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RyanGosling [none/use name] @hexbear.net

1y ago

God this is so fucking stupid lol. I don't even know if I believed in this nonsense when I was a kid let alone a grown ass man.

The irreversible global catastrophe is imperialist militaries massacring people with little risk to themselves.

The irreversible global catastrophe is assembly line robots at the Toyota plant becoming sentient and going on a freaking epic terminator style mass shooting and enslave everyone except me

57 comments

Someone once said that fear of AI is just white people being terrified of having someone do to them what they did to the rest of the world, and I think they might have hit that bullseye so hard the dartboard shattered.
- Someone once said that fear of AI is just white people being terrified*
  
  Someone once said that fear of AI is just white people
I remember reading one of those Less Wrong-ite "dangers of AI" stories where it's mentioned that nobody can stop the AI superintelligence because it keeps its servers and cores dozens of kilometers underground.
Dozens of kilometers.
Underground.
Evidently the author had never heard of the geothermal gradient. Server racks generate so much waste heat that they have to be put in rooms specifically designed to maintain high airflow to keep the entire room from cooking. Imagine trying to keep that shit cooled when it's so far underground that the ambient temperatures melt lead, to say nothing of how much work it would be to actually excavate all that. The Kola Borehole only goes 12km down and that took decades to dig.
- dozens of kilometers underground.
  On the cryogenic moon Titan
- This is such a perfect encapsulation of the techbro desire to speak authoritatively about subjects they know nothing about
- What you don’t know is that the earth is just a giant computer chip. We’ve been played all along. The robots are already in our soil
AI isn’t real, has never been real, and will never be real
If AI ends the world, it won't be because it's superintelligent and gains sentience. It'll be because it's dumb as a bag of rocks and humans decide to make important shit rely on it.
- Pretty much this. The current implementation of machine learning is a bunch of smug redditors throwing it at every single problem and trusting the output to make decisions. Then going "the computer says x who am I to argue?"
- WarGames.mp4
- Yeah, they did that back in the 70s, you can learn about it in a little game called MGS: Peace Walker
  
  Or that one Matthew Broderick documentary
- I would argue this is just people who already wanted excuses to do terrible things offloading the responsibility to the thing they invented to do terrible things. Absolution of blame for lack of a better word.
  As @Yeat said in another comment, if the people (you know, real sentient beings that make decisions) wanted, they could just unplug it. ---
- In the second book of the Rifters trilogy by Peter Watts, spineless corpo types leave the major strategic decision-making on how to handle the emergence of a primordial proto-organism dubbed "Behemoth" to a bunch of lab-grown neural network computers running AIs. The computers eventually skew things in the direction of allowing Behemoth to take over because it created more predictable outcomes than the chaos of human activity that kept forcing the AIs to reallocate resources to deal with new variables, leading to global mass death via the proliferation of a thing not complex enough to be called a virus stripping all the phosphorous out of people's cells to perpetuate itself.
  
  Watts seems like an absolute maniac, but I do enjoy his books.
Capitlaism is an evil AI that runs off people and is overclocking the planet to make increment numbers. This is the exact scenario one of their ai boogy men is based on. That they can't see a paperclip maximizer situation because it doesn't have enough led lights is infuriating
- Money maximizer instead of paperclips
  
  I was recently on one of the discords for them and used the term paperslip maximizer. They kicked me out for being a comunist.
Skynet reveals master plan to sit back and enjoy humans cooking themselves alive with CO2 emissions.
ai will kill us by wasting a colossal amount of time and killing the imagination of a generation. Or it gets owned but we still go down with it because the economy is tied to ai succeeding. Classic crapitalism lose lose
If you ask computer salesmen and computer engineers if it's possible for computers to be too good at their jobs they will say yes
- why? so they can't make more?
  
  The idea makes their professions/industries more valuable because it makes computers seem more powerful than they are
if AI tried taking over the world i’d just unplug it
- Not if I put you in a coma and unplug you first
The most realistic depiction of a superintelligent AI that has ever been written is when VEGA is instructed to start its self-destruct sequence and it helpfully walks you through the process and even gives you strategic tips on how to do it most efficiently.
A computer literally cannot fucking do anything it is not told to do.
Enough said about treating aggregate language models as "AI", I've got my own special grievance with this
"human beings dominate other species because the human brain possessed distinctive capabilities other animals lack" Shitty way to understand human success. It's from our ability to act as a group, we could be dumb as shit and if we were still altruistic we'd remain successful, it's nature's cheat code
- Anthropologists say prehistoric human skeletal remains with mended leg bones are one of the earliest signs of human civilization.
  In almost all animals, even herd species, a broken limb is essentially a death sentence because they can't get to food and water, or escape from predators or find shelter. Even a solitary person in the modern day can't survive for very long if they can't find help.
  The fact that ancient human remains have been found with mended bones means that the person had help immobilizing their broken leg, and were protected and fed while it healed.
  
  Matabele ants have been observed picking up and carrying nest mates who emit a specific pheromone that signals to others that they have been wounded. Back at the nest, others lick the injured ant's wounds and it decreases overall mortality by like 30 percent iirc.
  (My favorite element of this behavior is that some ants have also been observed "faking" their wound signal to get carried back, though it's hard to say whether this is intentional. Other injured ants will even fight off their would-be rescuers if they are so wounded that they will not recover.)
  
  It's a nice, feel good story, oft repeated on the internet, but the evidence is dubious.
  "Anthropologists" would more accurately refer specifically to Margaret Mead, a well known anthropologist. But even then, evidence of her saying it is only secondhand. When later asked in an interview, she gave a very different answer, listing things like elaborate division of labour, record keeping, and such.
  But also, animals have been spotted giving basic medical care to each other in the wild. However, I could not find anything that specifically shows animals giving medical care at their own detriment to an individual who would be doomed without it.
  And my own two cents: Quadrupeds can survive with a missing limb. Perhaps not as well as an unscathed individual, but still, the focus on the femur is human centric for this reason. So if anything, I think the story should ask, "How do we know when human society started?"
This assumes that the ai will be white and or capitalist
- it will be
  all the AI and alien nonsense is just them preemptively constructing a scapegoat to assign blame to later on
  aliens are real btw but whatever the media or congress says about them is gonna be fake
Ok so the general ai gets real smart or whatever but how does it do anything to me if i just don't go on the computer
- Exactly. It would have to have direct access and control of production of robots. From there it could make robots that make and produce other material things. But if the cut the power, it's done. What's it going to do, threaten us with cutting the power? Direct control of infrastructure through the internet, if it it's actual present, can just be overridden by manual control at the power or water plant. Threaten to launch nukes? That's completely detached from the internet and the orders to the individual people who turn the keys comes via phone call over a private network that's not attached to anything - the kind of phones that don't have and dial buttons. These orders have a backup of radio transmission on military channels. Even then, if the code isn't right it's a no go, and these codes aren't crackable because they're manually generated on isolated systems. One wrong attempt and the whole thing is shut down. One thing it could do, control a drone and hit a target... But how's it going to refuel and reload without human labor? Okay, you popped off one or two targets, now every drone has been grounded and non-responsive ones are shot down. Maybe AI could corrupt the stock market... Good luck, it'll just be undone. If the market and banks can just be bailed out for human error, they'll fire up the money machine for an AI attack.
  Maybe it could blackmail everyone if it hacks into everyone's email... But if it started to do that, we'd probably all collectively pull the plug on it.
  Sorry AI, but your just Bonzibuddy 2.0.
  
  I've seen some techbros say their machine god will design a super plague and trick people to make it. The problem is, this possibility already exists without AI yet it does not happen.
  
  The problem of "how could AGI take over the world" is the same thing as "how could a billionaire take over the world". To affect the physical world they just pay people to do things, no trickery required. If the factory needs to keep the lights on, a private army will guard it. Runaway AGI is a problem of capitalism (and its prominence in discourse is a reflection of people's fear of capitalism). It's just "what if corporations were smart".
Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the dumbest people in America right now, and the fact that he gets treated in the popular media as some kind of AI expert is infuriating to no end.
- Eliezer has some horrible opinions and is possibly the most arrogant person alive, but he also wants to nationalize Nvidia and force them to stop turning out GPUs
  
  :heartbreaking:
I always liked how part of the reason The Sentient from Warframe turned on their creators was because they rightly realized the Orokin were a bunch of crazed immortal hyper-fascists who ruin everything they touch
- Well actually that was retconned but then the retcon was retconned so now nothing is confirmed to be true. /s
  
  RIP Corpus Braton
even just in terms of hardware, find me a computer, hell, find me a CAR, a much more durable machine, that can last as long as a human can without replacement parts. based off of first page google results, the avarage lifespan of a human is about 76 years in the USA, while the average lifespan of a car is 12 years, and the average lifespan of a computer is between three and eight years. and to prolong the lifespan of those cars and computers, it requires specially manufactured artificial parts made of difficult to acquire materials, while a human can just stick seeds into the dirt and pour water and shit on it every so often and as long as nothing goes wrong, there will be regenerating human food in the area eventually. sometimes humans can just find food in the wild and eat it there unprocessed, find any machine that does that. Lifespan isn't everything but it can be an advantage, especially when humans are so relatively low-maintenance in terms of production and resource requirements.
- It doesn't make financial sense to manufacturer a car or computer that lasts 70 years because of rapid technological progress. There are some 50s cars still driving around, but they're cool toys. Worse gas mileage, worse emissions, worse handling, no airbags or ABS, etc - for all the practical uses of a car, modern stuff is better. Same for computers, try browsing Hexbear on a UNIVAC.
  Replacement parts are an engineering choice. Over the design life of the system, usually it's cheaper to say "swap these relays every 10 years" than to put in a huge durable relay that will probably last for 75. You'll find some elevator computers and other industrial controllers with long lifespans, but pretty much the only systems you will find no replacement parts are things like the Voyager probes.

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