alt Hacker NewsDid you know that if trains or cars go over 30 mph, it's disastrous for public health? Not from accidents. Just trauma from (ahem) acceleration:
https://illuminatingfacts.com/the-train-speed-panic-why-peop...
Reason that hysteria remains apropos now is that then, and now, we're figuring out how to deal with something beyond merely incremental change.
Irony is roads and sidewalks should have changed much more. We never did get around to good controls leading to zero deaths*, we decided a 100 people dead per day is a reasonable cost of convenience.
How much do our cyber traffic and cyber pedestrian controls need to change for everyman to get to drive AI? Car seats? Seatbelts? Air bags? Speed limiters? Pedestrian only living spaces? Driverless cars?
Many practical responses, likely a mix of things we haven't thought of yet, just as horses and horse drawn carriages didn't require most of them to coexist. Controls develop like scar tissue more naturally than they appear in advance.**
And if the better analogy for LLMs turns out to have been less like cars, more like flammable gas blimps, we'll figure that out too and tell cautionary stories for generations... but long before the stories are forgotten we'll have already come up with something more practical, faster, and – oh well – perhaps even deadlier per mile.
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* Still working on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero
** Not saying that's as it should be.
Replies
You lost me when you said trains and cars shouldn’t go over 30mph. Lol, this sounds like Amish propaganda. Go buy your horse and buggy
I don't agree with laughing at these things. It's a fine line between calling something hysteria and suffering from hubris. The Titanic is a completely inverse case of hysteria. They were so damn confident it could work that it didn't work at all. So yea, just laughing at dumb people isn't a valid argument to dismiss doubts.
On the other hand some kinds of hysteria occurs due to a divide between the public and subject matter experts on topics. Kind of like Dunning Kruger. Take for example the people saying 5G causes cancer. Then there are people who blanket dismiss their worries, because "it's non ionizing you dummy". Given sufficient power you can still fry someone with non ionizing radiation, for example in radio broadcasts. Of course a regular 5g antenna can't put out that kind of power but my point is that people too quickly raise or dismiss concerns without actually critically examining the entire topic. This will likely worsen from specialization and progress in all fields and regular Joes get left further and further behind.