[zzzeek]

With the advent of new technology, so must entire practices and industries spring up to counteract the inherent harm this technology will cause and is already causing.

is it a given that technological progress will often necessitate societal harm? Is such technological progress actually progress for humanity?

there seems to be this universal notion that "things that can be built will be built and are inevitable". It is for example argument #1 anytime anyone suggests we should be manufacturing and selling fewer guns - that this is not possible, since guns are "inevitable". You can 3-d print them after all! Therefore, everyone must be armed and we must live in an armed society with regular mass shootings, because what can we do? It's also a ubiquitous slogan used around AI - that AI is "inevitable". It's already out there, Google internal docs are betting that OSS AI will become the norm, and that's that. AI will be everywhere used for everything, making it's fairly unreliable decisions about things like who broke into your house last night, who's likely to be shoplifting, is that a bike in the crosswalk or just nothing at all, etc., and that's now the world we live in.

Are humans as a species perhaps in need of better ways to not build things, since right now every possible thing that is imagined and becomes possible therefore "must" be built, en masse, and humanity's occupation becomes mitigating the species against all the harms brought about by all this "progress".

anyway that's the low blood sugar version. I'll likely have not much to say after lunch

[kunley]

Very well put.

Why not to build nukes massively? Nukes are inevitable, because in the human nature there is inherent hunger for power (ask any psychologist nearby), and nukes are the ultimate power. With nukes at reasonable prices for wealthy families, the notion of an "atomic family" would really get a new exciting meaning!

I am ofc sarcastic, but the reasoning is IMO the same like with the AI.. The real question here is: why to refrain from building nukes and why to refrain from uncontrollably developing AI.

[zzzeek]

if you could build a nuke in your garage, the world would have ended long ago. the extreme difficulty, expense, and industrial-grade complexity in handling and enriching uranium and then forming it into a viable weapon is the only thing that kept that from happening

[NumberWangMan]

Hey, I was just this idea the other day. One can imagine a world in which all new tech has to go through a period of deliberation before it ever sees the light of day.

There would clearly be a lot of things that would be blocked. Some of them would be good. Even today, we have problems like new drugs being rejected due to risks, when people are dying due to lack of treatment. That kind of thing might get worse.

On the other hand, we might have stopped Thimerosal, leaded gasoline, social media addiction, high fructose corn syrup, CFCs, and perhaps been a lot more careful about fossil fuels before they did so much damage. There are probably more technologies I haven't thought of -- it's easy to forget the ones we don't use anymore.

I don't know if it would be a good thing on average. Delaying technology has costs. BUT, when it comes to technologies that carry existential risk, like fossil fuels (I believe) AGI, I think it's likely worth it. Gotta play it safe sometimes, so you can keep playing.