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by tsimionescu 256 days ago
If this were so, I've yet to see any explanation that accounts for why human cloning has been so successfully prevented, even though it's relatively inexpensive technology, to the point that we have (had?) pet cloning companies selling it as a consumer service.
1 comments
naasking 256 days ago
1. How do you know human cloning has been prevented? Maybe you mean it's not provided as a commercial service, but does that entail it's not happening at all?

2. Preventing the manifestation of physical objects is a lot easier than preventing the dissemination of pure information. AIs are easy to copy, easy to run, and can assist in their own creation, advancement and proliferation, and it only gets easier over time. For an apt analogy, consider a cloning lab where every clone that escaped was compelled to create their own cloning lab, and everything you needed could be bought at any corner store.

3. All cloning requires existing biological organisms to participate at various stages. You need not only the biologists on board, but also the surrogate that has to carry the fetus to term. What do you think will happen when artificial wombs become available?

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tsimionescu 256 days ago
1. Because neither Elon Musk nor Kim Jong-Un have a clone. That is, if human cloning were being carried out, we'd see clones of famous and/or powerful people. Is there some chance it happened in a lab somewhere and kept extremely secret? Sure. Is it a technology that's available to the groups that could pay for it? No, it would be very visible (eventually, at least).

2. Computers powerful enough to train AI are also physical objects, ones that consume gigantic amounts of power as well. Maybe some day we'll have computers that can train Claude on 50kW of power running in your pocket, but maybe not. There are fundamental limits to how much computation you can get per watt, and we're getting closer to them. So, preventing AI may be as simple as banning use of any computer cluster that consumes more than some wattage, say 1000kW, without government audit, while also banning research into more computationally efficient ways of doing AI.

3. This is not a real problem, since some biologists that are into cloning may have wombs of their own to gestate the clone. Artifical wombs, even cheap ones, would change nothing in relation to cloning (except maybe reduce the diversity of rogue cloning research teams - angering the criminal enterprise DEI department, I'm sure).

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