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Comment by anon-3988 | Hacker News Reader

I am having a brain aneurysm trying to understand this

> Regulating gun ownership is exactly regulating the application. In your analogy, the gun is the AI. What you can do with the gun is the application.

From what I can tell, you are arguing that gun laws is reasonable.

> Different actors with different credentials in different contexts will have different requirements and permissions of what they can do with the technology, be it a gun or AI.

But this, is going against that, this is saying, "why should we ban AI or gun when they can be used for both good and bad. What we want is to ban bad, regardless of how it is achieved"

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There are levels to it as well. Take alcohol and driving, for example:

Level A: Who can drink it (possession and consumption law)

Level B: What you can do while drunk (DUI law)

Level C: What you can do while drinking (open container law)

All orthogonal to things like reckless driving, endangerment and creating injurious accidents, which are already criminalized without needing additional laws against alcohol use to enforce them.

> From what I can tell, you are arguing that gun laws is reasonable.

Correct.

> But this, is going against that, this is saying, "why should we ban AI or gun when they can be used for both good and bad. What we want is to ban bad, regardless of how it is achieved"

Not at all. I'm saying regulations do that and they are a good thing. Not everybody can own an assault rifle. Some of the people who can, are not allowed to carry it on the streets. Police will have very different regulations towards their gun use. The army, another set of regulations. The list goes on. Even in countries who have lax gun laws, usually not all guns are allowed to everyone in all situations. No one is allowed to carry a nuke into a shopping centre.

Note that regulating and banning are very different things. I don't think you can fully ban guns or AI.

> From what I can tell, you are arguing that gun laws is reasonable.

You aren’t going to repeal the second amendment, so reasonable or not it’s a fact that everyone has to contend with. Do we all want guns? No. Do we all want AI? Also no.

> What we want is to ban bad, regardless of how it is achieved

No, we don’t want to ban bad. Banning doesn’t really work - the effort to reward ratio isn’t great. We want to regulate bad and see if we can minimize the damage it can do.

Not really.

"Different actors with different credentials in different contexts"

The argument is that the military or police have a need for access to guns, whereas the lunatic on the street corner (or any random citizen) does not. The same argument applies for access to nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons... or autonomous hacking/killing machines...

Exactly this.

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