This is an apples to oranges comparison. Because while productivity gains of the past made workers more efficient, AI gains occurring now will allow synthetic workers, physical and virtual, possessed of every asset that makes a human a valuable economic unit but with some many orders of magnitude fewer costs.

Holy shot is this Reddit now? Every week we have to read about someone banning AI form something?

Wouldn’t the sorts of signals our own planet emits be a good dataset to train to recognize the sorts of signals a civilization might generate? I’d assumed from the article this is what they’d done. Seems to me the key is whether we can discern, not necessarily interpret, communications, perhaps encrypted, from cosmic noise and natural phenomena, right? So train a model to recognize any human signals from noise. You’d look in those bands that we emit that are likely to make the journey to our neighbors.

To make the data more useful, you could simulate phase shifting in the datasets of our own EM communications. Perhaps you’d want to simulate other phenomena that is likely to modify celestial signals from a neighbor civilization.

Before you know it, you won't be able to throw a rock without hitting a language or diffusion model. There will be lots of AIs, of different shapes and sizes, and for different functions, and they'll compete with each other to produce better and better answers in a thousand different ways. And then we'll see extremist groups release offensive models, and then AI will find its way into warfare in ways we can't yet imagine. All of this is going to happen, and we can't stop it.

But let's get mad because one company has people running it whose values caution them against being the ones who build a Hitler bot you can access at $ 0.0005 a GET request.

This guy really be like: build the most powerful weapon the world has ever seen, with NO safeguards, and release it to the unwashed masses!! And put your company name on it too! YOCO! (C for civilization).

Because, as everyone knows, physics has already coughed up her last secrets to us. There’s nothing we have yet to learn about.