[cheonn638]

> theyre food delivery robots, thats not a gun that a drink dispenser!"

You underestimate how many top AI scientists are perfectly okay with building autonomous weapons systems and are not ashamed of it.

Me, and 99% of HN readers, will gladly pull the trigger to release a missile from a drone if we are paid even just US$1,000,000/year.

Now note that many L7+ at OpenAI are making $10 million+ per year.

[wackget]

> Me, and 99% of HN readers, will gladly pull the trigger to release a missile from a drone if we are paid even just US$1,000,000/year.

I sincerely doubt that's true. I hope it's not. $1m is a lot of money, but I find it hard to believe most people would be willing to indiscriminately kill a large number of people for it.

[vixen99]

Never mind people in the US, there are plenty of people elsewhere happy to work with their governments who are doubtless developing such autonomous entities.

[ozmodiar]

It doesn't need to be most, it just needs to be enough. I dont think it's close to a majority, but at the same time its more than enough.

[throwaway2037]

    > Me, and 99% of HN readers, will gladly pull the trigger to release a missile from a drone if we are paid even just US$1,000,000/year.

I will respond with a personal, related story. I was living in Hongkong when "democracy fell" in the late 2010s / early 2020s. It was depressing, and I wanted to leave. (I did later.) I was trying to explain to my parents (and relatives) why most highly skilled foreign workers just didn't care. I said: "Imagine you told a bunch of people in 1984 that they could move to Moscow to open a local office for a wealthy international corporation and get paid big money, like 500K+ in today's dollars. Fat expat package is included. How many people would take it? Most."

Another point completely unrelated to my previous story: Since the advent of pretty good LLMs starting in 2023, when I watch flims with warfare set in the future, it makes absolutely no sense that soldiers are still manually aiming. I'm not saying it will be like Terminator 2 right away, but surely the 19-22 year old operator will just point the weapon in the general direction of the target, then AI will handle the rest. And yet, we still see people manually aiming and shooting in these scenarios. Am I the only one who cringes when I see this? There is something uncanney valley about it, like seeing a character in a film using a flip phone post-2015! Maybe directors don't want to show us the ugly truth of the future of warfare.

[DharmaPolice]

I don't cringe because it's for dramatic/narrative effect. It's the same reason the crew of the Enterprise regularly beam into dangerous locations rather than sending a semi-autonomous drone. Or that despite having intelligent machines their operations are often very manual, as it is on many science fiction shows. The audience (if they think about it) realises this is not realistic and understands that the vast majority of our exploration would be done by unmanned/automated vessels. But that wouldn't be very interesting.

Other universes take it further - Warhammer 40k often features combatants fighting with melee weapons. Rule of cool and all that.

[fc417fc802]

Agreed, but I think it goes far beyond warfare. The biggest "plot hole" in much scifi (IMO) is the lack of explanation for why all the depicted systems aren't autonomous. Most worldbuilding seems rather lazy to me, a haphazard mishmash of things that imply AGI and things that would only ever exist in a pre-ChatGPT world.

One of the few works that at least attempts to get this right is the Culture series where it's remarked on several different occasions that anything over some threshold of computing power has AGI built into it (but don't worry you're totally free, just ignore the hall monitor in all of your devices).

[tibbydudeza]

True that - everybody has a price.

[xphos]

I mean this is not actually true and the statement justifies and vindicates those that do sell out by saying of course anyone would. There are countless marytr for religion, politics, and other things.

A better way is to say you can always find a cheap sellout at least than the morally dammed cannot claim equality of belief

[zelphirkalt]

> There are countless marytr for religion, politics, and other things.

I think those are not really comparable to OpenAI employees who leave, but that only underlines your point more:

Leaving OpenAI is not like death. In fact most of the employees will have an easy time finding a new job, given the resume of having worked at OpenAI. It is nowhere near any actual martyr.

[raw_anon_1111]

You mean like all of the religious leaders who are actively supporting a defending a three time married adulterer? You’ll have to excuse my skepticism of the morality of “the moral majority”.

[nawgz]

Religion is and always has been about control… it strikes me as exceedingly naive to be surprised the church is backing a pedophile, have you literally ever read any history of any kind?

[raw_anon_1111]

I am the last person to be surprised at the corruption of any large organization.

[xphos]

Not claiming all religious people everywhere are some moral majority? Simply that people die for there beliefs and don't sellout. It happens in religion, politics etc. Also it's some super faulty logic to say look those prominent religious people support trump so all religous people support him is stupid. If that were the case Trump would win every election by massive margins. Trump might win 60/40 in rural areas the 40% he is losing is still very religous generally speaking because rural populations are religious. Cambridge MA voted for Biden by like 96% they have more than 4% of there populations that is also religious.

Also your point is kind of self defeating Trump's true believers dont sell Trump out no matter what he does. He could hide and suppress a pedophile conspiracy and his believers will still say he is tough on crime.

Selling out is bad I think people should passionate stand and be consistent in what they believe and do anything less shouldn't be celebrated or excused because its hard

[raw_anon_1111]

80% of Evangelical Christians voted for Trump.

[xphos]

2 things

1) I don't think you have read nor understood my argument. Stating that 80% of Evangelical Christians voted for Trump is not the the ding you think it is. Your imply 1/5 of Evangelicals don't sellout? I think that estimate is way too high and even if it was 99.99% of Evangelic Christians that doesn't excuse their selling hence my original statement. Say everyone sellsout so its okay to sell out is excusing in my opinion is abhorent behavior and suppport of an extremely dangerous leader. But this leads to point 2.

2) I am assuming your a democrat, congrats me to. I am also religiou, and I am assuming your not religous. But you don't see to undertand much about different religous groups and I think this sharp narrow view thinking really harms the democrats ability to reach out to religous people which is around 70-75% of american's according to pew research.

If you want to understand Evangelicals are basically defined by following some charismatic leader who either speaks for Christ, or has visions, or just claims to have all the answers. Believers will follow in any direction because they trust that person but when trust is lost they usually face a crisis of faith and leave that church or the faith all together because they didn't really have strong buy in to the ideals of chirst just that person. This is an extremely well documented occurence. While not all Evangelical people are that occurence a large number are and that architype perfectly describes Trump supporters and MAGA cultist. I think that explains the extreme overlap.

But also religion is a much more complex subject than 1 statistic, as being MAGA is not on the set of beliefs required to be Christian, In fact being a good person isn't either. I think it would be worth while to read up on up and coming people like James Talarico, who understand well that infusing the 2 philosophies is motivating. Because remember religion while being used to do horrible things was also used to immensely liberal things. Universal voting is a protestant thing, anti slavery is largerly a religous movement against white supremacy. The civil rights movement is baked in religion.

Understanding religion as equal to Trump support is corrosive the game of politics and pandering the playroom of vanity. As it doesn't help change anything and is just social meeting points to talk that way. I don't care for vanity I care about wining political power and using it run the country well and help people. I care about uplifting people economically, so they have the freedom to explore whatever faith, athiestism, or whatever they want because that liberality I believe is inherent into the decency of the human condition.

[ozmodiar]

I think the tragic thing is that not everyone has a price, just the vast majority.

[beanjuiceII]

1,000,000 ? lol gimme 200,000 and I'm your trigger puller

[mr_mitm]

How many?

[achierius]

As many as are at OpenAI about a month from now.

[the_real_cher]

The world needs a nuclear war to just eliminate 99% of human life and just start over.

[tclancy]

Same answer the last ten thousand edge lords who said this got: you first.

[duzer65657]

but you're part of the 1%, right?

[jacquesm]

Either that or a cockroach.

[nilamo]

And all the survivors die from radiation? This must be a joke

[the_real_cher]

Theres 8 billion people. Some will survive statistically. Not many but some.