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by pembrook 105 days ago
Anyone who leaves OpenAI is also signing the death warrant of countless young soldiers by refusing to help build the technology to help remove humans from old school combat.

The current state of affairs of modern warfare is: lots of deaths, lots of collateral damage.

Improving the technology used is more likely to lead to less collateral deaths of innocent people and your own soldiers as well.

There’s already enough weapons to blow the entire world up a thousand times over. Making armies smarter about how they use these deadly weapons is a good thing.

Technologists and intellectuals are notoriously terrible at these sorts of broader societal calculations. They all thought the internet and Social Media would obviously lead to global freedom, which it didn’t.

Now technologists think their new thing, AI coding/spreadsheet bots, will destroy the global economy and kill us all or lead to communist techno-utopia. What if we stop with the moralistic grandstanding and self-aggrandizement and take a deep breath. None of the overpaid pontificators at OpenAI has ever seen real combat, so to make confident claims about what nascent technology will do to it is silly.

This whole thread is going to age like milk.

1 comments

And how exactly does collaborating with the US gov on mass surveillance of citizens help save the lives of young soldiers?

But ok, let’s stick to weapons. The premise that we can wage war without sacrificing lives is a tantalizing one. But do you genuinely think that would prevent death? The drone warfare era under bush and obama shows that killing from afar with no skin in the game doesn’t lead to restraint or lack of war. It just leads to blowing up entire wedding parties.

Do you realize that prior to drones, we would just carpet bomb entire cities?

Collateral damage would be the entirety of the city itself and a huge percentage of the people in it, not just a wedding party.

Also, China is doing mass surveillance just fine without OpenAI. So this is an irrelevant, mute point.

When we chose to go to war, carpet bombing was common, yes. But would Obama have gone to war in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan if he hadn’t had drones? The choice to go to war is influenced by the tech you have.

> Also, China is doing mass surveillance just fine without OpenAI. So this is an irrelevant, mute point.

The east german stasi was doing mass surveillance just fine without computers… yet they couldn’t implement what china has done. We have yet to see the full reality of what AI-enabled mass surveillance looks like - but what the stasi did, and what china does, will look like freedom compared to what is coming.

Also just fyi it’s “moot” point not “mute” point.

I’d make the choice to live in modern China instead of the GDR under the stasi every single time, without hesitation.
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