[catigula]

You could literally develop a hyper-intelligent advisor on how to kill people or perform dangerous hacks using ablated 'open source' AI. You can do this right now, this very moment, and have an extremely adept advisor on how to do really, really bad things.

[trollbridge]

My level of trust in Anthropic/Google/OAI/Microsoft/Meta not to do bad things is about zero, so why should I trust them with this?

[quantum_state]

These companies are using anything at hand to trick people out of their money … be very careful…

[catigula]

“We clearly can’t “trust” these companies not incentivized to randomly kill lots of people, so we might as well give everyone the ability to randomly kill lots of people”.

[OkayPhysicist]

So? The primary thing stopping people from doing really really bad things is, and always has been, most people not wanting to do bad things.

It's never been difficult. Literally, right this second, you could grab a pen off your desk and pretty easy ram it into the neck of your nearest coworker. Killing's easy. You don't need some hyperintellect to tell you how to do it.

The reason you haven't rammed a pen into your coworker's neck is the same reason why most possible really bad things don't happen: People don't want to do them.

[catigula]

It’s interesting that most of the examples people making this argument give are high consequence, high difficulty (could you actually murder your coworker with a pen? I’m skeptical.) low kill count methodologies of violence.

We’re specifically talking about low difficulty, highly effective, high kill count methodologies of violence.

And yes, being able to kill a lot of people trivially, even with huge consequences is something people do. Most countries don’t let you run around with an armory as a result of that.

[OkayPhysicist]

I live in one of the exceptions to that, and still have zero concern that someone's going to shoot up my workplace. Again, civilization works because the vast majority of people are utterly repulsed by the idea of harming another person.

Most of the hypotheticals that people come up with are things that could pretty trivially done by a mad scientist today. But that doesn't happen, because this isn't a comic book, there is nobody hell-bent on turning everyone into dinosaurs.

[iamnothere]

> Most countries don’t let you run around with an armory as a result of that.

My country allows it!

[wizzwizz4]

I already know how to kill thousands of people. It's not conceptually difficult: more than a day's effort, sure, but what stops people from doing this kind of thing is not the lack of knowing how. https://xkcd.com/1958/

[catigula]

No, you don't. What stops people is actually access to knowledge. There are killers of varying levels of efficacy; making killing easier means more people die. It's 1-1.

[mrguyorama]

How many people have shot up electrical substations, a fairly trivial way to causing widespread harm that was popularized in the news just a few years ago.

But it's only happened a couple times. Because most people just can't be assed to harm a hundred thousand others.

[drdeca]

Most people don’t want to hurt lots of other people in an untargeted way, yes.

But there are a lot of people, and, apparently a few of them shot up some electrical substations?

If you hold constant the (very small) fraction of people who want to cause mass harm, and increase the average ease with which a randomly selected person could cause mass harm , you would expect the amount of deliberate mass harm to increase, even if the fraction of people who would want to do that is like, 0.000001 of people?

[wizzwizz4]

The kind of person who wants to cause mass harm is the kind of person who's thought about it for more than 15 minutes. If you think about it for more than 15 minutes, I'm sure you can come up with plenty of ways. (Even 5 minutes is probably long enough to produce 3 or 4 workable suggestions.)

If AI causes people to kill who otherwise wouldn't have, I expect it to be by causing and exacerbating mental health problems, not by providing knowledge. (See e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67012224, where a roleplay escalated into a concrete plan to kill Queen Elizabeth II over the course of two weeks. The plan wasn't, however, a very good one.)

[esseph]

> What stops people is actually access to knowledge.

Very untrue.

I'm a combat vet. I spent years fighting an insurgency and therefore pretty good at that very task. I have the knowledge, so what stops me?

[catigula]

FYI combat vets are a counter example. They frequently kill a lot of people effectively. See: the DC sniper.

[esseph]

There are around 16 million living veterans.

Between 4.5-6 million living US combat veterans.

5-8% of all mass casualty perpetrators are a combat veteran, between 92-95% of all mass casualty perpetrators are not combat veterans

By far, there are more veteran suicides than there are mass casualties caused by combat veterans. Veterans are more likely to kill themselves than to kill you.

DC sniper was 24 YEARS ago, prior to the invasion of Iraq during the GWOT. Not only that, John Allen Muhammad didn't even see combat, his job was to dismantle old rockets! He was a mechanic and truck driver!

The point of discussion is: "What stops people is actually access to knowledge."

Statistics show this to be clearly false: Knowledge is not required to be effective in causing a mass casualty event, in fact, lack of formal training is a higher predictor!

[wizzwizz4]

A bold assertion. How many deaths can you attribute to this xkcd comic?

[catigula]

The ideas are dumb. They wouldn't kill anyone, the barrier to entry is too high and you'd trivially be caught and punished.