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Didn’t they want to bomb the nazis?

• okasaki 3y ago
  And, you know, the whole thing where they nuked two Japanese cities.
• 0xEF 3y ago
  Not exactly. It was an arms race. Through intelligence efforts, both "sides" knew the other was working on these new and destructive tech, so it became a game of finishing first wins the crown. The Cold War era follows, and the Sword of Damacles hangs over the world to this day. An over simplification, of course, as the real history of the atomic bomb and the era that followed is far, far more complex. AI is no different in the advantage it would offer to the country that first develops a concrete weaponized model. Since we still think of the world in terms of nation states as opposed to a global humanity, it makes sense that there would be fear surrounding its development. It also makes sense that we would lose our ethical goals pretty quickly due to Othering in this scenario. It's easy to look at a perceived enemy and think "well, if they had this tech they wouldn't hesitate to use it against us!" to justify using said tech. By stripping our perceived enemies of any morality or ethical postulates, we reduce them to aggressive threats, which is interesting since the act of viewing another human as anything "less" than human is itself an aggressive threat.