Why do you believe what you believe? What would be true if it were false? Is that a thinkable alternative? If not, do you really have a hypothesis, or do you have a political belief being presented in the guise of a claim of fact?

Yes, that's exactly why they shouldn't exist.

If what you believe to be true is in fact true, then you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. Either way, I hope that you desire to find the correct answer rather than the one that would be convenient for your political position, and that whatever hypothesis you have has not set itself up to be unfalsifiable.

I don't know why AI companies don't hire them in advance.

This is not a slippery slope, nor do I think your attempted reductio ad absurdum is valid: we can talk about AI and nuclear weaponry and judge them differently than we do computers and hammers.

It's not that it could never happen. It's that it is much less likely.

Thought experiment: suppose there exists some trivial activity that would end the world, using everyday household objects that is easy to enact but vanishingly unlikely to do by accident, such that it could only happen if you made a deliberate choice to do it. For the sake of an absurd-but-clear information-theoretically-unlikely example, "write this exact ten-word sentence on a piece of paper, and place it in the microwave along with a vinegar-soaked match".

Now suppose that activity becomes public knowledge. How many minutes does the world last? I'd bet against more than a day (if betting were of any use).

Making it simple and widely accessible to do such things is a bad idea.

> Ordinary people were able to do these things pre AI-- with some effort into study for sure.

Yes, and the amount of study and knowledge required had a tendency to filter out people with the inclination to do such things. The Venn diagrams weren't completely empty, but they were close, which is why such incidents were rare.

> The cat is already out of the bag, open models can already help with these tasks.

This is not binary. Open models can do these things. Frontier models can do them better. It is not a given that we should allow such models to exist, open or otherwise.

How would you solve, for instance, the problem in which AI models are capable of helping the average person build viruses (computer or human)?

"YOLO" is not a reasonable answer here.

I am a massive advocate of Open Source, and have been for 25+ years. These things should not exist, open or otherwise.

We understand quite well where in the brain the sensation of self-awareness / self-experience / sense-of-self comes from. We have evidence that disruption of that part of the brain breaks those sensations.

In any case, a closely-but-not-perfectly-accurate simulation of a real human brain is still going to be human, unless you believe that someone becomes less human when they're experiencing some kind of cognitive decline, or a stroke, or other biological malfunctions. The point is, there is nothing essential to the having of a physical brain that creates the concept of consciousness or sense-of-self.

If every neuron of your brain were simulated precisely on a sufficiently powerful computer, that simulation would have subjective experiences, without having a body.

I hope the same becomes true of people, and that doesn't mean people stop being sapient.

> expand that exemption from CEQA to include a public project for the institution or increase of other passenger rail service, which will be exclusively used by zero-emission trains, located entirely within existing rail rights-of-way or existing highway rights-of-way.

Cloudflare's demo page still treats that as a pass, but complains about it. As is often the case with Cloudflare, I expect that they'll then take no responsibility for sites that use more aggressive settings.