I have concerns with artificial intelligence. I haven’t hidden them, either. I use it, mind you, because there are very real advantages to it. The problems I have with it aren’t so much about where it is now, but where it may go.
Still, it’s a useful technology for a lot of things, and tends to be a better search engine than Google these days.
In Australia, though, one pundit thinks that we should be careful with the rollout of AI, and to support his claim, he makes an anti-gun argument.
American gun rights advocates are fond of saying that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, meaning more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens will make society safer.
That’s fine if your priority is people’s right to protect themselves using lethal force, but it’s an ideological principle, not an evidence-based harm reduction policy – as gun death statistics show.
Now imagine we gave all 8.3 billion people on Earth access to very big guns in the hope that the good guys would outshoot the bad ones. That’s roughly the case being put by some Silicon Valley figures pushing to reduce AI regulation and liberalise access to advanced or ‘frontier’ models, despite those models’ prowess at cyberattacks and information operations, and the looming risk they pose as bioweapon tools.
These tech leaders are twisting an admirable principle that AI should be open and available to all, rather than concentrated in the hands of a powerful few, into a reckless push to undermine safeguards and circumvent sensible regulation. This should be challenged, including by the world beyond AI superpowers the United States and China, since we will all be endangered if safety and security are disregarded.
My guy, if that’s the best argument you’ve got, then we should put AI everywhere so anyone can use it, even our pets.
So-called “gun death” statistics are nothing more than an amalgamation of everyone who dies as a result of a gunshot wound. It includes suicides, homicides, accidents, and even justifiable homicides. As such, it’s meaningless beyond being just that. It doesn’t tell us anything about the overall use of firearms in the United States as a whole.
When the numbers for defensive gun uses per year, however, range from 500,000 at the low end and rise to a couple million on the upper end, I think we can see that the claim being made here is, frankly, stupid.
Honestly, it’s so stupid that it qualifies for disability payments for lack of cognitive ability. It rides a bus to school that uses less steel than the others. There are special programs to help that claim find meaningful work later, such as low-wage work that requires no intelligence at all, because it’s not capable of even being the guy who rounds up the carts from the grocery store parking lot. (No shade on people doing that, by the way, because someone has to and any legal work is noble work in my book, but roll with me here.)
The truth is that guns save lives, so if your argument against the widespread availability of AI is to compare it to guns, then yeah, the tech bros are right, and we should install it in freaking gumball machines if we have to.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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