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Maybe there's a pattern here?
- morninglight 8mo agoWe need to break this pattern of kinetic weapons. How about some modern, safe bio-weapons.
- rationalist 8mo agoIt has bio in the name - it must be good! That means they're made from renewable resources, right?
- coffeebeqn 8mo agoAs long as they’re USDA Organic
- jiehong 8mo agoI just watched an episode of Babylon 5 in which an entire race gets wiped by a virus in that way In a matter of days.
- ares623 8mo agoClincally proven bio-weapons
- InsideOutSanta 8mo agoSide effects may include victory.
- zabzonk 8mo agoHow do you test "safe bio-weapons"?
- hammock 8mo agoSame way you test regular weapons
- hackyhacky 8mo agotldr: 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.
- 6177c40f 8mo agoReminds me a quote from Gibson's Spook Country: "That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery."
- lich_king 8mo agoI think both things can simultaneously be true. There is a certain inevitability to technological progress. Once you reach a critical mass of collective knowledge, the resulting "thing" will get developed. If not by you, then by someone else. But also, inevitability is not an argument for complicity. If you personally decide to work on bioweapons, I don't think you can shrug and say "eh, it was going to happen either way". As tech workers, we've really mastered the art of coming up with justifications for what essentially just boils down to "all my friends have gotten rich and now it's my turn". I've met hundreds of sharp engineers from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. None of them could look me straight in the eye and say "yeah, you know, what we're doing with ad tech is actually good". They just always had an explanation along the lines of "it's not that bad, and besides, if we don't do it, someone else will, and we're the good guys here".
- godelski 8mo ago> besides, if we don't do it, someone else will, and we're the good guys here". It's funny that people justify themselves that way considering it's the literal phrase is discussed in every ethics 101 course... and not because a bunch of good people were saying it...
- XorNot 8mo agoThis 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.
- hackyhacky 8mo ago> Like we have prehistoric skeletons with obvious signs of traumatic injury inflicted by tools. No one is arguing that modern technology is the sole or even principal cause of military deaths. The argument is simply that technology has greatly facilitated the ease and scale. Imagine a world without nuclear weapons, automatic weapons, rockets, and explosives (other than gunpowder). There would still be wars, certainly, but they would be a lot less destructive.
- XorNot 8mo agoThe number of casualties from the American civil war was estimated at 700,000 soldiers from both sides. The death toll from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is estimated at about 200,000. Nuclear weapons have killed far fewer people then any other type in history, whereas the musket did some work. And you know, a bunch of Romans with the pinnacle of technology - the sharp thing on a long stick - in the Battle of Carthage collectively had about 100,000 casualties and also demolished a city. And that was one of many battles in many wars. The masses of man and ground into the masses of man in conflict, at scale, at every turn that we've had organized society. We live in a time where casualty scales are actually shockingly low in conflict.
- watwut 8mo agoYou literally refenced WWII. Which features a peek of people killed in military conflict. And yes, holocaust counts, civilian deaths by soldiers count.
- chihuahua 8mo agoInteresting perspective. One could argue that nuclear weapons are among the less harmful things invented, since they killed fewer people than knives, clubs, spears, guns, cars, cigarettes, alcohol, asbestos, coal power plants, and probably a lot of other things. Plus they probably prevent a 3rd world war with killing on the same scale as WW1 and WW2, tens of millions each.
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- chihuahua 8mo agoThe 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?
- mmcromp 8mo agoI don't know if this is your point, but we're hearing the same stores with AI. Do these people really mean what they say or are they just lying to paint themselves as honorable
- zmgsabst 8mo agoBut… it did do that. > that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished. Our force structure shifted towards logistics and infrastructure from combatants as we moved up the weapon complexity hierarchy. First automatic guns, then tanks, then airplanes. To a large extent, a tank or air crew is 50 guys waving off 1-5, while they sit back at base and do hobbies between bouts of mechanic labor. They’re not literally at home, but we do fight with small mechanized armies while most soldiers watch on from the base.
- AndrewKemendo 8mo agoRight It wasn’t over night but it did exactly what it intended and sped up a battle significantly as though you had multiples of troops compared to a musket firing line Then miniaturized it becomes the SAW
- closewith 8mo agoYes, even for infantry, the tooth to tail ratio for deployed expeditionary armies is now 10-20:1. Even that's down from cold war ratios due to mechanisation and automation on the logistics side.
- MediaSquirrel 8mo agoNukes 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.
- jiehong 8mo agoIt very much depends on where "here" is. At least, it gives impunity to attack others with less fear of retaliation…
- treebeard901 8mo agoLet's assume a nuclear exchange happens at some point during a war. There is a very high chance that this will cause an escalation leading to a nuclear apocalypse. Since this result is presumably inevitable at increasing frequency, it's more like nukes prevented another major world war and stole a form of peace from the future, temporarily. That peace debt might be repaid with the end of everything.
- ares623 8mo agowell whatever society is left will definitely be "peaceful" for at least a couple of decades.
- testaccount28 8mo agolet's assume the trees rise up and set fire to the ionosphere.
- KronisLV 8mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls
- nehal3m 8mo agoFunny how the unintentional close calls become more sparse with time. I wonder if that’s because humanity got better at dealing with the responsibility or because the oopsies haven’t been declassified yet.
- nilirl 8mo agoI 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?
- seydor 8mo agoYeah the pattern is , "with great power comes great irresponsibility" , which is only confained when the power is matched by rivals
- notarobot123 8mo agoYet the Cold War taught us that competition between rivals doesn't contain power at all.
- expedition32 8mo agoShould power be contained? Humans always rise up against their oppressors and I find that a comforting thought. Tyranny, slavery, colonialism- it never lasts.
- Chris2048 8mo ago> Humans always rise up against their oppressors Successfully?
- rschiavone 8mo agoThe number of people trapped in modern slavery today is an all-time high across the whole history.
- renewiltord 8mo agoIndeed one of the reasons to advocate for the Nuclear Holocaust is because it will eliminate slavery once and for all. Under sufficient nuclear bombardment, we could guarantee zero slaves.
- redhanuman 8mo agoGatling 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.
- Starman_Jones 8mo agoKalashnikov worked for decades to build better rifles. Regret is an old man's game. Even if these AI engineers do regret what they've built, I fear it's too late. A couple years ago, when news broke about Project Lavender, the Google engineers who worked on it protested and got fired. Google's still building weaponized AI systems.
- abetusk 8mo agoA pattern that keeps repeating: https://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/ https://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/
- ineedasername 8mo ago“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.
- onion2k 8mo agoSnark 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. That's true if your definition of 'die in armed conflicts' is limited to 'the soldiers on the battlefield.' If you extend that definition a little to 'people who would not have died if there hadn't been an armed conflict' then you need to scale it up to about a million people a year today. That's just from 5 countries where it's been studied. Globally it's likely to be much more. There's some good information about it, from a credible source, here: https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human
- ineedasername 8mo agoNo, you are mistaken, inconsistent. Analysis cannot be X in ~1900's vs. x + y these days -> "Oh wow things have changed". Do you think "would not have died if there hadn't been an armed conflict" wasn't a thing in 1900? I know such things to have been high then, though not with precision, but starvation followed conflict whether because crops went unharvested or were burned or scavenged by the armies. Logistic to rapidly transport food from other regions easily, humanitarian aid, not very good compared to today. That's just one area things may have been worse at those times.
- watwut 8mo agoA deliberate bombing of hospitals and whole cities were not a feature in 1900. Deliberate attempts to create refugee crisis or just kill then all are feature now. By all means, count in all the civilians killed in 1900 too. But it is completely ridiculous to count only soldiers. Civilians are more likely to die due to wars. And soldiers kill civilians intentionally. > proportion of people that die in armed conflicts That must include the majority of victims of it all.
- throwaway290 8mo agonobody here noticed? None of them were women.
- synecdoche 8mo agoI'm puzzled to what point is tried to be made. Is the parent statement supposed to be an argument that women are not capable, or even less likely, of providing means for, or inflicting massive destruction? How would that follow from what is said here or in the article? Certainly women can be destructive too. What would make it a sex issue?
- throwaway290 8mo ago> argument that women are not capable I know this is called techbro crowd for a reason, but you know that plenty of women invented things and did scientific discoveries right? especially after they were unbanned from it > Certainly women can be destructive too Sure if you say so. It's just that 0% of these destructive weapons and tech in the article was developed by women. Maybe there's a pattern here
- arjie 8mo agoThis 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.
- weinzierl 8mo agoNah, before the Internet if you asked a random German on the street, who'd they think invented the airplane I'm pretty sure you'd had gotten Otto Lilienthal as an answer. I guess the reality is that before the world got hyper connected every country had its own set of inventors for almost everything. There are numerous examples but they are hard to find now. In the early days of Wikipedia I thought about writing a crawler that makes a table with inventor per country. It would have been an interesting experiment. Maybe it could be done with an archive even now.
- reshlo 8mo ago
- lilytweed 8mo agoFor 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.
- trevyn 8mo agoSorry, this is fiction about real-life scientists being driven mad, when in fact the real-life scientists in question were not driven mad?
- lwansbrough 8mo agoTangential, 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poseidon_(unmanned_underwater_vehicle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poseidon_(unmanned_underwater_...
- hyperific 8mo agoYou might like "The Bomb" documentary from 2016. "[It] explores the culture surrounding nuclear weapons, the fascination they inspire and the perverse appeal they still exert." https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5596034/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5596034/ https://www.thebombnow.com/ https://www.thebombnow.com/
- watwut 8mo agoThe truble is, that with current new world order, not having nuclear power means you are helpless sitting duck for active insatiable bullies. Like, there is no other option - not having them means you will be turned into rubble or will have to pay a lot for not being tuned into rubble. The most aggressive states have nuclear power. The countries they attacked dont.
- lwansbrough 8mo agoYou are arguing in favour of a nuclear apocalypse.
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- roxolotl 8mo agoThis 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.
- derektank 8mo agoI didn’t cancel my ChatGPT subscription because OpenAI were willing to accept different terms of use for their AI tools than Anthropic. I canceled my subscription because they were willing to negotiate with a government that was engaged in an unlawful attempt to coerce and extort a competitor.
- amadeuspagel 8mo agoThis essay reminded me of War Before Civilization, which argues that modern technologies like the airplane and the submarine brought back pre-civilizational genocidal war, without clearly defined frontlines, without distinction between civilians and soldiers. I didn't know that Alfred Nobel thought that removing this distinction would bring peace though. I guess he didn't read the book, which was published long after his death. It's main thesis is just that war before civilization was a thing at all, that the archeological evidence for it can be taken at face value, that weapons were not means of exchange and walls were not symbols of unity. It could have been written before the invention of dynamite.