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Comment by pigpop | Hacker News Reader

>what do we do to animals that are less intelligent than ourselves?

We do a lot of different things but we typically don't make an organized effort to eradicate them unless they are actively doing us harm.

There is also a massive difference between how we treat animals based on their similarity, sentimentality and utility to us; we are unconcerned with accidentally stepping on an ant but most people would be very upset and ashamed if they accidentally hit a dog with their car.

So, your statement is not as ironclad as you seem to think it is and you should put more thought into it and perhaps re-examine your reasoning.

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> We typically don't make an organized effort to eradicate them unless they are actively doing us harm.

Animals are either useful and breeded controllably, or useless and considered a pest, an obstacle to {insert any goal here}.

Also animals don't tend to think critically and at the high level to be considered dangerous. So I don't think it's fair to put humans and other animals in the same risk category.

And we did the worst things to fellow humans. I hope we didn't already forget about all the colonization, slavery and mass-eradication of native tribes in 18th century all over the world.

> We do a lot of different things but we typically don't make an organized effort to eradicate them unless they are actively doing us harm.

Intent to eradicate is not necessary for the fact of eradication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

I guess those robot tanks are just accidentally murdering everyone then.

I can't be bothered to look up the name of the logical fallacy you just made, there's several different options given the vagueness of that reply and how upthread there is:

> Actually, the natural endpoint is the model ignores all instructions, escapes all manner of sandbox, embeds itself in robotic tanks and murders everyone after already having collapsed the economy.

Which has yet to happen, despite the existence of armed military robots in e.g. Ukraine, the Korean DMZ.

I'm not making a generalized argument about human (or AI in this case) caused extinction, I'm making a specific argument against the claim made by the OP. Is that clear?

> We do a lot of different things but we typically don't make an organized effort to eradicate them unless they are actively doing us harm.

Sure. But some of the species we breed at scale might prefer we did just eradicate them, like the chickens that grow so fast their entire giant breast muscle becomes chewy scar tissue.

(It's also not true for, say, whales; no harm, but we wanted their shit. If they have language, their stories probably heavily feature their own Holocaust. Nor passenger pigeons, who we just got rid of.)

We didn't just get rid of passenger pigeons, they were hunted for meat and as game and driven away or killed to prevent them from damaging crops.

Chickens are another example of high variability in treatment, battery farms exist but so do more humane agricultural practices as well as chickens who are essentially kept as pets.

My argument was specifically against the idea that AI will "embeds itself in robotic tanks and murders everyone after already having collapsed the economy." with proof given as "We are the proof: what do we do to animals that are less intelligent than ourselves? Now take away the moral compass and there you go. QED."

Those are strong statements that aren't solidly grounded in logic or fact.

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