Society is a lot more fragile than many people believe.
Most people aren’t Ted Kazinsky.
And most wanna be Ted Kazinsky’s that we’ve caught don’t have super smart friends they can call up and ask for help in planning their next task.
But a world where every disgruntled person who aims to do the most harm has an incredibly smart friend who is always DTF no matter the task? Who is capable of reeling them in to be more pragmatic about sowing chaos, death, and destruction?
That world is on the horizon, it’s something we are going to have to adapt to, and it’s significantly different than Notepad++. It’s also significantly different than you, assuming you are not willing to help your neighbor get away with serial murder.
I think this is something that’s going to significantly increase the sophistication of bad actors in our society and I think that outcome is inevitable at this point. I don’t think this is “the end times” - nor do I think trying to align and regulate LLMs is going to be effective unless training these things continues to require a supply chain that’s easily monitored and controlled. Every step we take towards training LLMs on commodity/consumer hardware is a step away from effective regulation, and selfishly a step I support.