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keeganpoppen • yesterday at 11:08 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

no offense, but I think aviation is a horrible example. if we treated every problem like we treated aviation, we would still be living in the 1950s. honestly, probably the 1850s. hell, we sent a guy to the moon LONG before it was actually safe to do so. (is it safe even now?). do we really think LLMs would be more blasé about human life than humanity itself up until... iono, since the Baby Boomer generation? the "issue", such as it is, with AI is not "we need to make so many guardrails in order for it to be useful", it's that unlike aviation, where the ground truth is "did the plane crash or not?", AI is an open-ended experiment in what would happen where we don't have any feedback from anything other than... how humans feel about it. humans are the antithesis of paperclip maximizers.

I don't see any reason whatsoever why "AI regulations" would become antifragile from their having been "written in blood" in the way that aviation regulations have been; if anything, our inevitable present and future AI crises will each be exponentially more devastating than the last. Modern aviation is a triumph because of how fallible humans are-- that's why we delegate control of aircraft mostly to machines. The shape of AI disruption isn't "the computers aren't following the rules", it's that even by our own rules of rationality our world is terribly underspecified-- we have computer security that isn't secure, subjective rules of ethics/fairness/judgment that defy straightforward explication, "knowledge work" that is actually neither "knowledge" nor "work"... the whole situation is much closer to the human domestication of the dog (letting a potential threat into one's home) than any traditional story of humans coming to terms with their own technological innovations. human behavior is FAR easier to predict than un-aligned AI behavior-- that is why it is such a singular moment in human history.