[nhod]

Actually, no, "only you" can't stop it. No one can.

There was a book in the 80's called The Hundredth Monkey that posited that if only enough people opposed nuclear technology, there would be a magical critical mass of people after which it would become apparent to everyone in the whole world that nuclear technology was, you know, really bad and stuff, and it would all just go away.

We know how that went.

Like nuclear technology, AI technology development is in part an arms race. One huge difference is that AI's technological underpinnings are already far more widely available and understood than any nuclear technology ever was. Its myriad forms — neural nets, deepfakes, predictive spell check, Adobe Photoshop object selection filters, spam filters, deep learning, machine learning, large language models, etc — already permeate much of technology and life. Where does one draw the line?

Like nuclear technology, if any entity voluntarily decides to "voluntarily shut AI down," the other governments/rogue states/corporations/NGO's/financial firms/universities/etc in the world will merrily continue doing so, leaving the voluntary Luddite in the same dust as every other voluntary Luddite. Or even worse, such an entity (say, the US or Chinese governments) would in all likelihood not actually stop developing AI themselves, just ban others from having it, which would create another insane governmental "war" and enforcement regime, like the War on Drugs or War on Terrorism. Again, we know how both of those went.

One of the reasons OpenAI as founded was specifically because of this. To paraphrase @sama, AGI should belong to everyone, not to any one corporation or government. https://www.yahoo.com/now/openai-founder-sam-altman-says-221...

At the end of the day, the author may be right. Being right is also irrelevant. AI development will continue to hurtle forward. The real question is what do we do with it?

[thatfrenchguy]

> There was a book in the 80's called The Hundredth Monkey that posited that if only enough people opposed nuclear technology, there would be a magical critical mass of people after which it would become apparent to everyone in the whole world that nuclear technology was, you know, really bad and stuff, and it would all just go away.

And now we also live in the dumbest version of this world: less civilian nuclear (that would help for climate change), same amount of nuclear weapons (that doesn't!)

[ShredKazoo]

>We know how that went.

A large majority of the world's countries have no nuclear weapons.

Big swaths of the globe have been designated as "Nuclear-weapon-free zones": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-weapon-free_zone

And we haven't had a nuclear apocalypse -- in part due to lots of work on things like weapons treaties, monitoring, control systems, etc.

Throwing up our hands and giving up seems very premature. The challenges are big, but I'd say the importance is high enough that it's worth actually reading this book to see if the author has creative solutions for the things you mention.

[kamaal]

>>And we haven't had a nuclear apocalypse -- in part due to lots of work on things like weapons treaties, monitoring, control systems, etc.

Mostly its because no body has been desperate enough to press the button yet. Even in cases with a power losing a war, they've had the attitude to 'live to fight another day'. So it hasn't come to pass.

The biggest fear is someday, a power, which is often known to get away with anything they do, will go one step too far thinking they won't be held accountable as usual, and the other side will say 'sorry, that was past, this is a little too much, we ran out of patience, here is a nuke move'.

[ShredKazoo]

If people had given up on anti-proliferation efforts, it seems likely that additional nations would've had nuclear weapons, and maybe one of those nations would've been desperate enough to push the button. So I don't think the example of nuclear anti-proliferation tells us that we should be fatalistic.

[nhod]

I haven’t read the book in like 30 years, but I recall it being about both nuclear warfare AND nuclear power, inextricably linked. Which means you are right — it resulted in nuclear non-proliferation. It also resulted in an absurd, perhaps even Luddite-esque fear of nuclear power, which has set us back in countless ways.

Again, the difference here is that the cat is already out of the bag and AI technology is widely distributed and integrated into everything, including the iPhone I am writing this on. Non-proliferation has already failed.

[ShredKazoo]

>Again, the difference here is that the cat is already out of the bag and AI technology is widely distributed and integrated into everything, including the iPhone I am writing this on. Non-proliferation has already failed.

If you read the book's chapter headings under the "HOW TO AVERT AN AI APOCALYPSE" section, it seems to me that the author is cognizant of your iPhone.

I think the title is meant to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek btw.

It seems to me that the anti-nuclear movement had an overall positive impact, because lack of nuclear power, while undesirable, is a far more desirable outcome than nuclear holocaust.

And we had enough nuclear close calls (see e.g. Arkhipov or Petrov) that I'm not comfortable with the conclusion that anti-nuclear activism was unnecessary.

If humanity had been more fatalistic about nuclear proliferation, and there was never any anti-nuclear activism, nuclear weapons probably would've proliferated a lot more, there would've been more close calls, and some of them would've been catastrophes.

Of course, it would be ideal if we had both nuclear power and lack of nuclear weapons -- I'm just pushing back against "anti-nuclear = bad" oversimplifications.

[ravagat]

> A large majority of the world's countries have no nuclear weapons.

While I'd like to think this, having lived in the ME and also knowing how badly falsified government data is and could be. I do not believe this.

> The challenges are big, but I'd say the importance is high enough that it's worth actually reading this book to see if the author has creative solutions for the things you mention.

You are right with this thinking. I agree with that.

[ravagat]

You wrote this very well. I only add a sentence[0] and a link to the video where I saw it recently [1]

[0] - "The World still fights Holy Wars."

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FECyn_sGk4M