Why Tech Inevitability is Self-Defeating

It reminds me of the time a Scientific American columnist ran a contest. The idea was to submit a number on a postcard. The person who submitted the highest number would win $1 million divided by the winning number.

The publishers almost nixed the contest. They didn't actually have $1 million to give away and they were worried. But the columnist assured them that there was no chance the prize would be even one dollar. As you might expect, the winning number was so ridiculously large that no money had to be sent.

As for LLMs affecting the economy, I think my only uncertainty is in how long it will take for them to be integrated. I think we all agree that even in their current state, they are valuable for certain tasks (e.g., language translation). I'm pretty sure they are economically viable for 90% of support calls. Are they going to displace software developers? Lawyers? Doctors? Even if they don't, the effects will still be large.

If we agree that they are economically viable, then I don't see how they don't have an impact. If a technology saves businesses money, it is going to get deployed. The only wildcard would be regulatory blocks or legislative bans. But you know China is not going to give up on the technology, so any bans will be reversed or circumvented (we'll import products/services from China).

Now, if you don't think LLMs in their current state are economically viable/valuable, then none of that will happen. But (a) that's a different argument, and (b) then people will inevitably choose NOT to deploy LLMs.

I get the desire for agency. I certainly wish I had more control over the course of the future. But people's behavior (in large groups) is almost always downstream of external events. Fukushima has an accident and Germany chooses to give up nuclear power. Inflation in the US goes up and people vote for Donald fraking Trump.

Maybe there will be some event--a Fukushima for AI--that causes a mass change. But absent that, I think LLMs are here to stay.

The idea that you can develop "good" information technology without enabling the creation of "bad" information technology is pure fantasy, and if your idea is actually that we could halt the progress of information technology wholesale, then that's laughable, sorry to say. Hence the inevitability.

> As for "oppressive regime", we already do this for nuclear and biotech, and most people find it quite palatable!

You mean we do this for raw materials that have inherent scarcity because they are somewhat rare, difficult to mine, and difficult to refine? And you think this natural scarcity is somehow comparable to natural abundance that follows from digital information that can be trivially copied at perfect fidelity?

Furthermore, you've misunderstood what was meant by "oppressive regime". The same technologies that allow us to email each other, make family photo albums and forecast the weather or the stock market are what also enable AI. There is no way in which to suppress AI without also suppressing these other benign uses that everyone enjoys and that enable considerable productivity. This is not comparable to the technology and raw materials for nuclear weapons.

> We've had the knowledge for both for decades, yet basement nukes and basement human clones aren't happening.

You seem awfully confident about declaring the non-existence of something that's inherently underground and thus difficult to measure.

But let's make the comparison of AI to cloning more apt: how confident would you be that cloning won't happen once the knowledge of how to construct artificial wombs is discovered? Now reconsider those probabilities about if such wombs also easy to construct with readily available materials. That's the reality of information technology.

e.g. RISC-V is inevitable.

Not really. While all the Government-funded stuff was going on, International Business Machines was slowly advancing their business machines. There was a long path from the IBM 601 (1931, mechanical multiplication, plugboard programmed), the IBM 602 (1946, mechanical division), the IBM 602A ("a 602 that worked"), the IBM 603 (1946, multiplication and division with vacuum tubes, but still plugboard programmed), the IBM 604 (1948, with 1,250 tubes), and finally the IBM 650 (1954, true stored program, tube logic, drum main memory, Knuth's first computer.) The government-funded machines were more advanced but very low volume. All of the 600 series machines were mass-produced and had long operating careers making businesses go.

Transistors had to progress more before IBM business computers became transistorized. The IBM 1401. (1959, all transistor, 12,000 built) launched business computing in a big way. From then on, the business side, rather than the government side, drove the technology. All that would have happened without WWII. WWII held up the IBM 603 electronic multiplier by several years; IBM was trying out electronic arithmetic in the late 1930s.