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This is the thing that actually worries me the most about AI. Right now there are meaningful practical obstacles to, say, manufacturing ricin or 3-D printing a

This is the thing that actually worries me the most about AI. Right now there are meaningful practical obstacles to, say, manufacturing ricin or 3-D printing a working gun or figuring out how to kill somebody with a drone, and apparently these practical obstacles are enough to deter a nutso but insufficiently committed/intelligent/methodical would-be assassin, but if you have a chatbot that will happily talk you through the whole process, maybe that equilibrium changes.

vkou 2y ago
The chatbot can't even give me a code sample which doesn't hallucinate APIs - something that is easily machine-verifiable. Asking it to do something complicated that's not machine verifiable and expecting it to be correct is science fiction.
- croissants 2y ago
  I'm not sure what chatbots you're using, but the big free ones at this point can and, in my experience, typically do give valid code samples for a surprising range of tasks. I'm skeptical about LLMs as the ultimate future of AI, but they aren't useless.
ge96 2y ago
You don't need AI for that, just look it up on Reddit
npunt 2y ago
Same, and the story is really of all technology. A suitable amount of friction is the invisible force that holds together much of society. We have to be very careful about what activities and actions we make easy to do, because if destruction is simple, we will be governed by the laziest and most stupid among us who will harness it without thought or care. The same goes in the opposite direction; if everything is hard to do, our dynamism is oppressed.
- xyzzy123 2y ago
  You need a certain degree of practicality to do proper damage to infrastructure, the trades have it in spades but political types not so much. You have to have some mental model of which parts of the system are hard to replace. Sometimes this is not immediately obvious, e.g. signalling equipment vs track damage or transformers vs line damage. TBH most people's threat models haven't really caught up with the reality of battery powered tools and carbide / bimetal blades. A small number of organised protesters could quickly disable a lot of infrastructure with a few k of milwaukee, some wrecking bars & utility keys. It's been interesting to watch the "blade runners" in London solo this, still haven't seen a coordinated group do it on a large scale.

vkou 2y ago

The chatbot can't even give me a code sample which doesn't hallucinate APIs - something that is easily machine-verifiable. Asking it to do something complicated that's not machine verifiable and expecting it to be correct is science fiction.

croissants 2y ago
I'm not sure what chatbots you're using, but the big free ones at this point can and, in my experience, typically do give valid code samples for a surprising range of tasks. I'm skeptical about LLMs as the ultimate future of AI, but they aren't useless.

ge96 2y ago

You don't need AI for that, just look it up on Reddit

npunt 2y ago

Same, and the story is really of all technology. A suitable amount of friction is the invisible force that holds together much of society. We have to be very careful about what activities and actions we make easy to do, because if destruction is simple, we will be governed by the laziest and most stupid among us who will harness it without thought or care. The same goes in the opposite direction; if everything is hard to do, our dynamism is oppressed.

xyzzy123 2y ago
You need a certain degree of practicality to do proper damage to infrastructure, the trades have it in spades but political types not so much. You have to have some mental model of which parts of the system are hard to replace. Sometimes this is not immediately obvious, e.g. signalling equipment vs track damage or transformers vs line damage. TBH most people's threat models haven't really caught up with the reality of battery powered tools and carbide / bimetal blades. A small number of organised protesters could quickly disable a lot of infrastructure with a few k of milwaukee, some wrecking bars & utility keys. It's been interesting to watch the "blade runners" in London solo this, still haven't seen a coordinated group do it on a large scale.