“We can prevent progress! Conceptual clarity, and inspiration from the FDA” by KatjaGrace

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Recorded08 Apr 2026

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“We can’t prevent progress” say the people for some reason enthusiastically advocating that we just risk dying by AI rather than even consider contravening this law. I have several problems with this, beyond those unsubtly hinted at above. First, it seems to be willfully conflating “increasing technology understanding and/or tools” with “things getting better”. The word ‘progress’ generally means ‘things getting better’, but here in a debate about whether it is good or not for society to acquire and spread some specific information and tools, we are being asked to label all increases in information and tools as ‘progress’, which is quite the presumption of a particular conclusion. (Yes the sub-debate here is more narrowly about whether averting technology is feasible not whether it is good, but the bid here to implicitly grant that the infeasible thing is also reprehensible and backward to want (i.e. anti-”progress”) seems unfriendly.) If we separate the conflated concepts—i.e. distinguish ‘increasing technological information and tools’ from ‘things getting better’—the statement doesn’t seem remotely true for either of them. First: Preventing things from getting better is a capability humans have had perhaps at least as far back as the Sea [...] --- First published: April 7th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aYfTyppBMgyZQAQrv/we-can-prevent-progress-conceptual-clarity-and-inspiration --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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