Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully?

I guess nuclear weapons might be the best example though research doesn't seem have to actually "stopped" as much as gone underground and we still have country trying to climb that ladder.

But I don't know how relevant that is to LLMs/AI. It almost feels like pandora's box is open and our only option is continue to improve them. There is clearly value in what they do and while I can absolutely see the dangers, for example: authoritative governments and surveillance, I'm not convinced to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

All of technology back to the printing press (and probably before that) could also be said to make it easier for governments to oppress their citizens. Making laws (and enforcing them!) to prevent governments from doing these things feels like that route forward, not trying to stick our heads in the sand.

Perhaps I'm horribly naive, perhaps I just see the SciFi future I've spent my life reading and dreaming about on the horizon and I'm blinded by the reality, perhaps my ideals around "knowledge deserves to be free/accessible" are misguided. I don't know.

Bravo, and I hope it has the impact on the AI safety field it deserves to have.

Plan C:

> "... fewer and fewer humans are needed to conduct AI R&D, meaning that covert projects are easier and easier to pull off without detection."

Plan A:

> "... training AIs requires large numbers of AI chips. Most AI chips are in giant datacenters.50 AI datacenters are typically big enough to be visible from space, and power-hungry enough to require conspicuous infrastructure. New AI chips can only be manufactured at a handful of fabrication plants (fabs), located mostly in Taiwan, South Korea, the US, and China. The US and China negotiate with the countries that have a major role in the chip supply chain, and they require each major datacenter owner (and their upstream suppliers, including chip fabs) to publicly declare their major purchases and sales."

Plan A requires properties of AI training that Plan C requires do not exist.

If there is any movement to pause AI development, it will come from the general public's dislike of these companies. Not from the AI safety angle.

My early analysis of the analysis:

https://lifearchitect.substack.com/p/the-memo-special-editio...

They being the US and China and by agreement.

It would be ideal, but there’s far too much money on the table to overcome human nature.

So my hope is we hit some kind of limits naturally.. Wishful thinking?

I'd bet that in most places 9 years is about the time needed to build a residential building. I think a good way to think about this is to think of this as producing a serial car. From pitching and capital acquisition to building a prototype to software, regulatory and then the final product which needs multiple factories and supply chains. Yes, of course robots sound cooler and there are compounding effects yada yada, but on the other side there are as many obstacles as things that accelerate this product (like capital acquisition and fearmongering of gov to bend regulatory stuff faster).

I am not sure where they believe that amount of capital could come from. It would require central bank level money printing never seen before.

https://ai-2040.com/supplements/compute-supplement

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-plan-a