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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

> There are millions of schizophrenics worldwide. Are you sure you want to roll those dice?

We've been rolling them for the past 3 years and nothing happened. Can we stop with this baseless fearmongering crap?

Humans are inherently bad at reasoning about rare events. In 2019, many people implicitly reasoned that "since there hasn't been a pandemic in the past 3 years, there won't be one in 2020". Bill Gates was one of the few voices arguing that the world was quite vulnerable to a pandemic. Now he's arguing that the world is quite vulnerable to AI.

> many people implicitly reasoned that "since there hasn't been a pandemic

...pandemics are precedented. There's a world of difference between that and a fully hypothetical catastrophe that you can't even describe without looking and feeling silly.

Bill Gates is Epstein's pal, and not a very intelligent person to-boot. I trust his liberal musings about as much as I trust Chomsky's hysterical and discredited views concerning AI.

>fully hypothetical catastrophe that you can't even describe without looking and feeling silly.

The HuggingFace hack fell into that category not long ago, yet it happened anyways.

The necessary IQ for destroying the world is dropping. Op does not say it's low enough today, but that will probably come sometime. Denying the possible harm these tools are capable of doesn't help.

It would be much harder to deny it if any of you were capable of describing the risks. The current discussion is a national-scale Handwavium mine.

If these systems allow anyone with an internet access or a few grands to run an open model to obtain the necessary information to e.g. build a bomb, spread an infectious agent, hack water or electrical infrastructures, I think that creates significant threats to the population.

These systems don't enable that. Building a bomb, spreading a bioweapon and hacking water/electrical misconfigurations are all trivially possible without AI. Courtesy to Unibomber, Aum Shinrikyo and the IRGC, respectively, for teaching society this.

In any case, how would AI regulation prevent any of these things? Shouldn't we instead focus on limiting access to bomb/bioweapon precursors and securing vulnerable endpoints, since that is the solution that saves lives regardless of how AI disseminates? Regulating AI is expressly dangerous, if it expands that societal blind spot. It'd be like regulating red mercury.

These things are of course possible without the help of AI, but I don't think they're trivial. That requires some specific knowledge, and making it easily obtainable is one less barrier to entry for people interested in it. Such attacks would require both knowledge and access, and I think preventing both is a better strategy than focusing on the physical aspect only.

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