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drdecayesterday at 10:42 PM1 replyview on HN

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?


Replies

wizzwizz4yesterday at 11:42 PM

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.)