3 ms·

Exactly! We bravely trudge forward and see what overturning the next stone brings.

• ben_w 2y ago
  I'm enthusiastic about the potential rewards for AI. But I look back at our history of running towards new things without awareness of (or planning for) risks, and I see Bhopal accident happening at all despite that it should have been preventable, and I see Castle Bravo being larger than expected, and I see the stories about children crushed in industrial equipment because the Victorians had no workplace health and safety, and I see the way CO2 was known to have a greenhouse effect for around a century before we got the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Climate Accords. It's hard to tell where the real risks are, vs. things which are just Hollywood plot points — this is likely true in every field, it certainly is in cryptography: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/04/the_eighth_movi.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/04/the_eighth_mo... So, for example: Rainbows End is fiction, but the exact same things that lead to real-life intelligence agencies wanting to break crypto also drive people to want to find a "you gotta believe me" McGuffin in real life — even if their main goal is simply to know it's possible before it happens, in order to catch people under its influence. Why does this matter? Because we've already had a chatbot accidentally encourage someone's delusional belief that their purpose in life was to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67012224 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67012224) and "find lone agents willing to do crimes for you" is reportedly a thing IS already does manually — but is that even a big deal IRL, or just a decent plot device for a story?