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Comment by gmueckl | Hacker News Reader

Here's a very strong take on the situation, more for discussion than a true representation of my own beliefs:

The ML models will be trained as long as we as the human society in charge allow them to be trained. Progress only happens if society allows it to happen. The commercial AI proponents are trying to do an end-run around societal adjustments, forcing change at a speed that is to fast for proper responses. It could be interpreted as a malicious attack. We, the people, could collectively decide to slow them down or to make them stop. Their hope is to confront us with a done deal before any opposition has found the resolve and organization to do anything meaningful about it.

We, collectively, need to decide where to draw the lines on this technology and we need to decide fast.

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I don't think society has enough power to control what billionaires spend their money on. The promise of AI is such an attractive nuisance for power seekers that trying to crack down on it will just force it underground, where it will be developed with even less care and oversight than it is now.

Our institutions aren't even able to control what dirt-poor pirates do on hardware they own. How in the heck are they going to be able to control what incomprehensibly-rich people do? They can purchase political favors from whichever nations are selling them.

Advancing the state of the art takes so many resources that it can't happen underground, at least for now. Slap enough controls on the means and the handbrakes are on. So your doomsday scenario could be preventable. The crux is that enough people need to come out in favor to put constraints in place. It's not impossible, but public opinions form slowly.

> trying to crack down on it will just force it underground, where it will be developed with even less care and oversight than it is now.

With way less access to infrastructure, hardware, capital, people. That’s literally what we need, it should be constrained by having way less resources

Having fewer resources such as security engineers will not lead to better outcomes. A skeleton team with gigawatts of compute in some middle east bunker is MORE likely to unleash something poorly aligned.

Gigawatt of power doesn’t come from nowhere. You cannot have that much power consumption without being visible to regulators (of course that assumes a government that isn’t as corrupt as the US).

You can create bioweapons today, from a small lab. Doesn’t mean we allow it

Pretty naive take.

EU and US are slowing down while China doesn't slow down. In fact, they are pushing harder after gathering so much info from workers, and facial recognitions set in place for half a decade.

No signs of the US or EU slowing down

Do you live in a fantasy? Amazing

stop whining without any evidence.

Is society in charge of them? Or is it a small collective of people?

Edit: Typo

Society could take control back. It's not impossible. History has examples where people took control away from small collectives, although it wasn't always strictly lawfuly or even peaceful.

To take it to the extreme, billions of virtual dollars wouldn't offer any protection against a determined lynch mob at the front door.

More realistically, there is a lot of power in showing up in big numbers and protesting. It is beyond me why especially US culture doesn't accept that as an option these days.

> We, collectively, need to decide where to draw the lines on this technology and we need to decide fast.

I hope you, collectively, don't start deciding what deodorants I can wear. (Like Bernie Sanders infamously brought up.) Or what toys my daughter can play with. (As Donald Trump wanted.)

Society abides by a lot of rules that you also learned to follow, mostly while you were raised. Why else would you even wear a deodorant?

I wear deodorant to get along with the humans around me. Concrete folks I can point to (even if I don't necessarily know the guy next to me on the train by name nor will see him again).

No nebulous society involved that makes collective decisions in the abstract.

You got it backwards. Society is simple the collective that forms transitively from you, your connections, theirs and so on. You are pointing at a tree and missing that it's standing in the forest.

> Society is simple the collective that forms transitively from you, your connections, theirs and so on.

Where do you draw the line? Does the collective that makes these collective decisions you are so fond of have to include, say, people in Russia?

You can default to existing political structures and voting systems as a preliminary answer to get going. And they work for some things. But ain't nothing simple nor god given about that.

There is a subtlety here: on the one hand there are decisions that someone decides on and tries to enforce. On the other, there is collective behavior and what it does and doesn't tolerate - societal norms. The later forms in various ways and can overcome enforced decisions.

It's not on me to declare who is and isn't included or what consensus is being reached. These things normally play out in a self-organizing way.

But some companies try to disturb that process by not allowing it the time it needs. And I think this needs awareness.

Ok, I'll start shunning people who work at AI companies from now on. Let's see if that makes a difference or if they care.

Name one technology society has decided to stop and it stopped. There isn't one. Lots of people have made angry sounds about it, and made doom and gloom predictions about them, but none have ever been stopped. Nuclear hasn't been stopped so don't think that's your great comeback.

Some examples:

- CFCs are completely banned (Montreal Protocol)

- drag-reducing swimsuits

- some Persistant Organic Pollutants were completely banned (Stockholm convention)

It can be done.

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