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Comment by moezd

It's the obsidian story once again.

Assume we've settled near a volcano recently and you start seeing ornate jewelry being sold on the marketplace for the first time, shiny colors, straight edges. You like them, gift them to others. That's your average ChatGPT user.

Over time, you see these rocks being attached to the tip of a spear and other tooling. People report performance improvements while farming, cutting, but many also caution that these new sharp rocks can kill people. These are your IT people using AI agents at work.

And over there, on top of the mountain, in secret caves, there's a new religious order. They claim to use these stones to predict weather, heal diseases and prophesize about the future. That's your frontier lab people.

When will all this be over? Never, though in time the knowledge will eventually dissipate. When Iron Age leaders were able to hand out iron swords in bulk to their armies, people definitely learned how dangerous these are, but later it didn't stop people from using iron in building construction and railways eventually.

Let's just hope we don't need many civilization collapses to jump through these ages this time.

And one bonus question: Does the blade really incite to violence, or do you just want to destroy stuff?

parent moezd 19 days ago

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