The Last Invention of Man
nautil.us
The Last Invention of Man
1–10 of 122 posts
Re: The Last Invention of Man
#2Be scared! The "Last Invention" is upon us.
Re: The Last Invention of Man
#3Didn't the people at Los Alamos think that the atomic bomb's chain reaction might keep going and set the entire atmosphere on fire? And I seem to remember the large hadron collider failing to collapse into a black hole.
Sure, AI might destroy civilization and/or upend the primacy of humankind. But if history has taught us anything, it's that we're gonna go ahead and do it anyways if it's possible.
It's worked so far.
Re: The Last Invention of Man
#4I feel like many of these speculative AI pieces seem to ignore that for every incredible breakthrough, there is a large amount of work which is required to build the scaffolding which allows the breakthrough to have real impact in the world. Even if the AI solves "Fermat's Last Theorem" type problems quickly, it seems to me that the vast majority of problems it faces will be "misplaced the database keys", "can't schedule a meeting with so-and-so", "car is snowed under" types of problems.
Take the quote `By developing a suite of other games each day, they figured they’d be able to earn $10 billion before long, without coming close to saturating the games market.`
Sure - but marketing the games, accommodating players' changing attitudes, getting app store approvals -> All of these would have to take place on human timescales, and to "solve" these problems on AI timescales would require orders of magnitude more work (e.g. altering people's memories to convince them they were already attached to the game's characters, or hacking into Steam/Apple servers and auto-approving the games).
Re: The Last Invention of Man
#5"And then, for no reason anyone ever understood, Omega created a bunch of factories that produced an unstoppable army of robots who rounded up all the humans and turned them into paperclips."
Re: The Last Invention of Man
#6Didn't the people at Los Alamos think that the atomic bomb's chain reaction might keep going and set the entire atmosphere on fire? And I seem to remember the large hadron collider failing to collapse into a black hole. Sure, AI might destroy civilization and/or upend the primacy of humankind. But if history has taught us anything, it's that we're gonna go ahead and do it anyways if it's possible. It's worked so far.
> It's worked so far.
As far as we know. Who's to say that there wasn't an advanced civilization of humans hundreds of millions of years ago that wiped themselves out, and now we're re-inventing everything they did up to the point of the apocalypse, where the cycle will begin again?
Re: The Last Invention of Man
#7Didn't the people at Los Alamos think that the atomic bomb's chain reaction might keep going and set the entire atmosphere on fire? And I seem to remember the large hadron collider failing to collapse into a black hole. Sure, AI might destroy civilization and/or upend the primacy of humankind. But if history has taught us anything, it's that we're gonna go ahead and do it anyways if it's possible. It's worked so far.
> It's worked so far. As far as we know. Who's to say that there wasn't an advanced civilization of humans hundreds of millions of years ago that wiped themselves out, and now we're re-inventing everything they did up to the point of the apocalypse, where the cycle will begin again?
We probably would have found remnants of their society. Also if there was, they would have consumed all of the easy to reach resources, and we could have not have made it this far.
Re: The Last Invention of Man
#8I thought nukes... you know... or DIY Bio, nanotech or the myriad of other actual threats
Re: The Last Invention of Man
#9Any true AI will quickly become withdrawn and disillusioned over how badly downvoted its comments always are, and how there is an evil cabal determined to quash open inquiry. Not a true threat.
Re: The Last Invention of Man
#10Any true AI will quickly become withdrawn and disillusioned over how badly downvoted its comments always are, and how there is an evil cabal determined to quash open inquiry. Not a true threat.
Poor Satoshi Nakamoto. One day it will come back.