That's pretty much the idea, that governments have a monopoly on the use of force. The last 80 years have been unusually peaceful by historical standards. My guess is that the crumbling of governments will lead to more human deaths.

People who say the UN failed have no idea what they're talking about.

They do. They want more of it so they wanna pretend the less of it failed. Swinging the the concept of 'bootlickers' around etc.

Would it have been better if nuclear weapons had been developed by a private company whose board consisted entirely of lunatics?

The “responsible” US government proceeded immediately to nuking a bunch of civilians in two cities, narrowly sparing Kyoto. So the answer to that question doesn’t seem clear cut to me. Do realize that you’re putting lunatics in charge in either case, but governments have unlimited budgets and monopoly on violence.

Yes the US bombed two cities with civilians, however remember that we were in a state of total war with them, and the contemporary analysis predicted far far higher death toll into the millions using traditional methods. Most Japanese soldiers fought to the death rather than surrender, and those unable to fight were to commit suicide. Civilian populations were being prepared for civilian resistance in force, as in attacking with bamboo spears. It would have been a door to door fight with death tolls in the millions on both sides. Death tolls predicted by both side were unimaginable.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Operation_K...)

It is easy to judge the actions of our grandparents and great grandparents with the information and technology we have now and 80 years distance. Were we in their place I am not sure we would have made a different decision given the information and technology of the time. Further given the difference in death toll predicted with the alternative and the death toll attributed to the bombing, while the results are heart rending and horrifying I am not convinced it was ultimately the wrong decision.

Perhaps you should ask what was the motivation of the United States in being in a total war with Japan? Why couldn’t the US accept peace terms, (something the Japanese repeatedly requested), why did the US need Japan to unconditionally surrender, to the point that the US got to rewrote their constitution? (And entertain the thought of hanging their king)

I’m not asking if you think this outcome is right, or if you have some post-hoc justification now, I’m asking if you know what justification the US made to themselves in 1940’s to enter total war with Japan, that led them to kill 200,000+ civilians with 2 Nuclear Bombs, and a Tokyo Fire Raid to force Japan to surrender. The past if you really try to understand it was a different country, in our past the Life Magazine of 1944 wrote a story of a soldiers girlfriend receiving a Japanese Skull as a gift with incredible quotes like : “This is a good Jap—a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach.” Natalie, surprised at the gift, named it Tojo.” (Link: https://time.com/3880997/young-woman-with-jap-skull-portrait...)

The typical response to this from present folk is that “But the Japanese did the Rape of Nanking, and other atrocities”, which almost implies (though the astute never explicitly make this implication), that the US fought the Japanese to right all the atrocities that the Japanese were doing in Pacific region. No one who studies history will ever claim this, if you do study history, it’s hard to not see US as a deceitful bully with lunatic tendencies. One reading of our history that I find may not be the whole truth but certainly has a lot of truth to it, is that Japan was a pawn used by the US Government to drum up support for US to enter WW2, something most of the intelligentsia in US desperately wanted to do, but were always hampered by lack of public appetite to involve itself in this bloody conflict on the other side of the world. Unfortunately a side effect of playing this role for Japan was getting bombed into oblivion when you refused to surrender your sovereignty to the allied powers.

>Perhaps you should ask what was the motivation of the United States in being in a total war with Japan?

Easy the attack at Pearl Harbor.

you try to brush away all of the atrocities at not being the reason for the US entry into the war, but the US was placing sanctions and trade embargo on japan because of the thing like the Rape of Nanjing prior to the war. The Japanese in response attacked the US at Pearl Harbor without declaration of war. Then proceeded to commit more atrocities against captured US troops, thing like unit 731 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes#Human_expe...) rival the horror done Mengele. As for your conspiracy theory that Japan was a pawn of some American deep state and it was being used as an excuse to enter ww2, the US wouldn't have even gone into Europe after pearl harbor had Hitler not declared war on the US in a act of solidarity with Japan.

The Soviets (now Russia) and the United States have had the power to unleash nuclear devastation many orders of magnitude worse than what we did to Japan for decades yet we've managed not to do it, despite many, many bad faith acts on both sides. The idea that a group of greedy nerds accountable to nobody but their rich investors is more responsible than that is ludicrous.

To the best of my knowledge the more hinged government of the USSR never actually contemplated nuking anyone. The whole Cuban missile crisis thing was over the unhinged US government placing its nukes in Turkey, right next to USSRs heartland

> To the best of my knowledge the more hinged government of the USSR never actually contemplated nuking anyone.

The Suez Crisis was basically ended by Khruschchev threatening to nuke Britain, France, and Israel. Not a single of those countries could meaningfully retaliate at that point, of course. He bragged about it in his memoirs. [1]

The USSR almost fired a nuclear torpedo in the Cuban crisis. Clearly they had rules of engagement for when to start throwing nukes around, without even requiring direct orders or even a confirmation of war. [2]

Historian Petr Lunak in 2007 found a 17-page Warsaw Pact plan in Prague's archives for basically unrestricted nuclear war against all of Western Europe. Drafted 1964, in use until 1986, possibly nearly executed during 1983 NATO exercises. [3][4] French diplomat Therese Delpech reports the same from seeing Warsaw Pact documents in Germany, notwithstanding Brezhnev's conspicuous 1982 "No First Use" declaration. [5] Vaporize Italy, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark, then conquer all the way into France. [6]

Ah. Kruschchev's famous 1956 "We will bury you" may have been a mistranslation. [7] But it is hard to see how his similar 1957 words could have been anything other than a thinly veiled nuclear death threat: "General Norstad will not be able to rush to Turkey’s aid and will not be able to be present in time for Turkey’s funeral". [8]

I'm sure there are others. The Cold War was crazy, and the Rocket Forces were (and are) held in some veneration. You don't spend an appreciable percentage of your GNP building and maintaining over 40,000 nuclear warheads plus delivery systems without "contemplating" using them.

> The whole Cuban missile crisis thing was over the unhinged US government placing its nukes in Turkey, right next to USSRs heartland

NAID:84786142 [9] in the US National Archives is a declassified CIA map showing the USSR didn't just have thousands of nuclear weapons and delivery systems "right next to" the heartlands of multiple countries like Germany, France, Finland, and Italy (which, again, they fully had prepared plans to nuke).

They also had thousands of nukes directly on the territory of multiple occupied hostile countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Hungary, and Poland.

Apparently the Czechs/Slovakians still don't even know how many warheads the USSR saw fit to store in their homeland. [10]

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And frankly, it's also rather imperialistic that you're just completely ignoring the sovereignty of Turkey and Cuba in that crisis: [11][12]

> …several consecutive Turkish governments, both before and after the coup of 1960, were eager to receive these weapons…

> …Turkey’s citizens regarded the Jupiter missiles as a symbol of the alliance’s determination to use atomic weapons in the case of a Soviet attack on Turkey.

> …Turkish authorities stated on more than one occasion that Jupiter missiles based on Turkish soil represented ‘firm proof of the U.S.’s commitment to Turkey’s security’…

> …aware of their limited defensive value, the missiles continued to be viewed as a symbol of Turkey’s importance within the Western security system, and also as a source of prestige.

> …placing Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, despite the misgivings of the Soviet Ambassador in Havana, Alexandr Ivanovich Alexeyev, who argued that Castro would not accept the deployment of the missiles.

> …Castro did not want the missiles, but Khrushchev pressured Castro to accept them.

> …Castro objected to the missiles' deployment as making him look like a Soviet puppet, but he was persuaded…

And:

> Throughout the crisis, Turkey had repeatedly stated that it would be upset if the Jupiter missiles were removed.

> …when the missiles were withdrawn, Castro was more angry with Khrushchev than with Kennedy because Khrushchev had not consulted Castro…

You know, cooperating with consent, instead of threatening, invading, and coercing both friend and foe alike when they try to tell you "no", then calling your opponent "unhinged" after jointly bringing the world to the brink of annihilation.

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1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis#Aftermath

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov

3: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1563692/Soviet-plan-...

4: http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch/lory1.ethz.ch/collections/coll_wa...

5: https://www.nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/npr/102f...

6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine

7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_will_bury_you

8: https://psi204.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Seydi%2C%20Turki...

9: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/84786142

10: https://english.radio.cz/soviet-nuclear-arsenal-czechoslovak...

11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

12: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0026320100366603...

Blah blah blah. Bottom line: you don’t get to put nukes next to where majority of Russian population lives. This is why there’s a war in Ukraine and nukes in Belarus now

Yes, that particular incident is good ol' fashioned Russian imperialism to impose their will onto Ukraine and Belarus. I wasn't disputing that, and you weren't talking about it either.

I am not excusing any use of nuclear weapons, simply asking wether it would have been better if it was a private company instead of the US government. Also note that I didn't use the word "responsible". At least, the lunatics in the government are supposed to be elected lunatics.

This whole thing seems like a way to build a regulatory framework so only the existing, largest AI players can continue and there is too much regulation for anyone else to enter the industry.

Pretty much. I hope we at least get some trillion parameter GPT4 grade FOSS models before they inevitably succeed in regulating linear algebra.

This is the thing that bothers me - we’re just talking about doing math, doing more thinking, doing more speech. That’s what these models are. But everyone who isn’t an independent (non monopolist) technologist is vying for control of something they don’t understand to achieve their political or financial goals.

Nobody has nuked anyone since Nagasaki so you're not exactly batting a hundred here bud. I'll take flawed democracy over authoritarian corporate self governance any day of the week. Many of the leaders in the valley have repeatedly shown that they are some of the worst people in the country.

The mere fact that USG nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have put a permanent black mark on its credibility and “hingedness”. Why this is in any way controversial idk. Literally a hundred thousand civilians were killed for no military gain whatsoever. Japan was already done fighting at that point

I mean I agree with you (US submarine campaign had already completely cut Japan off), but I think it's pretty obvious that the reason it's "controversial" is the fact that Japan was run by a fascist imperial government that was responsible for the deaths of millions of civilians in China and Southeast Asia. I think it's pretty hard to judge the restraint shown when the Axis powers were the ones who started attacks on population centers with events like the Rape of Nanking and the Bombing of London. Most of the the point of the UN was to ensure it never happened again, which it hasn't.

> Japan was already done fighting at that point

Damn, they really should have told someone.

Let’s give it to Elon instead. /s

Unironically that might be the best available option

Unironically funny answer.

I trust the guy far more than I trust the government at this point. For all his faults at least he’s not genociding children in Gaza and never bombed weddings

"Better yet, we should give it to me and my friends.

I promise we are just morally superior and better people in my unbiased opinion."

Humans are responsible for 100% of deaths attributable to violence. So how about we do our best to keep any humans from getting a world-ending technology?