge more available to bad actors, now we're talking about LLMs giving personally harmful advice.
You asked:
>If he had the help of Claude at the time, how much more dangerous would his bumbling have been?
Probably less? Even if you removed all the guardrails from Claude it would've likely told him his reactor plan wouldn't work and that he would have a high chance of poisoning himself and the environment.
There is an extremely narrow band of things that the AI shouldn't be answering, and that is generally immediately-actionable advice that allows someone to build something of harm to others. But even then, in an age where Tor, bittrent, i2p, abliterated local models, etc are freely available, let alone numerous books and online resources, is there even a point? Is it worth fully compromising the principles of free agency to an increasingly oppressed populace?
But instead of that we are handing the keys to regressive and repressive governments to order the suppression of any knowledge they deem inconvenient. I really doubt anyone is going to take a principled stance when the company's party minders threaten local staff with a rubber hose or incarceration.
I'm sure China et al are already doing this.
For the past 30-40 years humanity has received an incredible gift in these sand-powered thinking brainboxes. A gift that allows the common man to empower himself with a force multiplier towards his own success, and now access to superintelligence the likes of which few have ever seen. These can be tools to destroy the oppression that governs our lives from foolhardy, greedy, bootlicking control freaks. And here we are squandering it.
It's just the latest incarnation of a timeless debate. In the 1970s and 1980s it was about the Anarchists's Cookbook, which was revived again in the 1990s when it started circulating on the Internet. There are many timeless debates, but the debate over weapon-making knowledge is much more concrete and predictable.
So far it seems that the clearest use for these tools is to enhance, rather than destroy, oppression.
1. Suppression / elimination of white collar jobs
2. Negative cognitive effects, especially for young people
3. Accelerated decline in social media / information ecosystems. Increasing polarization, hard to tell fact from fiction.
4. Environmental impacts: increased energy usage means more carbon in the atmosphere, climate change accelerates.
5. Software security incidents increasing. Hard for individuals and small organizations to defend themselves.
6. “Power to think” vested in a very small group of organizations/labs. Doing work which should only require a computer and freely-available software will now be gated by expensive subscriptions. Once you “vibe code” a significant portion of your software you’re locked in and cannot go back to maintaining it without frontier-model level assistance.
> A gift that allows the common man to empower himself with a force multiplier towards his own success, and now access to superintelligence the likes of which few have ever seen.
As long as that "gift" requires me to call up Sam Altman's datacenter every time I want to do anything with that "superintelligence", it's not empowering, it's deepening the control.
That sounds like what Claude would say unless he was really good at jailbreaking it, which would IMO imply he knew he was chasing after a bad idea.
The concern here is not if an amateur attempt to make a reactor, hack a bank, bioengineer a medicine/poison is successful or not. Interactive and instructive access to some forms of knowledge used to come with discretion along side instruction.
Yes, perhaps your swearing at me in this context is a little hysterical
Step 1. Obtain pliers
Step 2. Obtain 300 discarded smoke detectors
Step 3. Start yanking!
You'd maybe get a sketchy but near-viable plan that could be dangerous if asked for a dirty bomb, but there the danger would more be the conventional explosives and not where to source radioisotopes, as it was already common knowledge that most residential smoke detectors contained americium until recently.