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Yup. The best thing Trump did for Climate Change was to start a war with Iran.

An excellent interview. Perhaps scripture can save us yet.

If we want to solve the alignment problem with AI, I think we need to first solve the alignment problem with Humans.

100% agree. All of these stories seem off the mark...with the increased ability to create agentic hacking swarms, mass surveillance, killer AI drones, virus engineering, etc. it seems to me that we should all be most concerned with humans, enabled by AI, destroying everything. AI is the least of our concerns.

AIs don't kill people but people with AIs kill people...

Nice soundbite. Do you have an actual suggestion too? I'd love to hear you suggestion to keep AI out of the hands of people who will certainly use it to kill.

Russia, for example, is already using AI targeting (Ukraine too but "with callback", ie. AI targeting asks permission to the commander and no permission? No targeting), China and Turkey are delivering AI targeting solutions to ... essentially anyone (the old Syrian government and Azerbeijan were both provided with them, and Azerbeijan probably used them against Armenian civilians in the blockade of Nagorno-Karabagh). Turkey provided them to Ukraine earlier in the war, then Russia flew a number of planes very close to Turkish borders and now they don't anymore.

The son-in-law of Turkey's prime minister, Özdemir Bayraktar, is among selling them.

As for diplomacy, the UN has already decided they will do nothing about it. And that means, btw, that the ICC will do nothing either.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/09/1168288

https://www.azernews.az/region/263412.html (Iran proudly declares they're doing this)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/pauliddon/2024/02/22/azerbaijan...

So you want this? Excellent! So what are you going to do? Keep in mind that serious amounts of violence will be required to accomplish your ban on AI drones, because the main strength of AI drones used to be that only side has them, but that time is passed. Turkey has no doubt built up their production, Russia obviously has (and is producing 100+ per day), and China, well we don't really know, but it's China, so ...

When two sides have them (like in Ukraine), it seems to be a numbers game. So you want to make any headway, you'll have to produce large amounts of AI targeting drones to accomplish this.


Sounds like you have put a lot of research and thinking into this topic.

What are your suggestions? Happy to follow along


I'm sorry but I really think there's only one solution: make sure the US has the best AI weapons, because the US political process will actually put limits on their use, and the US military will actually respect those limits.

(and while I'd love to say EU will do the same ... let's face facts here: Ukraine didn't follow the "no AI targeting" rules. Because of course part of the reason the US is so comfortable with limits on weapons is that there is absolutely nothing that's even a mild threat to US soil. The only neighbors with land connections are far weaker than the US and that's unlikely to change even in the very long term. A country like the UK ... controls the access to the oceans for half of Europe, and through Gibraltar for the other half. There are a LOT of countries with very good reasons to threaten even the UK, and so the UK might feel they're forced to use less-limited weapons to defend)


when AI can call someone and sound like someone they know, we are completely screwed.

My absolute regret is that I used to look up to Marc and Ben, in the sense that I felt we were on the same team, trying to build cool new technology. That was a long time ago. It appears now that they've completely lost their way, or they never had a moral compass in the first place. Having met some of the people in those circles, I've never come away with the thought that they were nefarious cartoonishly evil, but this incident with Penny certainly seems to confirm that they in fact, are. What a world. I will now burn their books in my campfire out back, and continue my hopeless search for tech people who have a shred of humanity and compassion.


This is why I love Hacker News. Come for the AI system outage root cause, get a treatise on the power of the spacing guild in Dune.


The Democratic party needs to call the Netherlands and Europe and say "Give us please until November to fix this. If we fail to do that, trust your instincts!"


The Democrats won't take the presidency in November. The fundamental trust issue is with the presidency, not Congress.


They're too afraid to be seen as "leftist" and of alienating moderates to do anything of the sort.


It's one thing for the Democrats to convince themselves Trump was a fluke ten years and 2 elections later. But it's not gonna convince other nations who aren't getting paid to tell the party establishment what they want to hear.


We are all in this together. As goes the US, so does the rest of the world. You can pretend otherwise, but wait until he takes Greenland, then Canada, and then god knows what else. He's going to bring it all down around us if we don't stop it.


A breakdown of modern American society lies on our failure to maintain old fashioned ideals such as honor, integrity, bravery. These ideals used to matter more than money, and were based on the idea that we would be measured by the supreme being someday and found wanting, versus measured simply by our fellow humans on the earth. These ideas remain essential to democracy in a way that is not clearly understood.


It's called the survivorship bias. But you can go ahead and ask all the dead liberals in Chile if you want confirmation of that.


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