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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25992 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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If the government is truly dedicated to putting down a rebellion, then a well regulated militia isn't going to stop them. You might have guns, but military has more guns, and their guns are bigger.

It does not seem to me that you understand how guns work. The government has nukes, which are the biggest "guns" in existence. Why do they persist in buying rifles? They have the biggest guns, why do they need the small ones? ...And the answer, of course, is that strife is not decided by whose guns are "bigger". That's why we spent twenty years and a couple trillion-with-a-capital-T dollars losing in Afghanistan, to a rabble of poorly-educated, poorly-armed, and notably nukeless militant farmers.

It seems to me that non-God AI should operate in a similar way. In the period before the AI God arrives, human conflict and cooperation is still the name of the game, and people still care about the outcomes of that cooperation and conflict being good from their perspective. We care about the here-and-now more than a nebulous future, and further it is appropriate and necessary for us to do so. It is still necessary to maintain the capabilities of self-defense and deterrence, because predators obviously still exist.

At that point it seems like we either have to hope that the AI god is benevolent, in which case we'll be fine either way, or it won't be, in which case we're all screwed. But it's hard to imagine such an entity being "owned" by any one human or group of humans.

I would be happy to trade complete restrictions on public AI research for complete control of society until the AI God arrives. Would that be a trade you'd be interested in?

It does not seem to me that you understand how guns work. The government has nukes, which are the biggest "guns" in existence. Why do they persist in buying rifles? They have the biggest guns, why do they need the small ones?

When the last of the human resistance makes their Final Stand against the God AI which only has nuclear weapons, they will primarily base their efforts out of data centers. Strangely for the Yuddites, the humans will not think to pull any plugs while they're there.

I would be happy to trade complete restrictions on public AI research for complete control of society until the AI God arrives. Would that be a trade you'd be interested in?

I'm not sure if I understand the question, or how it's related to the section you quoted.

On a basic level I'd be willing to hand control of society over to virtually any individual or group if it meant being able to live in a reality where machine learning was impossible. You can be the king, the progressives can be the kings, it doesn't matter.

The only thing that might give me pause would be the concern that such a decision would betray a lack of courage on my part.

A nuclear warhead isn't a big gun, it's a big bomb. Bombs explode roughly equally in every direction. Bullets travel in a forward line. That's their main distinction.

hence the quotes on "gun" above. Both are weapons, which is the point under discussion. The comment above assumes that big weapons invalidate small ones and numerous weapons invalidate sparse weapons, but neither is actually true. The advantage bigger or more numerous weapons provide is entirely contextual, and the contexts in question are not universal.

It strikes me as very bad faith to compare a large number of well equipped and trained soldiers having a large advantage if they were to fight a smaller number of armed militiamen to a situation where the existence of large city-destroying bombs nullifies the use of individual arms. It does not contextually demonstrate the value of combined arms or tactics.

Actually...: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-type_fission_weapon

Oh so the government will make gun-style bombs but not bomb-style guns? Figures

There is a "bomb-style gun" that's been proposed (though not developed) -- a bomb-pumped laser. If you use a gun-type nuke to pump the laser, you then have a gun-bomb-gun. Presumably you could use the laser to set off a deuterium-tritium pellet, giving you a gun-bomb-gun-bomb, but that's getting ridiculous.

Thank you for this.

Can you fit a nuclear shaped charge in there somewhere, too?

Akhshually that's just the mechanism of triggering the nuclear detonation, it's still a bomb. Though directional nuclear weapons are a cool idea

To nitpick your nitpick (flea removal is nominally in my remit), doesn't the combustion of a primer and/or the main propellant charge count as a tiny bomb in a fire arm?

And if you load a far too hot handloaded .50 BMG round, well, let's say it can be a much bigger bomb.

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