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Comment by Fordec | Hacker News Reader

All the good in the world can be 99.9% of the population even, it still doesn't stop the minority enacting a bioweapon mass casualty event. It's the reason we have jails. Jails don't house 50% of the population, not even close, but the grief the minority population enact gets its whole branch of criminal justice and multiple federal departments to counteract for good reason. And now this technology will accelerate what lone wolves can do, which cannot be undone, before they are stopped by the good majority.

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Yeah, AI may suck - time will tell.

But focusing on bioweapons and mass destruction, on the grief other people (‘jailed minorities’) cause, disregards the progress we have made. Over centuries human welfare has massively increased. On average things have never been better for humanity.

I’m not saying there’s no danger of bad things happening - I’m saying our view is distorted, which is a not a good basis for decision making

And I'm no bear on the tech either. I'm not even in the boat of that the tech should be slowed down yet. But in a world where anyone can produce the effort of 300 people trivially, this eventually takes us places. Electricity and industrialization introduced huge benefits upfront, it introduced new problems that needed addressing at the long tail. Lets not pretend there won't be new problems to tackle here or just "hope" it works out.

AI isn't going to create in of itself "new" problems, it's just going to expose what we already know can cause harm, but was just stopped from being bigger problems because scaling issues was a natural barrier and we took the lazy way out until now.

Yes AI may cause job loss, more inequality in the short term.

But if there is anything humanity has shown is that we can deal with disruptive progress.

We may need to resettle but over the longer term every disruptive innovation so far has lead to an increase in wellbeing for the whole of humanity.

(That does not resolve the danger of AI itself ‘going rogue’ or a single lunatic developing a bioweapon, but those things are much less likely to occur than the level of media attention would suggest.)

It also empowers the people trying to stop them.

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