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MelonUskyesterday at 11:10 PM2 repliesview on HN

Imagine multiple (basically all of them) leading pharma companies CEOs saying:

We cannot be sure our new medicine won’t harm or even kill humanity

Not only that, they are new to this whole pharma business, have no medical degree (medicine just appeared a few years ago and is still mostly art then science)

And they even say there is 10% chance of the majorly bad permanent outcome and they already had drugs that escaped the lab a few times and harmed others (suicides, lowered academic performance in children, major hacking sprees)

Isn’t it extraordinary enough? Isn’t it “not enough evidence some caution is advised”? ;-)

We used to have the TV, the thing was in the box, the simulations were in the box for 70+ years, and now something starts to crawl out of our “TVs”:

We can empower all (a lot of startups are needed, check my bio), not only AI agents


Replies

socalgal2today at 2:08 AM

This is a poor analogy because you have not listed any positive and demostrated upside.

It's more like "we found a cure for lung cancer and it works on 75% of patients and we're working hard to get to 100% and cure other cancers too" and someone else screaming "You need to stop that research because there is a 50% chance you'll cause the zombie apocalypse and turn us all into zombies".

I get this analogy isn't perfect but, (1) lots of people are seeing benefits. For example Mozilla claiming they used AI to fix tons of bugs. If there were no benefits there'd be no incentive to keep going (2) it's hard to verify the naysayers claims because they're guessing without proof. Sure, it's easy to follow their arguments and nod along but they are guesses similar to the population bomb of the 1970s

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