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Comment by shimman | Hacker News Reader

What are you referring to? The cult belief that they are ushering in a machine god or that they strictly care about making as much money as humanely possibly while ignoring the absolutely destructive impacts these companies have had on society?

IMO they are using the cult messaging to distract the public so they take out all the oxygen in the room regarding people that care about the immediate impacts (climate exacerbation, ease of scamming, degrading job prospects, increasing income inequality).

Whenever real concerns are brought up against these companies they are always ignored while claiming the real concern is the fantasy of a machine god turning into skynet.

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"Why don't they just not participate in the arms race?!" - guy who's never heard of arms races

If they believe they're creating "a machine god" and that it's better it's their machine god than someone else's (which, given the other contenders, I tend to agree with), then all the corollaries you mention are mostly irrelevant.

Whether you believe they're creating a machine god is irrelevant. They believe that they are. It would be helpful if you could create an actually good argument for why they cannot or are not creating a machine god, but it turns out there are no good arguments for why it's impossible to do so. And so... they shall try.

Oh okay, they're all just legit crazy and are allowed to poison the environment, murder teenagers, and ruin the material lives of millions for fantasy level delusions.

Good to know.

A lot of people would prefer nuclear deproliferation over building more nukes.

Arms races always work out great for arms dealers. Less so for the average Joe.

Yes, totally. But those people's preferences don't matter. What matters is the core competitive dynamic.

Sometimes governments have to deal with the weapons made by their enemies and that gets them stuck in an arms race.

Companies don't have to do that. If they're getting into actually dangerous territory, they can stop as soon as they want to.

If you believe in the AI doom scenario then yes, you do need to do that. Because it's very important that your "less ethical" and "less good" competitors do not get to the machine god first.

If you don't believe that, or you don't believe that the frontier labs believe that, then sure, it makes no sense. But they probably do. The people at these companies literally dedicated their lives to building this specific thing that, up until people had to make tradeoffs between "that looks risky" and "that looks useful", virtually everyone agreed would be a dangerous technology.

What apparently many people on HN failed to appreciate is that the thing that makes it dangerous is the fact that it grows in utility.

Joking? Companies absolutely do get into arms races.

They do but they very very very don't have to. They can stop.

In reality there is basically no mechanism by which a large company (i.e. with a board) can do this so long as there is 1) significant profit motive and 2) no government intervention.

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