There’s a huge, mysterious gap between the possibility of terrorism and actual terrorism. To leave a city without power or water, you only need a handful of ex-military people without any special tech, and the pool of people capable of that today is surely larger than the pool of machine learning enthusiasts. So why isn’t that happening all the time? It seems that we are protected in many ways: there are fewer terrorists than we think, they are less serious about it, fewer of them can cooperate with each other, a larger proportion than we think are already being tracked, etc.
So before building a global singleton, I’d look into why current measures work so well, and how they can be expanded. You could probably get >99% of the x-risk protection at <1% of the cost.
Yes, it is interesting. But a few pilots were capable to create almost apocalyptic destruction during 9.11, and it could be even worse if they were capable to hit a nuclear power plant or White House.
There were also a few smaller cases of deliberate plane crashing by pilots.
There’s a huge, mysterious gap between the possibility of terrorism and actual terrorism. To leave a city without power or water, you only need a handful of ex-military people without any special tech, and the pool of people capable of that today is surely larger than the pool of machine learning enthusiasts. So why isn’t that happening all the time? It seems that we are protected in many ways: there are fewer terrorists than we think, they are less serious about it, fewer of them can cooperate with each other, a larger proportion than we think are already being tracked, etc.
So before building a global singleton, I’d look into why current measures work so well, and how they can be expanded. You could probably get >99% of the x-risk protection at <1% of the cost.
Gwern wrote about this in his essay “Terrorism is not about terror”.
Yes, it is interesting. But a few pilots were capable to create almost apocalyptic destruction during 9.11, and it could be even worse if they were capable to hit a nuclear power plant or White House.
There were also a few smaller cases of deliberate plane crashing by pilots.