Um, 100 million of them already out there? So locking the barn door after the horse is gone.
I get it; we don't have land mines in first-world countries, and we will have AIs, so AIs are more interesting to talk about. That's why we continue to have land mines all over the world I think. Not our problem.
All the issues surrounding implacable AI killers on the loose are only something to talk about, if you haven't lived with them for generations already. Want to get real answers to sophomoric questions about robot killers? Just ask the people who already know.
It sounds as if that's intended to be an objection to something I wrote, but I've no inkling what. I certainly didn't mean to deny that there are a hell of a lot of them out there.
> we don't have land mines in first-world countries
I think the chances of a productive discussion would be greater if you didn't leap straight to assuming bad faith on the part of the people you're talking to.
Land mines are a big deal. They're a problem that needs solving. But you're not merely saying that; you're jumping into a discussion of something else and saying "you shouldn't be talking about this at all as long as there are land mines".
Which would be at least somewhat consistent (albeit rude), if that were your response to every HN discussion of things less important than land mines. But it isn't. By the advanced technique of clicking on your username, I see that you've been quite happy to participate in discussions of "table-oriented programming", mobile phone headphone jacks, and off-by-one errors in audio programming, and that you work in embedded software development. Are those things, unlike AI safety, more important than land mines?
I doubt you think that headphone jacks are more important than land mines. So why do you react to a discussion of headphone jacks by talking about headphone jacks, and to a discussion of AI safety by saying it's ridiculous and sophomoric to ask about AI safety when there are millions of land mines out there killing people?
You're trying to make out that the reason is that land mines are the same kind of things as hypothetical unsafe AI systems because they are human-made machines that kill people. But you're an intelligent person and surely you can't possibly really believe that. To deal with land mines we need treaties to stop them being deployed, we need ways of finding them that are cheap enough to deploy in quantity and effective enough to be worth deploying, we need ways of disarming them with the same qualities, and we need effective help for people who get blown up by them. None of these bears any resemblance to anything we might do about AI safety. To an excellent approximation, there is no overlap between the people who can do useful work on AI safety and the people who can do useful work on land mines. And the dangers don't arise in the same way: land mines are dangerous because they are put in place with the specific intention of killing anyone who passes, whereas in the scenarios AI safety people worry about no one intends the AI systems to cause trouble.
So that can't really be it, I think.
Why do you object to discussing AI safety but not to discussing mobile phone headphone jacks, really?
I get it; we don't have land mines in first-world countries, and we will have AIs, so AIs are more interesting to talk about. That's why we continue to have land mines all over the world I think. Not our problem.
All the issues surrounding implacable AI killers on the loose are only something to talk about, if you haven't lived with them for generations already. Want to get real answers to sophomoric questions about robot killers? Just ask the people who already know.