As someone with a stalker, I can't emphasize this enough. A stalker will go to all sorts of lengths to do bizarre shit. People don't believe it. I would guess governments will do some equivalent there-of.
Democratizing access to things -- including bad things -- has a preventative effect:
1) I can guard against things I know about
2) People take me seriously if something has been democratized
The worst-case scenario is if my stalker got her hands on something like deep fake technology before the police / prosecutor / jury didn't knew it existed. I'd probably be in jail by now if something like that ever happened. She's tried to frame me twice before. Fortunately, they were transparent. She'll try again.
Best case scenario is that no one has access to this stuff.
Worst case scenario is only a select group have access, and most people don't know about it.
I want to second this, as there are so many people that just simply can't believe how much time and energy some people will put into destroying someone else's life.
And when you ask for help, people think you are the insane one because they simply can't believe your story about the insanity of someone else.
I hope you find relief sometime from your stalker. I found it (not a stalker exactly) from letting the person burn themselves with their behavior so many times without me doing or saying anything in return to them (my strategy of non-direct conflict, and it worked for me), that eventually they ran out of people to manipulate and fool.
A worse situation: What if you ARE insane, it's just that this time it's not your imagination running wild, it's actually someone stalking you? People that have some mental problem, whatever it is, have a much harder time since no one will believe them. It's always just "I know you are feeling bad right now..." even though the diagnose is ADHD or something else irrelevant.
Your "worst case" depends greatly on who the select group is. Is it movie studios making 9 figure budgets, or is it any obsessed person who can figure out how to find and install software.
Obviously, it's hard to imagine many situations like that, but you can imagine a process that required a 8-figure quantum supercomputer.
This is too myopic a view. Think about how far graphics have come on mobile devices let alone high end gaming machines in the past 5 years. This technology will eventually be accessible in the palm of your hand via a powerful enough device or the cloud. It's more a question of when than if.
history say you cannot control how selected the selected group is, no matter the implications, i.e. nuclear bomb secrets from manatthan project finding their way into russian hands
I thought I had the knowledge to build a nuclear bomb when I was in high school. In retrospect, I'm not sure I was right, but I'm pretty sure I was close to right. From where I was, I certainly could have picked up the knowledge as an undergrad; it's no longer a hard problem with publicly-available information.
For better or worse, I did not have the requisite $2B-or-so to do so at the time. My allowance was $2/week. I don't think most terrorist groups have $2B either. Even if I did have the requisite $2B, I don't think I could have done so discreetly enough to not get caught; someone would have noticed a high school student buying up things like uranium or building appropriate facilities.
I'm more concerned about biological warfare. While I don't have the knowledge to engineer a super-virus, we're at the level where a few years intense study is all it takes to have that knowledge, and a few high school students do. The cost structure there is increasingly moving into the budget of high school students too. Things like DNA sequencing and synthesis have a Moore's Law-style curve, with falling prices.
(If this sounds unrealistic, I was in high school back in the days when nerds intensely learned physics; physics is much less interesting to nerds in 2022. Hot topics for nerds change over time, and we're out of the cold war and the space age. Today's high school nerds have moved on to today's hot topics like machine learning and microbiology)
They could probably make one (it would probably fizzle though, but that's still nasty, even if not full theoretical power), they just don't have the highly enriched uranium to do it.
not to be too pedantic, but this is not "democratizing access", as that would involve print-outs/usb sticks/discs of the code distributed to people that can't access the internet, accessibility issues, bias considerations etc etc. as such, this is just "access".
Athens, late medieval/early modern Poland, and the early US all had democratic systems of sorts where about 10% of the population, give-or-take, were in the electorate.
Likewise, slavery < serfdom < caste / Jim Crow / etc. class system < equality under the law with discrimination < equality
Access, inclusion, and democracy aren't binary concepts, and progress is gradual.
Democratizing access to things -- including bad things -- has a preventative effect:
1) I can guard against things I know about
2) People take me seriously if something has been democratized
The worst-case scenario is if my stalker got her hands on something like deep fake technology before the police / prosecutor / jury didn't knew it existed. I'd probably be in jail by now if something like that ever happened. She's tried to frame me twice before. Fortunately, they were transparent. She'll try again.
Best case scenario is that no one has access to this stuff.
Worst case scenario is only a select group have access, and most people don't know about it.
Universal access is somewhere in between.