Thanks for engaging kindly. I’m more positive than you are about us being able to ban use cases, especially if existential risk awareness (and awareness of this particular threat model) is high. Currently, we don’t ban many AI use cases (such as social algo’s), since they don’t threaten our existence as a species. A lot of people are of course criticizing what social media does to our society, but since we decide not to ban it, I conclude that in the end, we think its existence is net positive. But there are pocket exceptions: smartphones have recently been banned in Dutch secondary education during lecture hours, for example. To me, this is an example showing that we can ban use cases if we want to. Since human extinction is way more serious than e.g. less focus for school children, and we can ban for the latter reason, I conclude that we should be able to ban for the former reason, too. But, threat model awareness is needed first (but we’ll get there).
Thanks for engaging kindly. I’m more positive than you are about us being able to ban use cases, especially if existential risk awareness (and awareness of this particular threat model) is high. Currently, we don’t ban many AI use cases (such as social algo’s), since they don’t threaten our existence as a species. A lot of people are of course criticizing what social media does to our society, but since we decide not to ban it, I conclude that in the end, we think its existence is net positive. But there are pocket exceptions: smartphones have recently been banned in Dutch secondary education during lecture hours, for example. To me, this is an example showing that we can ban use cases if we want to. Since human extinction is way more serious than e.g. less focus for school children, and we can ban for the latter reason, I conclude that we should be able to ban for the former reason, too. But, threat model awareness is needed first (but we’ll get there).