It's probably too late now - Pandora's box has been opened - but just in the US, about one school shooting or mass shooting every two days proves that at least one member of the species isn't uniformly ready to have firearms.
Assuming for a moment that sanctioned warfare is justifiable, in peacetime we have at least managed to build a political and military apparatus that has generally kept nuclear, conventional explosive, and chemical/biological weapons out of the control of the subset of the species who are vulnerable to this sort of psychotic breakdown.
Syncophantic AI chat bots are already making this weakness worse.
Just to clarify, this statement will always be true: "N members of our species aren't ready for technology Y". And N will always be greater than or equal to 1.
I often see comments online descending into the argument about firearms. Besides the potential number of people hurt/killed, what's the difference between someone walking into a school with a gun versus one walking into a school with a knife? Or a sharpened spear (from other comments in the thread)?
In many ways, I think a knife could be worse. You can hurt/kill a lot of people very quietly with a knife, leaving most of the school none the wiser. They're easier to conceal, easier to make from non-metallic substances (and thus can be easier to sneak past metal detectors.) I imagine people would be a lot less concerned about a knife collection than a gun collection, etc etc.
I don't disagree with your comment about someone not being ready for a firearm. However, I think that the argument that we're not recognizing the dangers of "gun free" zones as potential targets (by at least one statistic, 94% of mass shootings in the US happen in a "gun free" zone) and mitigating that danger in a meaningful way actually supports your point about syncophantic AIs better.
Yeah, and what's the difference between cutting a slice of bread and dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima?
Scale, it's scale. Scale matters, you can't hand wave it. If you try to, then you go to some very dumb, obviously wrong conclusions.
Everything, and I do mean everything, can be used for evil. But we don't allow everything, and for good reason.
Its the classic low-brow reasoning technique. It almost makes sense, if you squint and don't think about it much.
No, there's levels of bad and we have no problem making some bad stuff off limits. I can't build nuclear weapons, after all.
You really think having access to ChatGPT is as dangerous as giving everyone a nuclear weapon?
But AI, as a piece of software available to everyone, is certainly more dangerous than a sharp stick.
If I went out and produced, say, 200,000 sharp sticks and started hanging them out like candy, guess what - id get the authorities attention.
Everything is a function of scale. If we ignore scale than stubbing your toe is genocide, stealing a penny is grand theft auto, and running a mile is time travel.
