Aside from just the potential for accidents, one has to consider the potential for irrational actors or those who choose to employ game theory more recklessly. And when I think of Metcalfe's law, I feel this sort of horror about the idea of proliferation and the loss of control in communication (which was of course vital in preventing Armageddon during the Cold War.)

I think ultimately, future security will come from defensive technology and I believe that's the most noble pursuit for engineers wishing to leave an indelible mark on humanity.

There is of course no defensive solution against those who wish to build Sundial [0] or Poseidon [1]. Humanity appears to be unequipped to carry the mantle of life.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poseidon_(unmanned_underwater_...

https://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/

How about some modern, safe bio-weapons.

The army was going to be reduced by a factor of 100, and two tiny armies were going to face off while the majority of men of fighting age were going to sit at home and paint landscape paintings? Really?

Is is that surprisingly few weapons inventors expressed regret and doubt? Or just that very few wrote about it?

Snark aside, we have massively more people alive today than in 1900 and yet the proportion of people that die in armed conflicts is— while horrific- barely noteworthy in most years around the dawn of the 20th century and not infrequently dwarfed by the body counts racked up in those days.

Civilization is a complex, evolving system. How much predictability and control do we really have?

The other pattern that’s a bit less explicit here is that these technologies try to win over the public by theorizing on their incredible peace time use. While many genuinely have great use in peacetime we should not allow that to blind ourselves to their wartime potential. Many of us have little power to direct the future but for those who care doing what you can do is always more than nothing and when done in concert with others does have an impact.

I didn't know that Alfred Nobel thought that removing this distinction would bring peace though.

I guess he didn't read the book, which was published long after his death. It's main thesis is just that war before civilization was a thing at all, that the archeological evidence for it can be taken at face value, that weapons were not means of exchange and walls were not symbols of unity. It could have been written before the invention of dynamite.

The unwritten implication is that this applies to AI, as well. I find it hard to disagree. I don't know what to do about it.

The HN crowd is elated that we can finally finish our side projects, while the ruling class is already using AI to subvert democracy, spread misinformation, and develop weapons. "If we don't build these weapons, someone else will." If we can learn nothing else from history, we should learn that you can't turn back the clock.

We've had no WW3 (so far) and no one here needs to worry about being drafted into a war. Gatling might have thought his gun would reduce the number of war fatalities, but but Oppenheimer thought he would end the world. Both were wrong.

Alternative take: Inventors are bad at predicting the downstream societal effects of their inventions.

None of them were women.

Like we have prehistoric skeletons with obvious signs of traumatic injury inflicted by tools.

> North Americans think the Wright Brothers invented the airplane. Much of the world believes that credit belongs to Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian inventor working in Paris.

Much of the world? It's a minority viewpoint both among scholars and lay people. Some people in the insight porn "actually, the thing they won't tell you" genre of blogs and so on also do it. Certainly it's standard in China and India, so at the least you have to put Asia on that list as well. And Wright is the standard teaching in Australia, and the UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Egypt and Botswana and I'd be surprised if other places in Africa are different.

In general, when I look in my rice at a restaurant and I see a cockroach, I assume there are more cockroaches in the restaurant. So, too, I assume there are other cockroaches in this article. I don't have the time to verify the other things, but this is wrong enough that I'd rather eat elsewhere.