I absolutely love the idea of me or my children going through a challenging few years as a tool of our society, whether that be military training or something else.
...with the enormous caveat that our society must be cohesive, which it is no longer (culturally, politically - you name it).
Why "gospel"? Why not "at face value"? What is the purpose of portraying a perfectly normal interpretation as irrational? There's nothing wrong with assuming a writeup is factually true until proven otherwise. We couldn't even speak to each other if that weren't the case.
There's an enormous difference between weighing the pros and cons and coming to a different conclusion than somebody else, and having no sympathy for somebody else.
Sympathy doesn't simply mean "understanding"; that's one small aspect of the definition of a more complex word that also denotes emotional reflection.
Having weighed the pros and cons, I have come to the conclusion that the correct amount of (emotional) sympathy for the position of "we should kill all the eagles because farmers deserve only endless profits, never (minor) costs" is infinitesimal.
Yeah, I think about this a lot. I currently need a vanity base. There are no businesses doing this within 100 miles of me, as far as I can tell using the information avenues available to me. So I'm shopping semi-identical jpgs with some filters on untrustworthy metadata from Wayfair, Home Depot, Lowes... They're all selling the exact same things. Does it even matter if I pay $200 vs $2000 on these sites? I can't even see what the difference is between those two options.
What about the "craftsmen" on Etsy? Are they even real? Or, I could pay $5000 for an individual, local, physically extant American with a name and face to make it from scratch, which I would love to be able to afford.
So I pick one at random off Wayfair that claims to be made of solid wood and has a price that is neither suspiciously low nor suspiciously high. Maybe I've just bought cheap boots, but it's insane that I don't even know.
It is nice to be able to buy things from actual people who make them. Coincidentally the biggest outfit who make reproduction desks in this country (ie think what an English desk looks like 200 years ago, basically that, except made last month by experts and also the real ones didn't have a place to run cables tidily out of sight) is in my city, so I paid them to make my desk (well, not this desk, the one in my office when I'm doing actual work). Expensive but definitely worth it.
I don't know at all how sure I'd be that what I'd get was good quality if it was turning up from the far side of the country, let alone from China. I know anywhere could make high quality products, but it's much easier to trust it when you can walk there and go see them.
One thing that may help resolve your issue is that while I do agree with the Sam Vimes theory, it is also not guaranteed. There are also scenarios where the $50 boots will last forever, or you can buy $2 boots that will only last five years... but across your entire lifetime will still be cheaper. Or you can account for the fact that you take better care of your stuff than most people and the cheap thing may in fact be fine for a long time. Or you buy the cheap thing twice and maybe in 15 years when you have more disposable income buy the thing that lasts. Or buy the cheap thing and hit the occasional estate sale and eventually find a thing that lasts, but for dirt cheap prices, because you weren't in a hurry because your immediate needs were met and you had the time to wait for a deal.
The meta-lesson of the Vimes theory is really more that you need to think about these things, but it's not guaranteed that the expensive thing will be better in the longterm on a bang-for-the-buck basis. For furniture, there is something to be said for the technique beloved by the just-starting-out set of buying "whatever I scrounged together from garage sales", and there's something to be said for "I outfitted my apartment from Ikea". Yeah, it's cheap and one way or another you're going to pay for that cheapness, but it's so much cheaper than the alternative that as long as you aren't practicing your wrestling moves on the Ikea end tables, you can get a long way with them even if you're replacing them every 10 years.
And, per your last point... at least when you buy cheap, you know you bought cheap. I found myself in need of a dining room table light a few years back. We went to a lighting store and I stood there staring at all the bespoke LEDs that I knew would die and couldn't be replaced, and the multi-thousand dollar lamps that looked nice but I simply couldn't know if they were quality... and ended up buying a $15 dollar extension cord with 5 light sockets on it, bought some light bulbs to put in it, and wrapped the cord around the remains of the previous what-turned-out-to-be-proprietary track lighting. We decorate it for the season with various ribbon things to hide the cords. Because damn it, if it's all just going to fail anyhow, at least I knew I could replace the lights with whatever I wanted, and it cost me less than $100 all in. We've had that for, gosh, I think at least 10 years now, and I've probably cycled the lights at least twice now, but that's probably still under $100 total... all because I simply can't trust the expensive stuff.
I don't think the writeup is very good, but the thesis is not being engaged with honestly in these comments.
Knives, books, water, calculators, encyclopedias, search engines: Just a few of the analogies being made with barely a word beyond "it's like X". In fact, the opposite: Demanding that other people make arguments that AI is not like X.
Analogies are almost always just a pithy, empty distraction. They are the fodder of low-quality internet conversations. It should be obvious why an analogy is so often reached for - if an argument about X can't be supported on its own, it's easy to point to another thing, Y, with some similarity, but which more easily fits the argument in other ways, and... just assert that they're the same.
Here's a dumb analogy: Yes, "it's just a tool." So is C4.
Analogies are not the problem. In fact, an analogy is like a good knife; sharp, removes problematic parts, and totally unethical unless it knows the motivations of its wielder.
Seriously though, yes it is obvious why analogies are so often used, but I think you have it the wrong way round. They are a form of proof by negation; you don't have to find a thing exactly like the subject of the argument.
It's a way of fighting against bad arguments; If I say China is bad because X, Y and Z and also, their flag is red! They must be evil. If you then tell me that this argument could also be applied to the Red Cross/Crescent, you have negated my argument by analogy. You don't have to negate every argument I made; but at least then we can treat X, Y and Z on their own.
The problem with this writeup is, there really are no other powerful arguments in it.
And I'm pretty sure C4 is great for controlled demolition of highly dangerous buildings. Or do you want adventurous people to hurt themselves?
Over the past few years, especially in places like HN, many people have made many arguments that AI is different in this or that relevant way. It's perfectly reasonable to disagree with them, but the implication of this snarky comment is that nobody is making these arguments in the first place.
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