Yes, though people also want better living through chemistry and better health through biotech.
I guess my thought was that with AI, there’s not obviously a distinction at all between the military vs. civilian forms. A civilian AI is almost necessarily also a world-security hazard just by its existence, whereas nuclear power plants need some work to be converted to bombs.
The distinction also feels very thin with some biotech research: consider e.g. the various debates of whether to publish the genome of various diseases. Arguably, there it might be easier to use that information to do damage than to do good: to do damage, you only need to synthesize the pathogen, whereas figuring out how to use the genome to defend against it better takes more effort.
My point was that the technology for nuclear weapons was inexorably tied with the technology for civilian nuclear power. You can’t have the technology for one without the other. (I will admit that this is not exactly the same thing as not being able to have one without another, but it’s pretty close.)
And you do make a good point on the topic of chemistry and biotech also having ties in that direction.
Yes, though people also want better living through chemistry and better health through biotech.
I guess my thought was that with AI, there’s not obviously a distinction at all between the military vs. civilian forms. A civilian AI is almost necessarily also a world-security hazard just by its existence, whereas nuclear power plants need some work to be converted to bombs.
The distinction also feels very thin with some biotech research: consider e.g. the various debates of whether to publish the genome of various diseases. Arguably, there it might be easier to use that information to do damage than to do good: to do damage, you only need to synthesize the pathogen, whereas figuring out how to use the genome to defend against it better takes more effort.
True.
My point was that the technology for nuclear weapons was inexorably tied with the technology for civilian nuclear power. You can’t have the technology for one without the other. (I will admit that this is not exactly the same thing as not being able to have one without another, but it’s pretty close.)
And you do make a good point on the topic of chemistry and biotech also having ties in that direction.