Humans can't develop safety until there is enough blood in the streets. Only issue with AI is that threshold may come at a point where its too far gone to recover. But humans can't put in seatbelts until we're losing 40k people per year in car crashes. Unfortunately its just how we're wired. Those that are careful are outcompeted by the brash and the fast-moving, until the relative value of moving fast is removed, then we consider the value of making things safe. We didn't start with safe electricity, we started by killing lots of people and starting lots of fires. Many many years later, we ended up with electrical codes and standards.
The AI proponents who originally spoke of safety did so because they are aware of the dangers. However they, like all of us, are not able to change human nature or society. Molloch will drag them into the most dangerous game or eliminate them from the competition. Only with time, death, and damage (and many lawsuits) will any measure of safety be gained. The righteous will say "see we said AI was dangerous!" but that will be the only satisfaction they can have, many years after the damage is done.
If we want to speedrun safety, the only real mechanism is to make legal recourse more viable (e.g. $1M penalty per copyright infringement, $100M per AI-related death, etc.). If this was the case, lawyers self-interest and greed will compete with the self-interest and greed of the AI corps, balancing the risk (but there is no altruistic route to solving this).
All of those examples given are due to the prerogatives of capitalism, not because of human nature.
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If we had rules like that in the past we never would have had the industrial revolution.
Yes, it would probably have been better to have industrial evolution instead. Or are you arguing that all the countless deaths, maimings, child labor, 16-hour workdays, robber barons, black lung, radium jaws, and so on and so on were simply how it had to go? Or do you simply not care because all of that happened to other people?
Yeah, pretty much. A material emitting a previously unknown form of energy that turns out to be extremely harmful is really something you can only discover by trial and error. And what do you mean it's happening to other people? I am being exposed to all kinds of shit like PFAs and microplastics today. But it turns out that the technological progress outweighs all the environmental pollutants and accidents that it took to get here and we still live healthier and longer lives than we did before.
Not sure if that's true, what are your reasons for believing that? Are you saying we couldn't have invented the machines we used if we took safety measures along the way (e.g. having guards on machines that chopped of arms and legs)? Perhaps progress would have been slower -- since rather than just using the saw, you'd need a saw with a guard and emergency switch -- but it seems like if humans were more circumspect, we would have the industrial revolution, but more deliberate and controlled. Agreed it probably wouldn't have been "overnight factories in every city", but then again, you probably wouldn't have many of the externalities we're still learning about and paying for?
And progress being slower means people die. You ever had polio? Smallpox? When was the last famine you lived through?