Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

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People were feeling doomtastic about nuclear weapons during the Cold War as well.

Listen to the words of this song written in 1969: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2JcxHX-8Xc

  When every man is torn apart
  With nightmares and with dreams
  Will no one lay the laurel wreath
  When silence drowns the screams
  Confusion will be my epitaph
  As I crawl a cracked and broken path
  If we make it, we can all sit back and laugh
  But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying

Ultimately, we have made it, through arms control agreements, working to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, and so forth. We can do the same for AI.

You don't have help. But perhaps you could at least avoid discouraging people unnecessarily?

*EDIT*: There are about 5 replies to this comment making roughly the same point. I'm not sure which to reply to, so I'll just reply here.

I'm not claiming that our execution as a species around nuclear weapons has been flawless. I'm not claiming that we are out of the woods with regard to nukes. I'm just trying to push back against defeatism and fatalism. Some felt a sense of inevitable doom during the Cold War. It's been decades now, and nuclear doom still isn't here! Our situation is dire, but not hopeless.

> Ultimately, we have made it

Spinning the present situation or the history of nuclear arms as a high-five, "go team human!" success story is... quite the take (Vasili Arkhipov, Cuban missile crisis generally, the current doomsday clock being "the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history").

> You don't have help. But perhaps you could at least avoid discouraging people unnecessarily?

More germanely, you don't have to worry yourself, but at least avoid discouraging people with legitimate worries who want to take precautions. Even the present situation with nuclear weapons, precarious as it is, would likely be more precarious were it not for the political pressure of the people worrying in the 1950s and 1960s and up to today.

>Spinning the present situation or the history of nuclear arms as a high-five, "go team human!" success story is... quite the take (Vasili Arkhipov, Cuban missile crisis generally, the current doomsday clock being "the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history").

I edited a response to this in my grandparent comment.

>More germanely, you don't have to worry yourself, but at least avoid discouraging people with legitimate worries who want to take precautions. Even the present situation with nuclear weapons, precarious as it is, would likely be more precarious were it not for the political pressure of the people worrying in the 1950s and 1960s and up to today.

Sorry, I may have mis-communicated. I want people to take precautions! That's why I linked to PauseAI: https://pauseai.info/ I'm trying to push back against defeatism.

Thanks for clarifying.

I lived through roughly the latter half of the cold war and both of my parents were soldiers. I lived in West Germany etc.

No we have not escaped the nuclear thing. If anything, the current Russian tzar is rather more unhinged than any of his predecessors.

I doubt many here know what perestroika and glasnost mean or why those Russian words were so important back in the day.

I don't fear AI (where on earth would an "autonomous" AI manage to find the power requirements). Darleks can't really fly and LLMs will stop when you pull the plug!

I do fear numpties with a red button and a tenuous grip on reality.

>No we have not escaped the nuclear thing. If anything, the current Russian tzar is rather more unhinged than any of his predecessors.

Understood. This is a dire situation. But it's not hopeless. Same for AI.

>I don't fear AI (where on earth would an "autonomous" AI manage to find the power requirements). Darleks can't really fly and LLMs will stop when you pull the plug!

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49689132

Hopelessness is a technicality, like absolute darkness.

It's still very, very dark, and you are not arguing in good faith if you keep somehow treating this as a successful consolation

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The idea that we're almost certainly doomed is an extraordinary claim. I haven't seen extraordinary evidence for it.

That was never the claim, firstly, so successful straw man there, and secondly, even if it was, would it really be that shocking? Population bottlenecks have happened for less. All habitat eventually shrinks. All species go extinct.

By the odds, I'm betting with the house.

We have not made it. We have survived so far but the threat remains. Stockpiles and warheads have shrunk, so it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as in, say, 1983, but we’re still one mistake or misunderstanding away from the worst day in human existence.

And worse, somehow we’ve managed to declare victory without achieving it, and there’s no longer any real attention on actually fixing the problem.

If AI follows the same example, we’ll take some measures to lessen the impact of Armageddon and then carry on saying “problem solved!”

We have had nuclear weapons for less than a century. It takes one guy, one time for it to all go to shit. We are not out of the woods yet and we will never be.

It takes more than one guy. The guy who gives the order is not the one pressing the button.

Except we did had a bunch of close calls [1]. Also, we've been warned about climate change for at least 30 years and were unable to avoid it. So OP's remark is entirely deserved.

Until proven otherwise, we are not part of a movie where the hero saves the day at the end. I thought 9/11 made it pretty clear to everyone?

[1] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2020-0...

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