I feel like nuclear energy is a bad example, because when it goes wrong it's "one big scary thing" as opposed to the papercuts that would add up with dangerous robotaxis. Also the benchmark for car danger is already so incredible low. You can see in this thread the argument that "cars are already killing people, so we as a society just have to decide how many it's ok to have die while we figure out to make them work."
As far as "objectively safer" - not sure how that works (or matters). Since when has safety actually mattered in terms of public opinion? If safety mattered we wouldn't have cars on city streets at all, all last mile would be slow & public and we'd have built our towns & cities to support that.
> It has become very clear that WFH workers take extra time off at random intervals during a day
Bob Slydell: You see, what we're actually trying to do here is, we're trying to get a feel for how people spend their day at work... so, if you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Bob Slydell: Great.
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
I mean, in an alternate universe where atomic weapons were a little easier to manufacture at home would it not have made sense for governments to aggressively crack down on anyone doing anything even remotely resembling building them?
I guess the second question is - would they have succeeded or would we all just have died?
There is a conspiracy theory out that that nuclear weapons are easier to manufacture - that uranium enrichment is the "difficult path" to creating them, that the easier path is via the accumulation of heavy water, and that the Powers That Be™ have hidden that fact because uranium enrichment provides a plausible means of suppressing proliferation.
To be very clear, I do not believe the above to be true. If it were, though, the implications on nuclear proliferation would be similar to trying to control AI research. Basically everyone has to insist that the only way to do it is to through nation-state levels of resources at a corpus to train a model, while knowing full well that it can be done with much more meager resources.
... honestly, I'm not sure where I'm going with this thought, it just seemed an interesting parallel to me.
You can see that the cost of the uranium enrichment program dwarfed the cost of the plutonium production program. All of the costs were higher for the Manhattan Project than for subsequent nuclear weapons development programs, because the Manhattan Project had to try everything at once (including dead ends and overpriced methods) at large scale to quickly guarantee a usable bomb.
Fast forward to the 1970s and more uranium enrichment methods were known and costs had come down significantly. South Africa built (but later voluntarily dismantled) several uranium based nuclear weapons at a cost of $400 million (1994 dollars):
The unique enrichment process used in South Africa was still more expensive than modern centrifuge based techniques, assuming that a would-be proliferator has the technical base to build working centrifuge systems.
The really cheap option remains a graphite or heavy water moderated reactor, fueled with natural uranium to produce plutonium. That's what North Korea uses -- a tiny 5 megawatt Magnox type reactor:
It's an open secret that nuclear weapons are now technically easy to manufacture. Preventing further proliferation is 95% from monitoring/diplomatic pressure/sabotage and about 5% from inherent technical difficulties.
And expanding that atomic weapons analogy in a different direction, the way to stop things is not just paying attention to the research, but the physical tools and materials used in the process. Just outlawing the work wouldn’t be effective, you would need to regulate graphics cards and cloud computing which would surely be unpopular.
Let's be honest, a big part of the goal of the fed action and these layoffs is to even the playing field between labor and capital. Silicon Valley type engineers especially were getting dangerously close to escaping precarity (and did in a lot of cases). Now the FAANG club gets to the join the rest of the precariat in the "I'm constantly worried about losing my job, probably shouldn't be too ballsy with my vacation or ask for more money" world. Obviously the $ values are higher than a lineworker at Ford, but lets be honest if you are a mid level dev with a family in silicon valley your standard of living is the same or below that line worker in the 70s.
> even the playing field between labor and capital
No, the goal was to keep it tilted in capital's favor. Which group wields greater decision-making power? Which type of income is more lightly taxed? Capital vehicles (corporations) have almost all of the rights and practically none of the responsibilities - or vulnerabilities such as mortality or geographic limitation - of human laborers. Yes, the playing field needs to be leveled ... the other way.
I think it's easy to mistake the concept of fads within technology with the application of arguably necessary abstractions. Most of what is new and faddish is just another abstraction around some (probably, relatively) archaic system.
The abstraction is the new thing, not the technology or the language that it's written in.
