Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

To paraphrase: yes, corporations function as agents, but their maximum performance is limited by the capabilities of their employees. A corporate AI may have a much broader set of skills than any single person, and may be able to tackle many concurrent tasks, but as an "intelligent agent" its decision making capabilities probably don't scale exponentially (or even linearly) with its headcount. In the sense that a corporation's maximum intelligence is likely to be in the same ballpark as the smartest humans, it can't be seen as a true superintelligence.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#6

Post by coldtea » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 8:15 PM UTC

Not so sure about his future prediction ability. This, for example, like most "the sky is falling", didn't age well:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/07/that-si...

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#7

Post by nikanj » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 8:18 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #6

Not so sure about his future prediction ability. This, for example, like most "the sky is falling", didn't age well: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/07/that-si...

Brexit hasn't happened yet. The transition period ends in about six months, so it's too early to say if he was right or wrong

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#8

Post by anchpop » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 8:23 PM UTC

> And once you start probing the nether regions of transhumanist thought and run into concepts like Roko's Basilisk—by the way, any of you who didn't know about the Basilisk before are now doomed to an eternity in AI hell—you realize they've mangled it to match some of the nastiest ideas in Presybterian Protestantism.

I wish every discussion of transhumanism didn't have to involve Roko's Basilisk. It's not something anyone takes seriously (and very few ever did), but it has enough quirky weirdness that everyone seems to want to talk about it.

Here's a quote from "Lesswrongwiki":

> Roko's argument was broadly rejected on Less Wrong, with commenters objecting that an agent like the one Roko was describing would have no real reason to follow through on its threat

> [...]

> Less Wrong's founder, Eliezer Yudkowsky, banned discussion of Roko's basilisk on the blog for several years as part of a general site policy against spreading potential information hazards. This had the opposite of its intended effect: a number of outside websites began sharing information about Roko's basilisk, as the ban attracted attention to this taboo topic. Websites like RationalWiki spread the assumption that Roko's basilisk had been banned because Less Wrong users accepted the argument; thus many criticisms of Less Wrong cite Roko's basilisk as evidence that the site's users have unconventional and wrong-headed beliefs.

- https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Roko's_basilisk

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#9

Post by zaphar » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 8:32 PM UTC

jengleton wrote: post #5

Robert Miles has an interesting response to the claim that corporations are AIs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw To paraphrase: yes, corporations function as agents, but their maximum performance is limited by the capabilities of their employees. A corporate AI may have a much broader set of skills than any single person, and may be able to tackle many concurrent tasks, but as an "intelligent agent" its d…

I don't think the comparison was to AI as a super intelligence. AI doesn't have to be a super intelligence to be AI or to be dangerous.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#10

Post by autokad » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 8:35 PM UTC

>"Science fiction is written by people embedded within a society with expectations and political assumptions that bias us towards looking at the shiny surface of new technologies rather than asking how human beings will use them, and to taking narratives of progress at face value rather than asking what hidden agenda they serve."

And be prepared for the most agenda ridden text you have read in a long time.