ha, the big difference is that this whole list can actually affect the ultra wealthy. AI has the power to make them entirely untouchable one day, so good luck seeing any kind of regulation happen here.

Asserting inevitability is an old rhetorical technique; it's purposes are obvious. What I wonder is, why are you using it? It serves people who want this power and have something to gain, the people who control it. Why are you fighting their battle for them?

- Most countries have little to no uranium deposits and so have to be able to find a uranium-producing ally willing to play ball.

- Production of enriched fuel and R&D are both outrageously expensive, generally limiting them to state actors.

- Enrichment has massive energy requirements and requires huge facilities, tipping off observers of what you're doing

Despite all this and decades of strong anti-nuclear proliferation international agreements India, Pakistan, South Africa, Isreal, and North Korea have all developed nuclear weapons in defiance of the UN and international law.

In comparison the only real bottleneck in proliferation of AI is computing power - but the cost of running an LLM is a pittance compared to a nuclear weapons program. OpenAI has raised something like $11 billion in funding. A single new proposed US Department of Energy uranium enrichment plant is estimated to cost $10 billion just to build.

I don't believe proliferation is inevitable but it's very possible that the genie is out of the bottle. You would have to convince the entire world that the risks are large enough to to warrant putting on the brakes, and the dangers of AI are much harder to explain than the dangers of nuclear weapons. And if rival countries cannot agree on regulation then we're just going to see a new arms race.

We can walk and chew gum at the same time, and regulate two things.

All those examples put us in physical danger to the point of death.

See airlines, traffic control, medical equipment, government services, but also we regulate ads, TV, financial services, crypto. I mean we regulate so many “tech” things for the benefit of society this is a losing argument to take. There’s plenty of room to argue the elsewhere but the idea that we don’t regulate tech if it’s not immediately a physical danger is crazy. Even global warming is a huge one, down to housing codes and cars etc. It’s a potential physical danger hundreds of years out, and we’re freaking out about it. Yet AI had the chance to really do much more damage within a much shorter time frame.

We also just regulate soft social stability things all over, be it nudity, noise, etc.

I just think that comparing AI to nuclear weapons seems like hyperbole.

If equally or similarly dangerous, are you then saying AI technology should be taken out of the hands of companies and private citizens?

As technology advances, such prohibitions are going to become less and less effective.

Tech is constantly getting smaller, cheaper and easier for a random person or group of people to acquire, no matter what the laws say.

Add in the nearly infinite profit and power motive to get hold of strong AI and it'll almost impossible to stop, as governments, billionaires, and megacorps all over the world will see it as a massive competitive disadvantage not to have one.

Make laws against it in one place, your competitor in another part of the world without such laws or their effective enforcement will dominate you before long.

I wouldn't say that this is an additional reason.

I would say that this is the primary reason that overrides the reasonable concerns that people have for AI. We are human after all.

There's lots of evidence of our ability to control the development, use and proliferation of technology.

Both have happened at a rampant pace once the technology to easily copy music and copyrighted content became easily available and virtually free.

The same is likely to happen to every technology that becomes cheap enough to make and easy enough to use -- which is where technology as a whole is trending towards.

Laws against technology manufacture/use are only effective while the barrier to entry remains high.

They have a large effect. But regardless, I don't see the point. Evidence that X doesn't always do Y isn't evidence that X is ineffective doing Y. Seatbelts don't always save your life, but are not ineffective.

If only.

Only because we know the risks and issues with them.

OP is talking about furthering technology, which is quite literally "discovering new things"; regulations on furthering technology (outside of literal nuclear weapons) would have to be along the lines of "you must submit your idea for approval to the US government before using it in a non-academic context if could be interpreted as industry-changing or inventing", which means anyone with ideas will just move to a country that doesn't hinder its own technological progress.