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Maybe there's a pattern here?

Maybe there's a pattern here?

surprisetalk

Comments (81)

  • lwansbrough
    Tangential, but one thing that really irks me is when people advocate for nuclear proliferation as a safety feature.Aside from just the potential for accidents, one has to consider the potential for irrational actors or those who choose to employ game theory more recklessly. And when I think of Metcalfe's law, I feel this sort of horror about the idea of proliferation and the loss of control in communication (which was of course vital in preventing Armageddon during the Cold War.)I think ultimately, future security will come from defensive technology and I believe that's the most noble pursuit for engineers wishing to leave an indelible mark on humanity.There is of course no defensive solution against those who wish to build Sundial [0] or Poseidon [1]. Humanity appears to be unequipped to carry the mantle of life.[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poseidon_(unmanned_underwater_...
  • abetusk
  • lilytweed
    For any readers who liked this essay, check out Benjamin Labatut’s fantastic novel “When We Cease to Understand the World,” about scientists and mathematicians who were more or less driven mad by their discoveries. The history of modern warfare and dual use technologies is a big part of the book.
  • roxolotl
    This is a great reminder that the line drawn by Anthropic is already too far and that if you’ve been driven to cancel your OpenAI account by their behavior you should also cancel your Anthropic account.The other pattern that’s a bit less explicit here is that these technologies try to win over the public by theorizing on their incredible peace time use. While many genuinely have great use in peacetime we should not allow that to blind ourselves to their wartime potential. Many of us have little power to direct the future but for those who care doing what you can do is always more than nothing and when done in concert with others does have an impact.
  • seydor
    Yeah the pattern is , "with great power comes great irresponsibility" , which is only confained when the power is matched by rivals
  • redhanuman
    Gatling died in 1903 and he never saw his gun used in a trench and the engineers at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google they're watching it happen on X in real time..that's the difference nobody's talking about So Does seeing it change anything? I genuinely don't know.
  • nilirl
    I see the pattern the author wants to show me, but what about it?Civilization is a complex, evolving system. How much predictability and control do we really have?
  • chihuahua
    The Gatling quote is hilarious. Did the inventor of the machine gun really think that each company of 100 men was going to be reduced to one guy with a Gatling gun, and 99 of them send him to the battlefield by himself, saying "good luck buddy, let us know how it works out?"The army was going to be reduced by a factor of 100, and two tiny armies were going to face off while the majority of men of fighting age were going to sit at home and paint landscape paintings? Really?
  • ineedasername
    “Maybe there’s a pattern here”Is is that surprisingly few weapons inventors expressed regret and doubt? Or just that very few wrote about it?Snark aside, we have massively more people alive today than in 1900 and yet the proportion of people that die in armed conflicts is— while horrific- barely noteworthy in most years around the dawn of the 20th century and not infrequently dwarfed by the body counts racked up in those days.
  • morninglight
    We need to break this pattern of kinetic weapons.How about some modern, safe bio-weapons.
  • MediaSquirrel
    Nukes gave us peace and freedom.We've had no WW3 (so far) and no one here needs to worry about being drafted into a war. Gatling might have thought his gun would reduce the number of war fatalities, but but Oppenheimer thought he would end the world. Both were wrong.Alternative take: Inventors are bad at predicting the downstream societal effects of their inventions.
  • hackyhacky
    tldr: many great scientific advancement were created by well-intentioned researchers who were subsequently shocked to find their work applied to military, often to the great detriment of mankind.The unwritten implication is that this applies to AI, as well. I find it hard to disagree. I don't know what to do about it.The HN crowd is elated that we can finally finish our side projects, while the ruling class is already using AI to subvert democracy, spread misinformation, and develop weapons. "If we don't build these weapons, someone else will." If we can learn nothing else from history, we should learn that you can't turn back the clock.
  • anon
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  • XorNot
    This is such a tiresome take. Anything is a weapon if you work hard enough at it, but do you really think the main thing that will stop us killing each other is access or lack thereof to weapons?Like we have prehistoric skeletons with obvious signs of traumatic injury inflicted by tools.
  • throwaway290
    nobody here noticed?None of them were women.
  • arjie
    This business about Alberto Santos-Dumont does put most of the thing into question:> North Americans think the Wright Brothers invented the airplane. Much of the world believes that credit belongs to Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian inventor working in Paris.Much of the world? It's a minority viewpoint both among scholars and lay people. Some people in the insight porn "actually, the thing they won't tell you" genre of blogs and so on also do it. Certainly it's standard in China and India, so at the least you have to put Asia on that list as well. And Wright is the standard teaching in Australia, and the UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Egypt and Botswana and I'd be surprised if other places in Africa are different.In general, when I look in my rice at a restaurant and I see a cockroach, I assume there are more cockroaches in the restaurant. So, too, I assume there are other cockroaches in this article. I don't have the time to verify the other things, but this is wrong enough that I'd rather eat elsewhere.