it's the weirdest thing to compare nuclear weapons and biological catastrophe to tools that people around the world right now are using towards personal/professional/capitalistic benefit.
bioweapons is the thing, AI is a tool to make things. That's exactly the most powerful distinction here. Bioweapon research didn't also serendipitously make available powerful tools for the generation of images/sounds/text/ideas/plans -- so there isn't much reason to compare the benefit of the two.
These arguments aren't the same as "Let's ban the personal creation of terrifying weaponry", they're the same as "Let's ban wrenches and hack-saws because they can be used down the line in years from now to facilitate the create of terrifying weaponry" -- the problem with this argument being that it ignores the boons that such tools will allow for humanity.
Wrenches and hammers would have been banned too had they been framed as weapons of bludgeoning and torture by those that first encountered them. Thankfully people saw the benefits offered otherwise.
> it's the weirdest thing to compare nuclear weapons and biological catastrophe to tools that people around the world right now are using towards personal/professional/capitalistic benefit.
You're literally painting a perfect analogy for biotech/nuclear/AI. Catastrophe and culture-shifting benefits go hand in hand with all of them. It's about figuring out where the lines are. But claiming there is minimal or negligible risk ("so let's just run with it" as some say, maybe not you) feels very cavalier to me.
But you're not alone, if you feel that way. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills with how the software dev field talks about sharing AI openly.
And I'm literally an open culture advocate for over a decade, and have helped hundreds of ppl start open community projects. If there's anyone who's be excited for open collaboration, it's me! :)
Okay, I made a mistake of using a shorthand. I won't do that in the future. The shorthand is saying "nuclear weapons" and "bioweapons" when I meant "technology making it easy to create WMDs".
Consider nuclear nonproliferation. It doesn't only affect weapons - it also affects nuclear power generation, nuclear physics research and even medicine. There's various degrees of secrecy to research and technologies that affect "tools that people around the world right now are using towards personal/professional/capitalistic benefit". Why? Because the same knowledge makes military and terrorist applications easier, reducing barrier to entry.
Consider then, biotech, particularly synthetic biology and genetic engineering. All that knowledge is dual-use, and unlike with nuclear weapons, biotech seems to scale down well. As a result, we have both a growing industry and research field, and kids playing with those same techniques at school and at home. Biohackerspaces were already a thing over a decade ago (I would know, I tried to start one in my city circa 2013). There's a reason all those developments have been accompanied by a certain unease and fear. Today, an unlucky biohacker may give themselves diarrhea or cancer, in ten years, they may accidentally end the world. Unlike with nuclear weapons, there's no natural barrier to scaling this capability down to individual level.
And of course, between the diarrhea and the humanity-ending "hold my beer and watch this" gain-of-function research, there's whole range of smaller things like getting a community sick, or destroying a local ecosystem. And I'm only talking about accidents with peaceful/civilian work here, ignoring deliberate weaponization.
To get a taste of what I'm talking about: if you buy into the lab leak hypothesis for COVID-19, then this is what a random fuckup at a random BSL-4 lab looks like, when we are lucky and get off easy. That is why biotech is another item on the x-risks list.
Back to the point: the AI x-risk is fundamentally more similar to biotech x-risk than nuclear x-risk, because the kind of world-ending AI we're worried about could be created and/or released by accident by a single group or individual, could self-replicate on the Internet, and would be unstoppable once released. The threat dynamics are similar to a highly-virulent pathogen, and not to a nuclear exchange between nation states - hence the comparison I've made in the original comment.
> the kind of world-ending AI we're worried about could be created and/or released by accident by a single group or individual, could self-replicate on the Internet, and would be unstoppable once released.
I also worry every time I drop a hammer from my waist that it could bounce and kill everyone I love. Really anyone on the planet could drop a hammer which bounces and kills everyone I love. That is why hammers are an 'x-risk'
bioweapons is the thing, AI is a tool to make things. That's exactly the most powerful distinction here. Bioweapon research didn't also serendipitously make available powerful tools for the generation of images/sounds/text/ideas/plans -- so there isn't much reason to compare the benefit of the two.
These arguments aren't the same as "Let's ban the personal creation of terrifying weaponry", they're the same as "Let's ban wrenches and hack-saws because they can be used down the line in years from now to facilitate the create of terrifying weaponry" -- the problem with this argument being that it ignores the boons that such tools will allow for humanity.
Wrenches and hammers would have been banned too had they been framed as weapons of bludgeoning and torture by those that first encountered them. Thankfully people saw the benefits offered otherwise.