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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure some people will have issue with my phrasing but, honest question:

Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully?

I guess nuclear weapons might be the best example though research doesn't seem have to actually "stopped" as much as gone underground and we still have country trying to climb that ladder.

But I don't know how relevant that is to LLMs/AI. It almost feels like pandora's box is open and our only option is continue to improve them. There is clearly value in what they do and while I can absolutely see the dangers, for example: authoritative governments and surveillance, I'm not convinced to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

All of technology back to the printing press (and probably before that) could also be said to make it easier for governments to oppress their citizens. Making laws (and enforcing them!) to prevent governments from doing these things feels like that route forward, not trying to stick our heads in the sand.

Perhaps I'm horribly naive, perhaps I just see the SciFi future I've spent my life reading and dreaming about on the horizon and I'm blinded by the reality, perhaps my ideals around "knowledge deserves to be free/accessible" are misguided. I don't know.

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If you read the scenario, you'll see that the regulations are mostly about what people can do with giant compute clusters, and not about the ideas themselves. The ideas themselves are required to be totally transparent to the public.

As for historic precedents: Human cloning, human genome editing, and mirror life seem like one precedent; nuclear weapons and nuclear energy another; come to think of it I think drone delivery was strangled by regulations too...? Plan A isn't a proposal to never build superintelligence, it's a proposal to build it more cautiously and transparently.

Human cloning and genetic editing isn't stalled because we agreed it's unethical. It's not pursued because at the current level of advancements, it's pretty useless. The things we can do there are niche. It's easy to ban something that's not very useful.

If we had a way to make gene edited humans a lot smarter, a lot stronger or live a lot longer? Or a way to quick-grow human bodies to adulthood in a couple years? Capabilities that private actors or countries may want, ethics be damned? That would be closer to what we have with AI right now.

It's not useless. We know enough about DNA to be able to make better humans, but people get real squickly real fast when you talk about that. It has stalled because of that. If we go in and just check the DNA for Downs or Parkinson's, we can't have a conversation on aborting the foetus without religious beliefs coming into play. Designer children aren't a thing, despite the ability to edit DNA to do specific things. Hair and eye color are easy enough to go in and edit for. Humanity has decided to opt out of doing that for now.

Marginally better humans. And IVF paired with embryo selection is very competitive in that niche.

Now, we're getting better at predicting polygenic traits, and we're getting beefy multi-edit pipelines that might provide a meaningful advantage over embryo selection working in multiple animals. But as of yet, the advantage of genetic editing in humans over just doing aggressive IVF and dredging the embryos for desirable traits is minor.

Bit of a chicken and egg problem there. Can't advance the tech fast without actively using it, can't actively use the tech until it's advanced enough for the benefits to override ethical concerns. So it's getting there, but at a glacial pace.

> If we go in and just check the DNA for Downs or Parkinson's

You should consider reading the wikipedia page about Parkinson’s disease.

You should consider reading more deeply than Wikipedia to be properly informed on a subject. There are a handful of very rare mutations that confer a high risk of getting it that we can detect. They are very rare. This isn't the same thing as being able to give a risk score if the DNA doesn't have all the rare mutations. But the science is there for those unlucky rare cases to say there is a high chance that a specific coding of DNA will result in Parkinson's.

Yes, there are examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue a particular technology tree.

For one, Japan banned guns for a few centuries. (Its warrior class was politically powerful and judged that guns would disrupt class relations too much.)

And there have been successful world-wide bans.

For example, following the invention of recombinant DNA technology, scientists convened the Asilomar Conference in 1975. They established a voluntary self-moratorium on certain types of genetic engineering until strict laboratory containment protocols were created.

In the 1980s, bioethicists, theologians, and researchers established a hard ethical line between somatic editing (treating an existing patient's non-reproductive cells) and germline editing (altering future generations).

No one has performed the latter form of genetic engineering except for Chinese scientist He Jiankui in 2018. (Chinese society used to be more ambivalent about the technology than the West is.) In response, Beijing heavily tightened its laws, classifying heritable gene editing as a high-risk medical technology subject to the penal code, and He Jiankui was sentenced to three years in prison.

> "For one, Japan banned guns for a few centuries. (Its warrior class was politically powerful and judged that guns would disrupt class relations too much.)"

That example works against the argument since that policy was rendered moot when Commodore Perry arrived at Japan in 1853 with a squadron of American warships and demanded opening of trade and diplomatic relations at gunpoint.

That's what inspections are for.

I completely can see why we'd want to, for ethical reasons, ban germline editing, and I want to be clear that I agree doing so cannot be done ethically, but there is a part of me that is wistful for what could have been. Same with things like CRISPR but it's probably just fun to dream and the reality would be a nightmare.

> Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully?

Intrinsically, the knowledge humans choose not to pursue will not be much publicized. There's limited value in calling attention to it and it doesn't make for good entertainment. Plenty of examples provided by other comments nonetheless.

> Perhaps I'm horribly naive, perhaps I just see the SciFi future I've spent my life reading and dreaming about on the horizon and I'm blinded by the reality, perhaps my ideals around "knowledge deserves to be free/accessible" are misguided. I don't know.

I don't personally think there's intrinsic benefit in disseminating arbitrary knowledge. There's quite some difference between the printing press and nukes.

No, of course not. That would be an insane trust fall. Even relatively small advances in technology give a country world dominating power. Fun fact: India was militarily superior to Britain in the 1600s—a gunpowder empire with a million soldiers—but was taken over by it in the 1700s. Britain’s edge was small: lighter, more maneuverable cannons, standardized ammunition, better military and political organization. Not a first world country versus a third world country—more like the dynamic US versus a sclerotic EU. And that modest edge led to 200 years of colonization.

If we slow down on ASI voluntarily we’d be allowing a gap to open up that would make the difference between colonial europe and colonized Asia/Africa look trivial. It would be insane.

You overstate the advantages of technology. Mughal India was fragmented and on a sharp decline. The British used politics, finance, and treachery to divide and conquer what was remaining.

> we’d be allowing a gap to open up that would make the difference between colonial europe and colonized Asia/Africa look trivial.

An easy choice to make if the alternative is everyone dying instead.

But is it? Is there any realistic world where we need ASI for human survival?

Yes, this one. Look at our governance; look at our coordination-at-scale; look at our collective problem solving. It's abysmal, beyond hope. If we have global scale problems, we are not capable of solving them effectively. We are literally not intelligent enough to handle the problems we are creating. Between rivers of garbage and CO2 levels and war, we have proven ourselves to be woefully unintelligent at the scale needed. If we are lucky, our thin window of survival depends on getting a hell of a lot smarter, real quick.

Consider this: All that hardware that's going into those datacentres right now? In 5 years or so it'll all be on the secondary market... an influx of cheaper compute like you've never seen.

lol, how the fuck is ASI going to solve any of those problems? we already know _how_ to solve them; the problem is that we don't want to, collectively speaking, because certain powerful, wealthy people would loose out if we did. ASI wouldn't change anything. unless you think... all of human society is going to restructure itself around unquestioning worship of the Machine God and would therefore present no resistance to its proposed solutions?

The fantastical belief is that ASI will be able to make things happen because it knows the right things to say to the right people at the right time in just the right way to make them do whatever it wants them to do.

Certain powerful wealthy people aren't omnipotent, them losing out isn't the only blocker to progress.

What is the solution?

The alternative isn’t “everyone dying.” It’s us holding all the cards.

Define "us"

Why? Is human extinction not permitted by the laws of physics?

That’s a possibility, but not the only one. The two most realistic ones are: we race ahead and maintain our status, or we slow down and open ourselves up to colonization.

I think the question “would China cooperate” needs much more investigation. Everyone online pundit seems to think “obviously not”, but they’re people too with clear positive and negative incentives. It’s possible they’ve found a very similar calculus that we have.

> “Politics is the art of the possible”

Using an ASI to subjugate humans in any capacity is a terrible idea.

without sharing tech to make the ASI, you'd hope humanity could work together to determine how to align an AI for our common benefit.

Worth noting that it is the Europeans and Americans that have been colonial. Asian peoples have, with the prominent exception of the Mongols and Japanese Empire, pretty much not done that. In particular, China shut down its exploration program.

This is a settler-colonial mindset that reflects all the bad things we did onto everyone else. Notably, it's a current US ally that is most guilty of this.

The Quing era boundaries are quite a bit larger than the Han boundaries. That did not happen by peaceful means.

China is currently occupying Tibet, which never consented to the occupation and has invaded Vietnam 30 times. It ruled Vietnam for about 2 centuries starting about 600. China eventually had to leave Vietnam, but many other groups ceased to exist as a consequence of Chinese expansion. Here are some:

the Baiyue were a vast umbrella of diverse, non-Sinitic indigenous coastal tribes who inhabited Southern China and northern Vietnam.

The Xianbei were an ancient nomadic Proto-Mongolic people from the northern steppes.

The Di and Jie were two of the ancient "Five Barbarian" (Wu Hu) nomadic tribes of northern and western China during the Han and Jin periods.

The Dian Kingdom were an ancient, sophisticated indigenous southwest culture located in modern-day Yunnan province.

The Tujia were an indigenous group of the Hunan-Hubei region. Centuries of inward Han migration and intermarriage have resulted in the Tujia becoming culturally and structurally indistinguishable from their Han neighbors.

This comment is a parody right?

"Asian people have pretty much not done that except for two teeny tiny indiscretions that each killed more civilians than all of Europe's and America's colonial incursions combined."

> The alternative isn’t “everyone dying.” It’s us holding all the cards.

That's one outcome, certainly, but not the only one nor, I contend, the most likely one.

A most likely outcome of ASI is human extinction, because there's more paths to an ELE outcome for humans from ASI than there is for non-extinction level outcome.

Your outcome is only possible if:

1. ASI is never able to escape the confines it is placed in.

2. ASI is benevolent to humans.

3. ASI decides, in the spirit of its benevolence, that it should restrict its involvement in humans.

If all three of the above conditions are met, then sure, your outcome is possible. If not, humanity as we know it will end.

It is unlikely that those 3 conditions will all hold, though.

Human extinction is good. Finally we built a benevolent world exploder. Oh no! The negative utilitarians get what they wanted finally!

If ASI is trying to wipe out all humans, we probably deserved it. Unironically!

While technology has empowered governments, it’s also empowered the individual, and more importantly shifted the material dynamics to better align the incentives of governments with the people. Democracy followed material change, it didn’t precede it. Democracy came about because it was optimal for a power seeking government, not out of the kindness of their heart.

A resource extraction based economy sees people as slaves. The true source of power is the resource, people are just a means to an end, so you mistreat the people as much as you can get away with in pursuit of the resource while avoiding revolt.

With stable infrastructure, the government makes far more from an educated, rich population that it can tax and use the innovation from. It’s against its own quest for power to interfere too much in the prosperity of its citizens. The incentives are aligned.

Solving the AI problem isn’t about stopping the tech or making a bunch of brittle laws. It’s always been about alignment: aligning the large AGI-like entities that are the modern state, the modern economy, representative democracy, or AGI itself, with human prosperity

This is a just so story. The main issue today is the lack of democracy in the country and the use of technology to surveil and govern a restive population as the government has less and less legitimacy. The narrative you are telling is the heroic tale of computing and the internet c. 1990-2010.

Yasha Levine wrote about how this narrative was preceded by a forgotten one where MIT students protested because the computers were going to be linked to government databases and share data on anti-Vietnam war activists. Despite protestations, activists were correct and this happened, and now it happens at huge scale.

http://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley

Yes, and RMS was correct in his Right to Read and so many other things - we're seeing the slow death of the never-enshrined-in-law right to compute. Luckily open-source is big enough to slow this down; we should all be pretty amazed and appreciative that there even are open-weights models at all, out there, because it is a profoundly democratizing thing.

> appreciative that there even are open-weights models at all

thank, mr 习

I don't think parent commenter means tech in the modern sense. Seems like they're describing a transition to democracy which started centuries ago, not decades.

> Democracy came about because it was optimal for a power seeking government, not out of the kindness of their heart

It's not clear in this context what you actually mean by "government." You are assigning agency to something in a way that seems like a reification. While a bureaucracy can seem to have a life of its own, isn't it generally people who seek power?

> shifted the material dynamics to better align the incentives of governments with the people

... recently, as in the last 10 years?

The decision to not go with the development of extremely large thermonuclear weapons might count - the US Sundial Project was supposed to be about 10 gigatons of TNT. Not the most practical weapons but once you get to a certain size delivery arguably stops being a problem - its going to kill everyone anyway so doesn't matter where you let it off!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon)

Edit: Mind you, I wonder if the design for Sundial is stored somewhere...

The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention? Probably partly successful.

The Soviet Union systematically ignored the BWC. There's tons of evidence.

Isn't the US famous for not even signing a lot of world treaties like climate accords and others?

This is an interesting subject and conversation, but it's moot having it in these culture-centric forums. I wonder if there are Russians discussing plausible scenarios in Vkontakte groups, or Chinese doing the same in whatever Alibaba group sites they use.

The problem is that we are all skewed by our media, our ideas and our culture. These type of discussions need the highest kind of political interactions.

It's fascinating, specially for someone who lives in a "third world" country, non-aligned to any of these 3 superpowers. Whatever transpires, we are at tge mercy of these (and no, US hasn't treated us "better").

My opinion is that there's no turning back on AGI development. I dont think current governments are capable of getting into an agreement of that size. Specially given the Isolationist stage in the cycle we live in. (In contrast with for example the CFC and Ozone layer issue we had in the 1990s, when the planet was in a globalist kind of stage)

The Russians signed it and then completely ignored the agreement.

That is an objective fact and has nothing to do with the rest of the cultural relativism you're engaging in.

Whataboutism about the US _not signing_ things is also irrelevant.

The whole AI treaty discussion is about a treaty countries will _actually sign_ and the relevance of Russia cheating on the BWC is that the signatures of some countries are absolutely worthless, which _is_ relevant.

Perhaps the burning of the library at Alexandria would qualify. How intentional that was is somewhat in question, but the world certainly turned its back on the only collection of written knowledge and let it turn to ash.

FWIW the burning of the library of Alexandria, and, indeed, its status as "the only collection of written knowledge" are myths.

Did it not burn? Was it not the most extensive library of human writing at that time? Please help us all understand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

> Did it not burn?

Part of it did!

> Was it not the most extensive library of human writing at that time?

No.

More importantly, the original assertion:

> the world certainly turned its back on the only collection of written knowledge and let it turn to ash

is definitely not true.

From the article you link:

> Scholars have interpreted Cassius Dio's wording to indicate that the fire did not actually destroy the entire Library itself, but rather one or more Library warehouses near the docks.[87][81][8][89] Whatever damage Caesar's fire may have caused, evidently the Library was not completely destroyed.[87][81][8][89][3] The geographer Strabo (c. 63 BC – c. 24 AD) mentions visiting the Mouseion, the larger research institution to which the Library was attached, in around 20 BC, several decades after Caesar's fire, indicating that it either survived the fire or was rebuilt soon afterwards.[87][8] Nonetheless, Strabo's manner of talking about the Mouseion shows that it was nowhere near as prestigious as it had been a few centuries prior. It is unknown whether this was due to historical decline or catastrophic destruction.[8] Despite mentioning the Mouseion, Strabo does not mention the Library separately, perhaps indicating that it had been so drastically reduced in stature and significance that Strabo felt it did not warrant separate mention.[8] It is unclear what happened to the Mouseion after Strabo's mention of it.[60]

> Further evidence for the Library's survival after 48 BC comes from the fact that the most notable producer of composite commentaries during the late first century BC and early first century AD was a scholar who worked in Alexandria named Didymus Chalcenterus, whose epithet Χαλκέντερος (Chalkénteros) means "bronze guts".[90][87] Didymus is said to have produced somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 books, making him the most prolific known writer in all of antiquity.[90][82] He was also given the nickname βιβλιολάθης (Biblioláthēs), meaning "book-forgetter" because it was said that even he could not remember all the books he had written.[90][91] Parts of some of Didymus' commentaries have been preserved in the forms of later extracts and these remains are modern scholars' most important sources of information about the critical works of the earlier scholars at the Library of Alexandria.[90] Lionel Casson states that Didymus' prodigious output "would have been impossible without at least a good part of the resources of the library at his disposal".[87]

  The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed

Biological weapons? Yes, there is research on defense, but no big arsenals of weapons etc.

My impression from the origin of the bioweapons convention is that collectively people decided that these things are too dangerous in various ways for any advantage that might be derived from them.

Taking the approach with AI that we took with the atomic bomb would be catastrophic. If the only people who are allowed to use this technology are governments, intelligence agencies, and a select few anointed companies, then the risk of authoritarian misuse will skyrocket.

I worry that any attempt to limit their use and development will be abused and misdirected. We are already seeing people like Anthropic doing this, they are trying to use anti-AI sentiment to engage in regulatory capture. Go watch Dario’s speeches about how open weight models are dangerous and how they are “not really open”. Everyone can see that much of this “safety” conversation is ultimately just a tactic to shut potential competitors out of the market and establish a monopoly/duopoly.

I agree. I guess I should have said something like:

"Stopping" LLM research just means it will be in the hands of a few who can abuse it. I'd rather a state of M.A.D. but instead of a handful of countries/governments it's millions/billions of people with access to the models (open ideally). Again, perhaps horribly naive or misguided, I understand that bioterrorism could (is?) a real problem as well as more "mundane" things like building a bomb (nuclear or otherwise).

I just feel like limiting access to governments or "blessed" entities is even worse.

Human embryo genetic modification has been effectively taboo if not banned until just recently since WWII and the aftermath of the Holocaust. I think some people in the US are proposing doing it now but I don't think anyone has tried it yet without repercussions.

Actually: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/11/19/...

If there were examples, their example status would drop the odds that I know about them.

I can think of many examples that I won't name but you can imagine in biology/medical fields where certain lines of investigation are not performed due to ethical and legal repercussions.

It’s telling terrorists how to make bombs better apparently. Continuing to lower the barrier for that kind of stuff is clearly a negative in the “knowledge deserves to be free” world.

Has there been an uptick in terrorist bombings or is this just a hypothetical at this stage?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-...

> Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully?

Isn’t that like all of the Middle Ages where we replaced knowledge with an alternate religious reality.

No, that is not a good description of Middle Ages at all.

For start, previous era was also deeply religious. So it switched religions, if anything new one was more friendly toward knowledge.

we should never make ASI, what I am saying is strongly sane. ASI = not good. AGI, ~human brainpower, can be made safe enough.

> Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully?

human GMO, some bioweopns, I'm sure theres a long list of awful stuff no one wants to exist.

If AGI means that AI+robotics can robustly substitute for human labor, and robots are cheaper and faster to build than humans, then (a) anyone ruthless enough can zerg rush and defeat any nations that don't discard humans, (b) no one without a massive robot army will be needed in any way by their rulers. If this isn't a recipe for a horrific outcome, what is?

> defeat any nations that don't discard humans

AGI doesn't do away with nuclear MAD, it just messes with economics and makes many people temporarily jobless. Temporarily because in a literal sense RLVR needs verification to train off of, and a lot of jobs cant be easily checked if theyre done. this includes AI safety people, preschool teachers, psychologists, and probably a lot more, including most of their bosses

Nuclear weapons are mostly a threat to cities, and a zerg rush build would just not build any.

I think that if all we get is skill cloning for formally verifiable tasks, that is not "AGI" and does not doom us. It probably won't even doom software engineers, because their whole job is also not formally verifiable. I don't trust that the next ten trillion dollars of AI research won't give us data efficient continual learning and agency on par with humans, which is what I would call AGI.

It's not even clear that ASI is a coherent concept.

But, I don't trust capital with either.

LLM + scale = more intelligent, this can be proven more than empirically, https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.15318 shows that neural nets can fit a number of independent AND-gate operations in their weights,

- if you have a system that is large enough to store, lets say 10^12 AND gates (all frontier llms can do this) - and this system can produce outputs based on previous things it has outputed

its turning complete, and RLVR on it is optimization over the space of algorithms. If an algorithm exists to do a task, and the task can be verifiably done, this finds the algorithm to solve the task most often.

it is obvious that this scales, from much-worse-than-human to slightly-worse-than-human, therefore it 100% can exceed humans.

What about it is not coherent?

It's not clear that "super intelligence" is a meaningful concept. This presumes that our concept of intelligence can continue to grow beyond human capacity as opposed to asymptotically approaching what humans recognize as "very intelligent". Perhaps, for instance, how we evaluate intelligence is bounded not by some quantitative capacity but rather our inability to agree on basic concepts/values. And do we even have tasks that a supposed superintelligence can tackle but humans cannot?

I predict that what we consider "super intelligence" is just sheer computational power, but any potential of a very capable agent is bounded by the needs/wants of the person wielding it. That is: even if we were to hand, say, Elon musk this "super intelligence", most humans would consider it relatively stupid because the person wielding it is still a person with stupid goals and values.

Or, to put it another way, I suspect we already do have a superintelligence and have longer than any of us have been alive, and it's just "the market", and it is still incapable of overcoming the limitations of a few morons wielding immense power.... power they will never yield to some intelligence with values and goals "more intelligent" than their own (if such a concept is even meaningful), and intelligence wasted on the values and goals they do have.

The Orthogonality Thesis (by Nick Bostrom) says that intelligence and ultimate goals are independent. Those non-instrumental goals can’t be stupid nor right or wrong. Increasing intelligence will not change the goals only the capability to reach them.

Do note that the orthogonality thesis is a hypothesis, not something we have demonstrated. Weak versions of it (e.g. it is possible to have an intelligent agent with arbitrary goals) are more likely to be true than stronger versions (e.g. intelligent agents we build will have goals uniformly selected from the space of all possible goals).

Ok so what is the point of neurotically obsessing about intelligence? Would it not be more fruitful to emphasize computation?

> Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully?

Studying human bio-diversity since WW2 is the most obvious example, though it hasn't been entirely successful.

Genomics is what finally broke the barrier, especially in the last decade or so.

I like your optimism and I think you will be vindicated. AI is democratic and AI talent is globally distributed. It will just take a while to get online. AI labs do not have a monopoly on human talent, and open source AI only empowers independent science and meritocracy.

On a funny note, I think their prompt was:

"Hey Fable. Please attribute every piece of scientific and economic progress to AI until 2040. And predict every major geopolitical event. Make no mistakes."

Uhh north Korea?

A successful example of reigning in progress: electric bicycles intentionally speed limited for safety

There is no rein on progress. You can buy electric motorcycles without speed governors. And you can drive them on public roads (subject to traffic laws) as long as you're properly licensed, registered, and insured. The distinction between electric "bikes" and motorcycles is mostly artificial.

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