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Comment by leokennis | Hacker News Reader

Every news headline or public statement these days is a gut punch. Only bad news, and nothing we (as "the general public") can do about it.

Take this one. Ok, AI is going to ruin us all. But let's say we do our civic duty: we protest, vote in candidates with good views on AI etc. and somehow convince or regulate OpenAI and Anthropic into stopping their arms race... Then what about China? It would be a great opportunity for them if their major competitor were out of the arms race.

So basically we have no choice or influence; and even if we did, we'd be choosing from two terrible outcomes.

Same for geopolitics, climate, economy...just bad bad bad all around.

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It's a bit depressing. I personally try to enjoy the present with my loved ones as much as I can, the future is a bit impossible to forecast right now. I'm focusing on staying alive, mortgage payments, etc.

I share your concern...

If our government cared enough to regulate, they could also directly negotiate with China. There are proposed agreements that don't require either party to trust each other, and even if China doesn't want out of this race, we could pressure them other things like trade.

Examples: FlexHEG from Bengio (proposes on-chip mechanisms that allow workload verification without trust), large bilateral investments into joint AI interpretability or alignment efforts, or invasive audits & inspections (data centers for training these models have a large footprint + this can combine with on-chip mechanisms since producing chips is even more complicated).

And there are probably better proposals available for people to find, if we actually prioritized this.

The Chinese are humans too. Why would they want to be extinct either?

It is just plain manipulation. So plain that I ask myself everyday who they fired that did it before, because at least that guy was not as plain and boring.

Indeed - we can't just pause some AI in one country, we have to stop it all globally, with an international treaty and monitoring.

Yes, that's hard. It's a challenge. You can set your brain on the challenge! It's a complex and interesting geopolitical and technical challenge.

A good starting point is to read Plan A https://ai-2040.com/

Look at all the things needed for that to happen, and think, how can we step towards making that happen?

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