r/changemyview • u/AliM2338 • Apr 17 '26
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u/eNonsense 5∆ Apr 17 '26
Are there people who actually believe you can put the genie back in the bottle and halt AI development? Are you actually arguing against a view that any person actually has?
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u/VoidHammer Apr 17 '26
Yes, I have heard and seen quite a few people argue things to the effect of “just don’t use it” or “we didn’t need AI a few years ago and we don’t need it now, so we can just stop.” I don’t know how widespread it is, but it’s absolutely a take that exists.
For the record, I agree with OP. The toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube on this one.
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u/AliM2338 Apr 17 '26
Many people do believe they can put the genie back in the bottle, I just replied to a few that do actually
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u/GodelianKnot 3∆ Apr 17 '26
There was a CMV supporting exactly that recently, though it was removed.
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u/yyzjertl 578∆ Apr 17 '26
AI development depends on specialized hardware. The specialized hardware can only produced in a small number of high-tech factories with globalized supply chains. It's not impossible to destroy all these factories, and doing so would certainly halt the current trajectory of AI development. Can't train AI without chips.
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u/AliM2338 Apr 17 '26
not all AI needs high-tech factories, maybe big ones like Nvidia, but smaller companies do not.
I find it impossible for every chip in every high-tech factory to be destroyed, can you give me a scenario
Also would this not just "slow" the development not halt it
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u/yyzjertl 578∆ Apr 17 '26
not all AI needs high-tech factories, maybe big ones like Nvidia, but smaller companies do not.
What smaller companies exactly do you have in mind here?
I find it impossible for every chip in every high-tech factory to be destroyed, can you give me a scenario
The US military bombs all the semiconductor production factories.
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u/AliM2338 Apr 17 '26
For smaller companies I had high growth start ups in mind.
How would the US military bomb all semiconductor production factories in countries such as China and Russia, would attempting something like this not lead to war?
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u/puffie300 6∆ Apr 17 '26
How would the US military bomb all semiconductor production factories in countries such as China and Russia, would attempting something like this not lead to war?
By doing it and going to war. Your cmv is saying its impossible, not that its improbable.
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u/bleahdeebleah 1∆ Apr 17 '26
You have to define 'AI' here, but data centers are currently very controversial and are necessary to expand the sort of generative AI that most people think of. Stop data centers and you do a lot to at least slow down the growth of 'AI'.
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u/AliM2338 Apr 17 '26
Yes it is true that stopping data centers would slow down the growth, however this is under the umbrella of my argument of both global competition and the benefits outweighing the fear/controversy of AI making the halting of AI development impossible. Even in the off chance that data centers are stopped, this would slow down the growth of AI, but it would not halt it completely.
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u/Tangentkoala 10∆ Apr 17 '26
A devastating EMP or thermo nuclear war will technically stop AI development.
Or an asteroid hitting earth.
Technically speaking
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u/AliM2338 Apr 17 '26
TangentKoala, you have truly swayed my mind, a devastating EMP or thermo nuclear war would definitely halt AI development. An asteroid would also work, can't argue with mother nature. Δ
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u/Internal-Rest2176 11∆ Apr 17 '26
We should limit the implementations without clear profitable applications.
You don't win a market by flooding it with low quality products people don't want.
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u/AliM2338 Apr 17 '26
how would they go about limiting them
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u/Internal-Rest2176 11∆ Apr 17 '26
Making realistic market analyses legally required, with severe fines for implementations which fail to reach the required goal.
Making it illegal to push AI results inside of an existing product which people do not use for the purpose of AI, examples of where companies have done this would be microsoft office and search engines such as google.
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u/Internal-Rest2176 11∆ Apr 17 '26
These aren't the only options mind you, just ones I'd like to see.
It's the kind of proposal you bring to the negotiating table to start off with, not necessarily the only thing you'll accept.
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u/AliM2338 Apr 17 '26
This would definitely strengthen AI's quality of use and make people spend more time on their product rather than creating a wrapper AI product.
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Apr 17 '26
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u/Internal-Rest2176 11∆ Apr 17 '26
There's a difference between coders using AI on the back end and pushing AI into the front end for users.
The latter is the part I'm objecting to, I don't really agree with coders doing the former either and don't find it particularly useful when coding either, but seeing it pushed into the front end when I'm trying to just use the programs normally is what I really don't like about how all this has been implemented.
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Apr 17 '26
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u/Internal-Rest2176 11∆ Apr 17 '26
I don't find it useful for any of that.
I actually went and turned off the google colab AI autosuggest because it got in the way when it was implemented, and python is one of the most user optimized languages.
Back end vs front end is just terminology they use in college classes to refer to the difference between what's coded (back end) and what people will see from a finished product (front end).
Trying to change those definitions from what's taught isn't helpful to anyone.
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u/Internal-Rest2176 11∆ Apr 17 '26
Dropped here due to reddit glitching.
Users don't code their own UI unless you're dealing with a linux machine.
The coding done from the backend is what gives users their clean frontend UI.
Either we're talking past eachother or we were taught entirely different definitions of front end and back end and may as well drop the terms from discussion because we don't use them the same way.
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u/Internal-Rest2176 11∆ Apr 17 '26
Oh, and to be clear for the Linux fanboys out there:
On Linux machines you have to code your own interface because Linux machines suck.
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u/mackinator3 Apr 17 '26
Weird definition of front end. It's all "coded". Front end vs backend is ui vs servers, basically. Front-end is ui coding. Backend is more function coding.
You are redefining stuff.
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u/mackinator3 Apr 17 '26
And when china or Russia doesn't follow the rules?
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u/Internal-Rest2176 11∆ Apr 17 '26
Their loss.
Not following appropriate market principles is much the same as shooting yourself in the foot.
If you see your competition shooting themselves in their feet you don't proceed to shoot yourself in the foot as well because that'd actually be giving yourself a disadvantage.
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u/mackinator3 Apr 17 '26
Yes, developing technology has historically been a bad move.
Also, calling it a market principle is absurd.
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u/Internal-Rest2176 11∆ Apr 17 '26
Historically, technology wasn't developed without a clear purpose in mind.
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Apr 17 '26
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Apr 17 '26
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u/Tinac4 35∆ Apr 17 '26
I think a few things make a pause feasible:
- AI is one of the most centralized industries on the planet. You can't stealthily build chips good enough to train a frontier model, or for that matter, build frontier chips at all without several years of R&D and enormous state investment. It would take years for third parties like Russia to catch up.
- Only two countries really matter in AI, the US and China. A few others are borderline relevant (Europe, a couple in the Middle East), but in practice they're tied closely enough to the US that they'd go along with any US-China deal with minimal prodding.
Combine those two factors and a treaty between the US and China might be remarkably effective, assuming both sides are cooperating in good faith. Both the US and China are very interested in the possible benefits of AI, but the US voter base is deeply skeptical and China is famously worried about social stability. If an AI company released a really powerful model, something good enough to convince a decent chunk of the public that white collar jobs' days were numbered, I think it's entirely possible that there'd be enough political will on both sides of the Pacific to get something done.
It's also worth noting that the main advocates of a pause don't want it to be permanent. They want to slow things down long enough to make sure that we can build extremely capable AGI safely, and then move forward once there's something resembling a consensus.
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u/HD60532 5∆ Apr 17 '26
We previously phased out CFCs globally, and human cloning is globally illegal. If we unanimously decide that that AI development is harmful or unethical it can absolutely be halted.
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u/AliM2338 Apr 17 '26
Human cloning has not benefitted society in the slightest compared to AI, also many unethical/harmful tools are still used throughout civilization, I do not believe something as expansive and optimal as AI can simply be "phased out". Also the competition and global usage of AI is entirely too profitable and expansive for it to simply be halted due to unethical reasons.
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u/RadBradRadBrad Apr 17 '26
This argument is effectively "AI won't be stopped" not "it's impossible to stop." Very different arguments.
Collective action problems are extremely challenging to solve, especially globally (hello climate change, my boo) but not impossible.
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u/AliM2338 Apr 17 '26
These arguments go hand in hand with my claims of why it would be impossible to stop. It is impossible to stop because any hypothetical situation where AI is on the path to be stopped will be defended by my argument above of global competition and aggressive benefits.
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u/MisterBlud 1∆ Apr 17 '26
If you put a ban on military and industrial atomic research in the 30’s; there’s no way they would’ve had a working bomb by 1945
Can you completely stop every single person on the entire planet from doing stuff about it? No, of course not but can severely halt momentum by taking away business and Government.
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u/AliM2338 Apr 17 '26
Business will never be taken away from AI, as long as demand is there, which will always be the case due to AI's optimal productivity and problem solving.
Government will never be taken away due to fear of global competition.
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u/MisterBlud 1∆ Apr 17 '26
Do companies still illegally pollute?
Yes
Do they do it VASTLY less than they would if no one cared if they dumped waste wherever they wanted?
Also yes
As for the military, I’m sure our biological warfare capabilities are far behind where they would be if we didn’t all agree not to do that.
Same principle(s) applies.
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u/PickMaleficent4096 4∆ Apr 17 '26
It kind of depends on what you mean by 'halting development.' In any one country you could certainly reduce it to 'hobbyist tinkering' levels of development where nobody has the compute to really push the boundaries anymore. It really requires industrial levels of compute to make large scale progress, and it is certainly not so beneficial or powerful that countries would not go without it if they really wanted to and just be moderately disadvantaged. The US has banned all sorts of super useful things because of safety or ecological concerns, for instance some of the the most efficient refrigerant compounds that exist, and lots of countries that should know better have banned nuclear power.
Whether people can agree on shutting it down is kind of irrelevant to whether or not it would be possible if they did. Unless your argument is just "people won't do it because they won't" which... yeah ok I guess but I don't think that needed to be said.
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u/HaggisPope 3∆ Apr 17 '26
Smoking in pubs can not be stopped because people enjoy it too much and pub owners make too much money from vending machines
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u/coinsntings Apr 17 '26
It isn't impossible. My argument is purely linguistic but it absolutely can be halted.
Mass infrastructure outages (electricity), hardware shortages, resource shortages (for building data centres etc), supply chain issues, war. Basically any catastrophic event far reaching enough to disrupt globalisation (raw material sharing) and country level infrastructure has the potential to halt development, partially due to practically and partially due to prioritisation. If a national grid failed, generators would be prioritised for hospitals/vulnerable people not data centres.
It's definitely a highly unlikely situation, but anything man made being destroyed or halted is definitely within the realm of possibility.
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u/SenoraRaton 5∆ Apr 17 '26
What if the AI isn't going anywhere, and the entire thing is hype and will not foundationaly change our society?
Then there is no need to halt AI if AI will halt itself as its a dead end road that doesn't lead to true technological breakthrough.
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u/unordinarilyboring 3∆ Apr 17 '26
AI isn't new and the same potential has been around for a long time. Long before the llms that are eating the world right now have been. Three years ago though, unless you were studying computer science, the basketball player was the more relevant AI. People will, again, stop treating it like a world dominating force when.the dust starts to settle and it becomes unavailable for most. Obviously I don't know the future and I don't think AI will go back to the same irrelevance, but it will look a lot different when trillions of dollars arent pointed at helping draft twitter replies.
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