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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Of course openness is only worse than leaving everything under the control of a select cabal of you believe that cabal to be more ethical than the rest of us.

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The select cabal who believe in an eschaton they're actively trying to bring about, as well.

Would you apply this reasoning to the proliferation of nuclear weapons?

edit: why is the parent rationale sensible for AI and not nuclear technology?

Absurd and incomparable.

Why? That seems like a shallow dismissal. Why is a world changing technology okay in the hands of a small cabal in the one case and not another?

"Why is the wheel not okay to gatekeep but the nuclear bomb is?" Even the framing is manipulative from the beginning. By asking this question you're already assuming they're in any way comparable. They are not even remotely equivalent and the entire comparison is utterly absurd.

AI is more like a nuke than a wheel. Do you disagree? Can you suggest a less manipulative framing? I am personally a proponent of open source AI and models but I found this cabal framing strange when we do indeed rely on this kind of control for other world-altering technologies. And AI is different in that it enables technological development in ways quite unlike the wheel in a general sense.

AI is more like the general purpose computer than a nuke. It can be used to greatly accelerate research and development of all kinds of things. Of course the war on general purpose computing has been going on for many years now, but so far freedom still has a couple of strongholds left.

AI is more like the wheel (can be used for anything) than the nuke (purposeful weapon of indiscriminate mass destruction), and there's more than two categories, so there's no need to prove proverbial Godwin's law by appealing to extremes. But I still can answer the ridiculous question about incomparable things with as much good faith as I have for it: gatekeeping a generic tech in advance based on ridiculous hypotheticals is ridiculous. That's a charitable interpretation, there's also uncharitable one: that it's nonsensical drivel made up by malevolent cranks that benefit from this strawman being used in public discussions.

>AI is different in that it enables technological development in ways quite unlike the wheel in a general sense.

The wheel already enabled almost every tech. Without the wheel nothing you see around yourself would be possible.

Dude ChatGPT is not the equivalent of a device that can level a major city killing millions in a flash. It is self evident. This entire discussion is ridiculous.

Nuclear weapons are a wholly unique threat to mankind.

That's a misconception and manipulative framing on your part.

While "some chatbot" isn't the problem, general intelligence superior to humans absolutely is.

AI allows anybody to enact essentially anything. And your "level a major city" is just a small task really. The problem there is your lack of imagination, not the actual impossibility of that task.

> AI allows anybody to enact essentially anything

No it doesn't. Where is your evidence for this?

> While "some chatbot" isn't the problem, general intelligence superior to humans absolutely is.

This doesn't exist. Why are you pretending it does?

So, in other words, none of this is about anything related to the actual technology and instead people are talking about the made up, fake technology that you read in Sci-fi book.

Thats the annoying part about these conversations. People try to smuggle in the conclusion of "And now I wave a magic wand that does literally anything, by magic" when discussing stuff that everyone can use and see right now that clearly isn't that.

It’s not manipulative at all. This is a comparison of nuclear weapons and LLM’s. That is manipulative.

Proliferation of data doesn't mean proliferation of the thing itself.

There's a massive barrier between knowing how to build a nuke and actually building it.

Also, isn't proliferation the basis for MAD? Well if we believe in that, naturally it means that the world would be safest if every individual had their own nuke ;)

Nuclear weapons aren’t that good an analogy, AI is closer to biological weapons.

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