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lubujacksontoday at 6:08 PM3 repliesview on HN

Sandbags against a tsunami. When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?

What we need is deep thinking on the implications and make the default way forward one where we want to go. In other words, we build a channel for the flood waters, not a wall. Creating a role for "somebody to deal with AI issues" is one of those hand-wavvy upper management moves that looks defensible but simply passes the buck to someone who structurally lacks the agency to actual move the needle.


Replies

chasd00today at 7:15 PM

> When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?

the only thing i can think of was when that Chinese scientist produced gene edited human babies. He was pretty much excommunicated from the scientific community and, eventually, spent some time in jail.

AI, on the other hand, has a huge profit potential and way too far out of the bag to go back in. To quote the movie Terminator, "it will never stop".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair

cheptsovtoday at 6:17 PM

What surprises me even more is why Bill Gates writes this kind of bizarre, low-quality nonsense in the first place. What purpose does it serve? It’s so obviously shallow that it influences nothing and adds nothing to the conversation.

inglor_cztoday at 6:50 PM

Locally, yes, like the Japanese shogunate blocking the outside world for more than two hundred years.

Globally, it is unrealistic.