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Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

antipope.org

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Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#11

Post by claudiawerner »

autokad wrote: post #10

>"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.

That's not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, most works (and specifically blogs) online have an "agenda".

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#12

Post by bawolff »

> Nobody in 2007 was expecting a Nazi revival in 2017, right?

Is that actually true? I seem to remember people predicting that usa has been edging towards facism for a while now, especially in the aftermath of 9/11.

For example here is an article from 2003 predicting usa is heading towards fasicism https://secularhumanism.org/2003/03/fascism-anyone/

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#13

Post by scotty79 »

anchpop wrote: post #8

> 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…

For me this illustrates nicely why most discussions about AI and singularity are like counting how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

It's all like talking about nuclear weapons in 17th century. Sure you can but even if you reach some conclusions they most likely will be invalidated by first technical detail of the implementation of thing when it actually gets created.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#14

Post by klenwell »

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...

It looks to me like most Stross's predictions depend first on the event of the Brexit, which has not occurred yet as far as I know.

Here's a map the NY Times published on 6/15/2005:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/06/15/business/arm3...

It makes an implicit prediction about the then booming housing market and the sky above it.

On that date, the S&P 500 closed at 1,206.58.

Two years later, in 2007, the S&P 500 closed at 1,522.97.

To the extent that stock markets tell us where we stand as a nation or a society, I find this example instructive.

There's such a thing as the long view. It's hard to know how long it should be. Harder to know whether it will be proved out in the end until it is proved or disproved. Even then sometimes we miss the forest for the trees.

S&P Data: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EGSPC/history?period1=1118...

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#15

Post by thiagocsf »

autokad wrote: post #10

>"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.

Would you mind explaining what the agenda is?

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#16

Post by Ygg2 »

> nastiest ideas in Presybterian Protestantism.

And if you follow Charlie's reasoning, that simpler parts, can't lead to a highly advanced intelligence, you come to conclusion intelligence is derived from a divine soul.

Intelligence isn't as uncommon as we think, but it takes long time to emerge.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#17

Post by ganzuul »

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…

This is why standardized testing works against improving aggregate intelligence. We probably have not seen anything close to what human minds are capable of if nurtured to express their differences.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#18

Post by danielscrubs »

autokad wrote: post #10

>"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.

He was also all over the place.

But interesting ideas and if he can connect the ideas in a better way in his book I wouldn’t mind reading it.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#19

Post by ALittleLight »

I found a couple errors early on that dissuaded me from continuing to read.

One was the idea that the author could rule out the singularity because he wasn't aware of progress toward self-motivated AI that would be something like our own intelligence. This seems like a limited view to me because we wouldn't need self-motivation at all in AI to hit the singularity. Humans can supply the self motivation.

Suppose I'm using GPT-4 or GPT-44 trained on the corpus from sci-hub and it recommends experiments to me, or explains physics to me, etc. I could be the self-motivating part and the AI could be the intelligence part, and it seems we'd still hit the technological singularity.

Another problem I had was when the author characterized Elon Musk's "obsession" with the paperclip maximizer and described Tesla as a battery maximizer. It seems like the author kind of misses the point of the paperclip thought experiment, which is, broadly, that an AI's interests might not be aligned with our own and that misalignment may cause serious problems.

Tesla is clearly not a battery maximizer and it is clearly not a different class of intelligence from the humans and corporations existing today (though it may be towards the top of that class). Neither of those things would necessarily be true of an AI.

Given the position of my scrollbar it seems I was only starting to read this piece, but already finding what I think are significant problems as the author sets up the argument, I'm hesitant to spend more reading.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#20

Post by rsynnott »

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...

Remember that Brexit hasn’t, for practical purposes, happened yet. Most people didn’t anticipate that the UK would request, and be granted, so many extensions, a few years ago.

However, time has now run out; the last realistic opportunity for a further extension passed a couple of weeks ago, and Brexit will now happen in some real sense at the end of the year. It likely won’t be pretty.

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