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Comment by coryrc | Hacker News Reader

Essentially no one in the USA fails to get a license if they try for one. There's no ongoing competence testing. Washington State recently failed to advance legislation to make the fourth DUI have a jail sentence because it would be too expensive imprisoning that many people.

> Cars are dangerous.

You can kill yourself with a kitchen knife in your own kitchen. Should be "heavily regulate" that too? How about we have remotely-locked drawers and medicine bottles and you have to talk with a government shrink before opening?

> Comparing anything to a car ... means it should be tightly regulated and controlled

Popsicles come in many colors, just like cars! Regulate the popsicles!

AI is, so far, like having a bottle of acetaminophen. Deadly if used incorrectly. It should be easy to lock away from children. It is not for the government to get in the way of how adults want to use it.

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> You can kill yourself with a kitchen knife in your own kitchen. Should be "heavily regulate" that too?

You can kill yourself with anything. That doesn’t make everything dangerous in the way we’re using the word.

Earlier you said “cars are literally the number one killer of children 0-14 in the United States.” That makes them dangerous in a way kitchen knives, which aren’t commonly killing children outside hypotheticals, are not.

> AI is, so far, like having a bottle of acetaminophen

If acetaminophen were sold as a service where a dude would come to your door to deliver each pill, sure.

Oh, and the delivery guy is paid a commission. And it isn’t a percentage of each delivery, but a multiple.

> Washington State recently failed to advance legislation to make the fourth DUI have a jail sentence because it would be too expensive imprisoning that many people.

Mandatory perhaps but you're already likely to receive a sentence on your second one at the judge's discretion. That's how it should be IMO as mandatory sentences subvert the justice system thus shouldn't be permitted.

So like a bottle of cough syrup it should have a child-lock cap and be required to be 18 and show I.D. to buy?

First, cough syrup ID checking is not about deaths, as nearly none are associated with dextromethorphan abuse (17 from 2000-2010, and most not from OTC). But an estimated 980 deaths/year from acetaminophen abuse: https://www.propublica.org/article/tylenol-mcneil-fda-behind...

So that's a great example: harm adults because young people have access to something which is hardly dangerous, but set them free with multi-ton killing machines once they turn 16 years old and let them buy an actually-deadly medicine with no restrictions.

Regulation which says "adults should easily be able to enable client-side child protection settings on retail devices" would be fine. It's not okay for government to make it necessary for LLM providers to verify my identity.

> nearly none are associated with dextromethorphan abuse

What do the numbers look like from before bottles were child locked?

It's the same. Dextromethorphan gets you high; there were only 17 deaths from 2000-2010, as I said. That's per-week numbers for acetaminophen.

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