alt Hacker News> Humanity's strategy so far has been to pull marbles out of the bag as fast as we can.
> But why are we rushing so much?
Talking about these things with elaborate analogies only obscuring the point you already stumbled into: Humanity advances because humans are curious, driven, like to discover things, and like to push the boundaries.
Talking about humanity like one entity that operates together misses the point: There are billions of people in the world and some of them are going to discover new things.
There is no general counsel where humanity gets together and decides what humanity works on. There is no singular bag with a singular “humanity” pulling marbles out one at a time.
The analogy is too broken to be useful for the discussion.
Replies
> There is no general counsel where humanity gets together and decides what humanity works on.
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968)
Biological Weapons Convention (1972)
Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA (1975)
We've done this sort of thing plenty of times around specific, dangerous technologies.
> Humanity advances because humans are curious, driven, like to discover things, and like to push the boundaries.
This is true, but not all the time, and transparently not the case for the current leaders in AI development. Their motivator is money.
There’s a point at which logic/reason/wisdom overrides our curiosity, and there are quite literally multi-nation groups that collaborate on matters of global importance.
There are plenty of examples of this, e.g. when we discovered how to harness nuclear energy, we quickly realized that extreme measures needed to be taken to ensure we don’t collectively destroy ourselves.