401–410 of 641 posts
Had a hard time finishing. It's a mix of fantasy, wrong facts, American imperialism, and extrapolating what happened in the last years (or even just reusing the timeline).
Much has been made in its article about autonomous agents ability to do research via browsing the web - the web is 90% garbage by weight (including articles on certain specialist topics). And it shows. When I used GPT's deep research to research the topic, it generated a shallow and largely incorrect summary of the issue, owning mostly to its inability to find quality material, instead it ended up going for places li…
Sturgeon's law : "Ninety percent of everything is crap"
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> and probably revolution I theorise that revolution would be near-impossible in post-AGI world. If people consider where power comes from it's relatively obvious that people will likely suffer and die on mass if we ever create AGI. Historically the general public have held the vast majority of power in society. 100+ years ago this would have been physical power – the state has to keep you happy or the public will co…
> In this world people become more like pests. They offer no economic value yet demand that AGI owners (wherever publicly or privately owned) share resources with them. If people revolted any AGI owner would be far better off just deploying a bioweapon to humanely kill the protestors rather than sharing resources with them. This is a very doomer take. The threats are real, and I'm certain some people feel this way, b…
Technology changes things though. Things aren't "the same as it ever was". The Napoleonic wars killed 6.5 million people with muskets and cannons. The total warfare of WWII killed 70 to 85 million people with tanks, turboprop bombers, aircraft carriers, and 36 kilotons TNT of Atomic bombs, among other weaponry.
Total war today includes modern thermonuclear weapons. In 60 seconds, just one Ohio class submarine can launch 80 independent warheads, totaling over 36 megatons of TNT. That is over 20 times more than all explosives, used by all sides, for all of WWII, including both Atomic bombs.
AGI is a leap forward in power equivalent to what thermonuclear bombs are to warfare. Humans have been trying to destroy each other for all of time but we can only have one nuclear war, and it is likely we can only have one AGI revolt.
It’s good science fiction, I’ll give it that. I think getting lost in the weeds over technicalities ignores the crux of the narrative: even if this doesn’t lead to AGI, at the very least it’s likely the final “warning shot” we’ll get before it’s suddenly and irreversibly here. The problems it raises - alignment, geopolitics, lack of societal safeguards - are all real, and happening now (just replace “AGI” with “corpo…
Can you point to the data that suggests these evil corporations are ruining the planet? Carbon emissions are down in every western country since 1990s. Not down per-capita, but down in absolute terms. And this holds even when adjusting for trade (i.e. we're not shipping our dirty work to foreign countries and trading with them). And this isn't because of some regulation or benevolence. It's a market system that says you should try to produce things at the lowest cost and carbon usage is usually associated with a cost. Get rid of costs, get rid of carbon.
Other measures for Western countries suggests the water is safer and overall environmental deaths have decreased considerably.
The rise in carbon emissions is due to Chine and India. Are you talking about evil Chinese and Indians corporations?
In the form of polluting the commons to such an extent that the true consequences wont hit us for decades?
Maybe we should learn from last time?
This is where all AI doom predictions break down. Imagining the motivations of a super-intelligence with our tiny minds is by definition impossible. We just come up with these pathetic guesses, utopias or doomsdays - depending on the mood we are in.
ACT post where Scott Alexander provides some additional info: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-ai-2027 . Manifold currently predicts 30%: https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/ai-2027-reports-predictio...
hah!
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Will people finally wake up that the AGI X-Risk people have been right and we’re rapidly approaching a really fucking big deal? This forum has been so behind for too long. Sama has been saying this a decade now: “Development of Superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity” 2015 https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 Hinton, Ilya, Dario Amodei,…
And why are Altman's words worth anything? Is he some sort of great thinker? Or a leading AI researcher, perhaps? No. Altman is in his current position because he's highly effective at consolidating power and has friends in high places. That's it. Everything he says can be seen as marketing for the next power grab.
In general it's worth weighting the opinions of people who are leaders in a field, about that field, over people who know little about it.
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Will people finally wake up that the AGI X-Risk people have been right and we’re rapidly approaching a really fucking big deal? This forum has been so behind for too long. Sama has been saying this a decade now: “Development of Superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity” 2015 https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 Hinton, Ilya, Dario Amodei,…
It's not something you need to worry about. If we get the Singularity, it's overwhelmingly likely Jesus will return concurrently.
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Whatever the future is, it is not American, not the United States. The US's cultural individualism has been Capitalistically weaponized, and the educational foundation to take the country forward is not there. The US is kaput, and we are merely observing the ugly demise. The future is Asia, with all of western culture going down. Yes, it is not pretty, The failed experiment of American self rule.
I agree but see it as less dire. All of western culture is not ending; it will be absorbed into a more Asia-dominated culture in much he was Asian culture was subsumed into western for the past couple of hundred years. And if Asian culture is better educated and more capable of progress, that’s a good thing. Certainly the US has announced loud and clear that this is the end of the line for us.
Was Asian culture dominated by the west to any significant degree? Perhaps in countries like India where the legal and parliamentary system installed by the British remained intact for a long time post-independence.
Elsewhere in East and Southeast Asia, the legal systems, education, cultural traditions, and economic philosophies have been very different from the "west", i.e. post-WWII US and Western Europe.
The biggest sign of this is how they developed their own information networks, infrastructure and consumer networking devices. Europe had many of these regional champions themselves (Phillips, Nokia, Ericsson, etc) but now outside of telecom infrastructure, Europe is largely reliant on American hardware and software.