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Skynet won and destroyed humanity

dmathieu.com

121–130 of 145 posts

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#121

I witnessed the dystopian future where humans are slaves to machines at my favorite local Mexican restaurant. It was about an hour before close. The kids and I were the only customers there. Before we ordered our food we had to wait for the staff to explain to a very annoyed door dasher that the meal they were here for had already been picked up by someone else. As we ate dinner over the next half hour, a new door da…

It's fascinating and deeply unsettling that corporate policies now extend into people's daily lives, dictating their _literal_ physical movements through an always on tracking devices.

In this case, it goes even further. A faceless corporate entity not only monitors movements but also _automates_ performance scoring and should these metrics decline, another automated system steps in to close accounts, freeze funds, or punish the person in a different manner.

The sheer dystopian nature of it is hard to ignore..

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#122

I witnessed the dystopian future where humans are slaves to machines at my favorite local Mexican restaurant. It was about an hour before close. The kids and I were the only customers there. Before we ordered our food we had to wait for the staff to explain to a very annoyed door dasher that the meal they were here for had already been picked up by someone else. As we ate dinner over the next half hour, a new door da…

There was that pharmacy/market that had a wheeled robot patrolling the isles looking for spills, and the bot would call a human wagie to come mop it up.

You might like (or hate) to check out Eric Sadin's "Injunctive turn of Technology"

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#123

I witnessed the dystopian future where humans are slaves to machines at my favorite local Mexican restaurant. It was about an hour before close. The kids and I were the only customers there. Before we ordered our food we had to wait for the staff to explain to a very annoyed door dasher that the meal they were here for had already been picked up by someone else. As we ate dinner over the next half hour, a new door da…

if the same circumstance happend due to human clerical error by a local delivery shop would you consider it enslavement or just an honest mistake. I think theres a weird tribal alignment angle in your interpretation of the scenario. You consider computers and machines to be an other, and so in this circumstance youre mind is framing it as subjugation.

The problem isn't computers being considered an "other", but rather that other people are using computers to unilaterally scale up the implementation of their own negligence/biases/"policy" while also insulating themselves from corrective feedback or other repercussions. This makes poor results feel willful rather than being considered honest mistakes.

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#124

I witnessed the dystopian future where humans are slaves to machines at my favorite local Mexican restaurant. It was about an hour before close. The kids and I were the only customers there. Before we ordered our food we had to wait for the staff to explain to a very annoyed door dasher that the meal they were here for had already been picked up by someone else. As we ate dinner over the next half hour, a new door da…

It is not an app or delivery service that enslaves humans. Politicians and lobbists do. Working in delivery doesn’t have to be modern day slavery with no viable escape routes for many. All an app does is limiting interaction between parties involved, which may be stupid but not enslaving.

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the same circumstance happend due to human clerical error by a local delivery shop would you consider it enslavement or just an honest mistake. I think theres a weird tribal alignment angle in your interpretation of the scenario. You consider computers and machines to be an other, and so in this circumstance youre mind is framing it as subjugation.

The problem isn't computers being considered an "other", but rather that other people are using computers to unilaterally scale up the implementation of their own negligence/biases/"policy" while also insulating themselves from corrective feedback or other repercussions. This makes poor results feel willful rather than being considered honest mistakes.

The first part isnt really an assertion of fact but of perspective.

Consider if the delivery logistics tracking was executed by men working with paper in an office in the 1920's, and the policy was a managers. That is still "unilateral" as people who are not the manager dont have control over the policy, nor necessarily the capital to create a competitor policy.

Additionally, there is corrective feedback. This errant policy costs the delivery company reputation, sales, time, customers. In so far as the error signal isnt so small as to be buried under the noise floor, in which case it isnt a very serious issue, its repurcussions will be felt.

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#126
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer Skynet attacking us with robots wielding phased plasma rifles in the 40 watt range, instead of behavioral targeted AI bots bombarding you with fake news and dopamine addictive slop. This timeline is much worse, give me the T-800s instead.

Can a 40 watt plasma rifle actually do any damage ? (pre LED light bulbs generally clock in at 60-100 watts)

Lasers can do eye/optics/arson damage in this power range, see the vid. It boils down to focus and distance. But for conventional plasma rifles, not sure.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=iVrJUbeuG44

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#127

> But as it started consuming more and more data that it had produced itself, its reliability became close to none. It's exactly the opposite with LLMs. See the "model collapse" phenomenon ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y ). > We show that, over time, models start losing information about the true distribution, which first starts with tails disappearing, and learned behaviours converge over the ge…

The dangers of "model collapse" are wildly overstated. Sure, if you feed the unfiltered output of an LLM into a new LLM, inbreeding will eventually collapse the model, but if you filter the data with some grounding in reality, the results will get better and better. The best example is probably AlphaGo Zero, which was grounded with the rules of the game and did not even receive any supervised data. For programming, g…

Same for stable diffusion (being the same tech). I trained models purely on model outputs and didn’t see any horrific handwavy things everyone’s talked about. You can’t get more of what’s already there, obviously. But as a way to bake some prompt / control pic in, it works great.

I actually find/feel this easier to achieve the same result, because I can vary the output with dynamic prompting and seeds, models, etc, while keeping the desired concept intact, with a little picking. This helps to better distill it into a model. Natural imagery is usually too diverse and requires lots of effort to dissect into the parts you want.

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#128

Even the dumbest of animals knows not to shit where it eats. Not humans though! We are dumb as a bag of rocks in groups larger than about 3.

It’s not us, but some of us. One or two is enough to establish a hierarchy of acute incentives, and suddenly it starts working as if everyone was a mf’n bastard.

Our last hope is genetic engineering, but for now I’d bet on just deleting the bad apples preventively rather than chasing moral ideals that never work. Imagine all people in the world clear the brain fog and suddenly realize who their real enemy is and what to do with them.

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#129
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this were set in Japan as you propose, and we substituted “onigiri stall” or “izakaya” for “Mexican restaurant,” would that affect the substance of the gp’s observation? To my mind, when gp said “Mexican restaurant,” that conjured a familiar image of a particular type of informal, moderately sized, sit-in-and-delivery kind of establishment that’s probably a small business rather than managed as a corporate chain.…

Maybe you are correct in that the mexican restraunt conjures up images of typical restraunt. I do think there is associative bleed. I think thoughts do not follow formal logic and words function as embeddings. My suspicion is the word "slave" in english has other encodings in it that arent strictly the general definition of slave, and that the high magnitude of those signals within the slave embedding will ellicit un…

> However it isnt framed with the term slavery. That seems to be a western fetish, and its due to the relationship the US has to slavery

I think “slavery” has much higher salience in the US than in the Western world in general. How many other nations fought a civil war over the topic?

Re: Skynet won and destroyed humanity

#130

I witnessed the dystopian future where humans are slaves to machines at my favorite local Mexican restaurant. It was about an hour before close. The kids and I were the only customers there. Before we ordered our food we had to wait for the staff to explain to a very annoyed door dasher that the meal they were here for had already been picked up by someone else. As we ate dinner over the next half hour, a new door da…

If it was japanese workers in japan at a japanese store you wouldnt see it as slavery. It would be just a funny bug that would needs fixing. There is probably a racial component to your perception that doesnt need to be there.

I didnt read that at all, could you be at risk of projecting here?
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