Maybe there's a pattern here?

A pattern that keeps repeating:

https://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/

Yeah the pattern is , "with great power comes great irresponsibility" , which is only confained when the power is matched by rivals

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.

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?

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?

“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.

We need to break this pattern of kinetic weapons.

How about some modern, safe bio-weapons.

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.

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.

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.

nobody here noticed?

None of them were women.

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.