I don’t quite get it. The PM and the engineer seem incompetent, in that they didn’t simply specify under what conditions the bomb should and should not detonate. The engineer would be quite justified in being annoyed if asked to make “maximially safe storage of C4, requiring transfer to an actual detonation environment before use”, and then it changed to include detonation in place.
Also, I’m unsure what the parable is. C4 has very few other uses than detonation, so it’s not a very good analog for useful-but-not-always-violent things like nuclear power, gain-of-function biological research, or AI. Making a bomb, given C4, is less interesting as a comparison than being a chemical engineer deciding whether to manufacture C4 more efficiently.
I don’t quite get it. The PM and the engineer seem incompetent, in that they didn’t simply specify under what conditions the bomb should and should not detonate. The engineer would be quite justified in being annoyed if asked to make “maximially safe storage of C4, requiring transfer to an actual detonation environment before use”, and then it changed to include detonation in place.
Also, I’m unsure what the parable is. C4 has very few other uses than detonation, so it’s not a very good analog for useful-but-not-always-violent things like nuclear power, gain-of-function biological research, or AI. Making a bomb, given C4, is less interesting as a comparison than being a chemical engineer deciding whether to manufacture C4 more efficiently.