Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

It's one thing to worry about AI's taking over the world someday. It's quite another matter entirely to think about current military automation of WMD deployment.

Everyone's probably seen Dr. Strangelove at some point in time. If you haven't, stop reading immediately and go watch it. You will not regret this. Those who have watched it are familiar with a contrived, hilarious, but mostly plausible, scheme by which human beings could be fooled into launching an unauthorized nuclear first strike. This is with technology from half a century ago. As you watch this movie, you will be exposed to a system with checks and safeties that can be bypassed by a determined (and insane) individual. Many humans at every step of the process could have stopped the deployment, but choose to blindly follow orders, well, like machines.

What people should be worried about today is how many humans stand between a decision made by a nuclear power's leader and launch. Humans doubt. Humans blink. Humans flinch. When all the data says nuclear missiles are inbound and it's time to retaliate, humans can still say "No.", and have[1]. If you automate humans out of the system, you wind up reducing the running length of a Dr. Strangelove remake. I suspect it would be down to under five minutes today.

Thanks to popular media, we have this strange idea that taking humans out of the equation in automated weapon systems reduces the possibility for error. Individual humans can, and do, make mistakes. This is true. However, humans fix each others' mistakes in any collaborative process. Machines, on the other hand, only amplify the mistakes of the original user. If a bad leader makes a bad decision with a highly automated nuclear arsenal at his or her disposal, how many other humans will have the chance to scrutinize that decision before machines enact it?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

> It's one thing to worry about AI's taking over the world someday .

I don't think AI taking over would necessarily be a bad thing. AI could maximize human potential much better than us. I'd rather let our technological offspring take on the role of protector - if it is really smarter than us. And of course it might kill us, but at least we would leave our more advanced children behind, we won't die for nothing.

This is a dilemma every parent has to grapple with - one day we will be weaker and less competent than our children. How will we fare under the care of our children. Will they abandon us, or love and cherish us? Should we avoid children altogether just to be safer? It's just that now humanity has a child, not individual humans.

My best guess is that AI would improve on biological intelligence and make it flourish, not suppress it, because biology is elegant and efficient. The end result would probably be a merge between computer and flesh, silicon and carbon. It won't be us vs them, but a wholly new kind of AI and humans.

Nuclear strike isn't particularly bad. Hiroshima + Nagasaki was 200k casualties or so. That many people are killed every year by sugar. Traffic kills over a million.

Any kind of worrying about theoretical future death is silly, especially accidental death like the kind you are asking us to devote resources to. Why should I care about theoretical future death when there is real, actual death happening all around me?

Heck, if you want to worry about future death, why not worry about climate change deaths, which we can actually model? At least that gives us some chance to do something about it.

Of course I'm assuming you actually care about public health. Maybe you are just worried about your own health, and nuclear strike is relevant to you because it has the potential to pierce through the barriers that distance you from people who are actually facing mortal peril.

You should care about "theoretical" future death because, via the inexorable passage of time, the future becomes the present. At which time you have "actual" death happening all around you.

Let's try and stop catastrophic climate change, diabetes, and traffic/pollution related deaths, and also allow some people to worry about nuclear holocaust as well.

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