31–40 of 176 posts
Wow, when I was a kid back in the early 2000s, howstuffworks was my favorite website. I bet I read every article on how various things work (there were many hundreds). I found that the knowledge from that website helped me understand how everything in the world worked and satisfied my curious mind. I attribute my knack for understanding new things and fixing things to this website. Back then, the site was clean and h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existin…
Which physics and biology prevent the utopia from existing?
I'm going to use this time to drop the Marshall Brain work that had the biggest impact on me, and is some of the most prescient speculative fiction I've read. Manna: Two Views of Humanity’s Future He contracts two societies. One is a dystopia where AI very, very similar to today's ML models is integrated into society as a replacement for the middle class, removing social mobility as well as acting as a panopticon low…
Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existin…
All the rest of it is a narrative about consequences.
Anyway, the AI there isn't like our LLMs either. It's an AGI capable of long term societal prediction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existin…
Which physics and biology prevent the utopia from existing?
But personally the “dystopia” to me feels very much like something we could end up with -it’s much more a warning. Meanwhile the fantastic nature of the utopia doesn’t really matter in contrast, because the idea of sharing society’s abundance with everyone is clearly possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existin…
Which physics and biology prevent the utopia from existing?
[spoiler alert]
Everyone has a remote kill switch in their spinal cord. Once the goverment decides to be evil, any rebel will get their legs instructed to walk to a pea facility for "reeducation".
Compared to this scenario, 1984 is almost as optimistic as Equilibrium.
Wow, when I was a kid back in the early 2000s, howstuffworks was my favorite website. I bet I read every article on how various things work (there were many hundreds). I found that the knowledge from that website helped me understand how everything in the world worked and satisfied my curious mind. I attribute my knack for understanding new things and fixing things to this website. Back then, the site was clean and h…
Wow, when I was a kid back in the early 2000s, howstuffworks was my favorite website. I bet I read every article on how various things work (there were many hundreds). I found that the knowledge from that website helped me understand how everything in the world worked and satisfied my curious mind. I attribute my knack for understanding new things and fixing things to this website. Back then, the site was clean and h…
I'm going to use this time to drop the Marshall Brain work that had the biggest impact on me, and is some of the most prescient speculative fiction I've read. Manna: Two Views of Humanity’s Future He contracts two societies. One is a dystopia where AI very, very similar to today's ML models is integrated into society as a replacement for the middle class, removing social mobility as well as acting as a panopticon low…
But I would like to point out that the “utopia” has a few serious panopticon elements which are very 1984. It seems as though high-welfare and high redistribution societies are predicated on high trust of your peers, and this takes that to the extreme…
> Another core principle is that nothing is anonymous. Eric grew up during the rise of the Internet, and the rise of global terrorism, and one thing he realized is that anonymity allows incredible abuse. It does not matter if you are sending anonymous, untraceable emails that destroy someone’s career, or if you are anonymously releasing computer viruses, or if you are anonymously blowing up buildings. Anonymity breeds abuse. In [utopia], if you walk from your home to a park, your path is logged. You cannot anonymously pass by someone else’s home. If someone looks up your path that day to see who walked by, that fact is also logged. So you know who knows your path. And so on. This system, of course, makes it completely impossible to commit an anonymous crime. So there is no anonymous crime. Anyone who commits a crime is immediately detained and disciplined.”