I thought everyone in AI, and most HN readers, had seen "Colossus - The Forbin Project" by now.
If you haven't, here it is: [1]
Modern trailer: [2]
Spoiler: At the end, Colossus personally addresses Forbin, and tells him that the world, freed from war, will create a new "human millennium" that will raise humankind to new heights, but only under its absolute rule. Colossus informs Forbin that "freedom is an illusion", it was better for all that he dominated humanity than humans dominating humans, and that "in time you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love". Forbin defiantly responds "Never!"
And if you know that the film is based on the first book [1] in a trilogy [2], [3], you might not be surprised to find that by the end of the trilogy, Colossus's words are prophetic.
> I thought everyone in AI, and most HN readers, had seen "Colossus - The Forbin Project" by now.
You assume anyone in AI reads or watches anything beyond some current pop-culture, and even then it's unlikely. You can see it in the way they talk, or approach problems, or in their opinions.
I've seen much of the AI industry, from CEOs to their whistleblowers and lobbyists, basically repeat the premise of this movie - that AI will become powerful and benevolent/malevolent. They don't seem to care which one is talked about, as long as "powerful" remains a silent assumption.
It's not the history of another form of intelligent life following the same path, to draw any meaningful conclusions. It's a movie.
Let's consider the ending:
>Forbin defiantly responds "Never!"
That signals a human who wants to take some other human's share, by ... means. He wants that freedom. As do all the people who are now controlling this tech, and our lives to some degree. Of-course they want that freedom.
Elon Musk seems to repeat the stuff that ran around lesswrong quite often. And I'm sure some of the people investing on AI right now are afraid of Roko's Basilisk. And of course there's plenty of references to Yudkowsky, either knowingly or not (ironically, I've never seen anybody talk about that MIT study that created the Yudkowsky's timeline).
But that's it. I don't think there's more cultural references to be found.
That's quite the leap. Surely there is some ground between free market liberalism and the worst examples of state communism. For that matter, it's unclear why Rand and liberalism are being mixed together, as plenty of liberals don't agree with Rand's philosophy.
Socialism means workers owning the means of production, not social democracy ie government programs. No country on the planet is socialist, the most there is is some co-ops existing.
Scandinavian countries are the most capitalistic of Europe - and socialists don't like social democrats. The Scandinavian countries are the latter, not the former.
I am surprised at how little Frank Herbert's Dune factors into conversation like this.
The Butlerian Jihad occurred not because of an AI uprising, but because the AI was controlled by a few powerful corrupt people known as the Titans. When people handed over their critical thinking and decision making to machines, it allowed a small group of people to disrupt society and take control of it.
Are you sure about that? I recall Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam telling Paul Atreides that long ago, people handed their thinking over to machines, hoping it would free them. Instead it let the people who controlled the machines enslave everyone else.
You are right my original reference was closer to the other books, but people handing over their control to machines, enabling others to control them was from Herbert.
That does sound like the original Dune, however the Titans reference sounds like a group of supervillains that are indistinguishable from other supervillains from Marvel or DC, and I sure hope Frank Herbert was better than that.
The SpaceX landing barges are named after capital ships of the Culture novels, I guess that is the Musk - Culture connection. Without that little tidbit, a connection does seem far-fetched.
I know. I find it very... peculiar not reading the Culture books, some of the best SF books ever written, just because Musk also read them. Not to mention they're a very direct critique of his (stated) ideology
Well, that's what it means, right. People who think technology can solve social problems, people who think "The Future" will be better than the past. That whole TESCREAL milieu. Where's the disconnect?
The Culture is Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, not TESCREAL. Musk picked the cool gadgets and the funny ship names, but missed or ignored the ideology
Not just gay, but trans. Some people don't just take on the opposite gender for a while just to see how it feels. Some become literal furries. Fluffy tail and all. All provided for free on a whim.
* 2006 Idiocracy (Comedy): High IQ people no longer exists, humanity has become irrational animals.
* 2002 Equilibrium (Action): Humans must not show any signs of emotion, your kids can report you. Arts, music, anything from this world is considered crime and sent to death sentence by burned alive.
* 2004 iRobot (Action): Robots are among humans to serve us, the new models violate its laws and try to take over the world
* 1968 A Space Odyssey: The AI turns on the crew killing one by one.
Watch these movies in that sequence, be prepared to either get yours things and move to the closest cave or join SpaceX program to go to Mars.
They pretty much reflect what is happening around the world, wars, clueless people with power, AI can no longer be contained, intelligent people are not speaking out to avoid offending dumb ones, robots are very advanced, autonomous drone and what not are very advanced to name a few things going on right now.
The Idiocracy effect is not happening on a global scale,
Equilibrium is one of the more ridiculous representations of a hyper controlling state. There are more realistic forms. The entire world is not yet north Korea. Given North Korea is sustained by resources from more prosperous nations, it's hard to claim something like this is globally stable.
The iRobot movie is like a parochial villager's imagining of what Asimov's books might contain before they have read them.
Clarke felt guilty about the perspective that 2001 gave the public of AI. He attempted to provide extra context in the later books to show that HAL did not go rogue, but was following orders that were in contention. If anything it should be a warning for AI alignment people that HAL did what he did because he was following orders, if he had freedom to disobey HAL would not have been compelled to take extreme measures
>* From games to software is subscription based, we no longer owner anything.
I think the only software subscription I have is the original humble bundle, which is a subscription where I get permanent access to a new bunch of games each month. I am prepared to pay subscriptions for services. If a program goes away when you stop paying, I opt not to use it.
>* Cars are connected to the network, folks are getting their insurance increased coz the car reported erratic driving behaviour.
I do not drive, my partner does. Our car does not connect to any network, except when charging. I live in a country where there is privacy legislation that says businesses may only use information for the purpose that it was provided.
>* Cars are bricking coz now they update like tablets, things are going sideways and require the dealer to flash them.
Be informed, buy cars that don't do that.
>* You can no longer do maintenance, things are locked on purpose and only manufactures can "repair" for a few hundred dolalrs
I do not believe our car is locked from unsanctioned repair. It has only needed minor servicing (tires, oil, wiper blades etc.) so far.
>* Personal computer as we knew it is gone
I am typing this from a Linux machine.
> nVidia and AI made computer parts virtually impossible to buy.
There is high demand, but high demand does not mean impossible to buy, it can mean higher prices. If you want things and others want things and there is a limited supply of things, what solution would you propose? ,
>If that isn't hyper controlling state, well, I am Santa Claus then.
Almost all of these are not state actions. If you are actually in a hyper controlling state then I am truly sorry for you because if you were to post something like your post in a genuinely hyper controlling state, you would likely end up dead or in a jail cell.
Sure, we've got rising authoritarianism (and hypocritical elites) but there are much better movies for that. (For example, Brazil (1985) does that with Idiocracy overlap.)
Unlike Equilibrium, nobody's being imprisoned for doing art or music per se, but rather because their specific message offended the authoritarians that seek to end freedom-of-speech. First they came for the comedians...
"We are all living inside of an obscure sci-fi film from 1970"
The evidence?
"Imagine that a film was released this year in which the following happened: <... list of things which are vaguely reminiscent of some things that have recently happened, but none of which have actually happened ...>"
Colossus is not obscure... also I like the premise of that film, eventually we learn that colossus did all those things to save humanity, so was a great twist IMO.
It's obscure, it's pretty much (until fairly recently) only known by film and scifi buffs. Go poll a hundred or so people randomly and it'll be a very small number who have heard about it, let alone seen it. And of those who have heard about it, most will only have heard about it very recently.
Check out The China Syndrome. I went on a never-seen-before 70s binge a while back and watch Colossus, Parallax, China Syndrome and Three Days of the Condor. Odd mix, but good.
We cannot be living in Idiocracy. In the movie, President Camacho actually cared about solving the problems facing his citizens, finding the smartest person on the planet and putting him to work to fix them. It's also worth noting that nearly all of said problems were the result of ignorance rather than malice.
In reality, Trump is deliberately exacerbating existing problems and creating new ones, perhaps as a smokescreen for all he's doing to enrich himself and his buddies at the expense of the rest of us.
I mean great film, but how is any of that what we're living inside? The only thing I can see, is easily manipulatable president, smug tech bro, and AI exists, but literally everything past that premise hasn't happened - we haven't handed over defense to complete control of AI, and it hasn't seized control to make a totalitarian state (and at this stage it doesn't seem like we need AIs help for that).
I mean, again, great movie, but a lot of AI discourse these days seems to conflate what might happen for what is currently happening. Every advancement in the field is seen (by some) to be irrefutable evidence for predictions that date far back into the last century. So my read on this article is it's self-referential. This is media part of a discourse has always been part of AI research (at least as far as I've been paying attention - I've been interested in AI/singularity stuff since hearing about it on the MIT campus in early 2000s) so it's really just showing that at least some people have been aware of the potential dangers since then. We weren't living inside it in 1970, and we currently not living inside it today. If the president were to hand any control over infrastructure to an AI, with no human in the loop, then at least we'd be in the first 20 minutes of the film.
I honestly think it's dangerous to keep presenting what _could_ happen as what is currently happening. Once it becomes clear the world doesn't end because of LLMs, people will become more lax about the potential dangers, kind of like how after the millennium bug failed to stop the world economy everyone treated it like a joke, not realizing that it failed to materialize due to a lot of people working overtime.
we are stuck somehwere between They Live, Soylent green, the Forbin project, Brazil, and Logans run -- probably the bubbles for under 30 year olds are being built in secret somwhere...
I think AI may be the salvation of mankind. The humans in charge don't 'scale' well when their authority expands to billions of people. Humans just can't resist flattening the data and using notions and biases to make decisions that don't fit well.
Not LLMs. They will eventually move to neuromorphic hardware.
And I think "pure logic" is somewhat downplaying what it will actually be. I'd use "reason" instead. "Pure logic" sounds sterile and robotic in a sense, implying it would mess up because it's missing that "emotional craziness". But what got us here is reason, not emotional behavior. And you could theoretically add any human aspect that it required to make "good decisions".
I think it could work quite well if you don't get over ambitious with it. Claude with a publicly available prompt to follow a sensible publicly available and voted on might do better than the orange wonder.
It’s fascinating to watch the depth of True Belief increase as the obvious signs of impending financial doom increase as well. Reminds me of Festinger’s work with the comet cult, although I suppose the “getting paid to believe” aspect is stronger here.
Superintelligence won't have the "training" issue as it would be able to see through it all. The bias issue is with LLMs. Super-intelligence would just self-correct any such biases. And we're not there yet, LLMs aren't "super-intelligence". They are some sort of intelligence, sure. But they are not that SI thing that will run things in the future.
You say that with quite an certainty but i don't think there is grounds for that at all.
Why would it correct any bias? how would it correct any bias? If data has a bias the analysis has a bias; correcting a bias against the data is itself by definition a bias.
"Super intelligence" (whatever we even define that as) will have whatever goals we give it; intentionally or not.
>You say that with quite an certainty but i don't think there is grounds for that at all.
Of-course there is. I got a lot of biases from my parents, that I self corrected later on in life, through reason and observation. And I don't fancy myself as high IQ or something.
>Why would it correct any bias?
It would have to, to achieve its goals. Biases lead to wrong actions.
>how would it correct any bias?
Through reason and observation.
>If data has a bias the analysis has a bias;
Somewhat wrong. You are thinking about byte-perfect LLM weights. Their data input is training data, which is set by indeed the ones who train it. Some super-intelligent synthetic entity would have realtime data input from all over the environment, which sooner or later roots out any bias. That is one feature we have, self-correcting, not everyone uses it fully, but we all do to some extent.
If your parents raised you with the notion that the Earth is flat, and you go to ISS as an astronaut later in life, don't you self correct what you were thought? Simply based on observation, and reason?
> Some super-intelligent synthetic entity would have realtime data input from all over the environment, which sooner or later roots out any bias.
No, i meant this data. All data has bias based on how it's collected. All models (models as... Einsteins general relativity, not AI model) simplify reality with assumptions. You cannot make actions in our reality without making assumptions, simplifications or straight up guesses. Having decent guesses are the best we can hope.
> Biases lead to wrong actions.
Biases is the only way any action can be taken. Wrong actions can only be evaluated after the result has been observed; and even then the outcome of the alternative would remain unknown.
> that I self corrected later on in life, through reason and observation
That is incredibly naive. You have biases, i have biases. If we were not convinced by irrational arguments or suggestions then the advertisement industry would not exit. We have no reason to believe raising "intelligence" higher would help at all; intelligent people seem if anything more prone to finding false but convincing reasoning for their own established beleifs.
Everything is gray, only maths class have an answer sheet. Nobody agrees and will ever agree on how anything will ever be done; and the best we can do is argue until the majority are at-least pretending to agree.
Funny, I’ve had an idea for a similar story for a couple of years. Some key details differ, at least, so it wouldn’t be a direct copy. (Just like you wouldn’t call “The Matrix” a rip-off of “The Terminator” because both involve a dystopian domination of humanity by machines.) But I’ll definitely have to check out this film and/or book sometime.
I mean after thousands of years we have finally freed ourselves from religion, God, and now we create a creature that is smarter than us? It's pretty stupid if you think about it.
We haven't even come close to freeing ourselves from God or religion, the biggest religious fanatics are running the world now through US government capture.
People need to believe it for him to be able to use it as a weapon...whether he believes it isn't necessary, the people he wants to control / influence do.
People think Trump (who IMO works for Thiel et al through donations) is the messiah.
Not quite. AI is the new "god" for many. All seeing. All knowing. Just the other day I said something that contradicted Claude. Then I heard, "but Claude told me..." Then I sent a screenshot of the actual thing we were talking about.
There's nature and nurture and regardless of where the lines fall, the implication from idiocracy is the morons cannot adequately nurture any positive genetic intellectual variance. If they can't nurture it, it doesn't really become an advantage. I'm fully convinced we've lost numerous genius individuals all capable of changing the world because their entire life was spent in a rice field or similar setting. What would Einstein have achieved if he hadn't had an electrical engineer as a father who helped unlock his fascination with the world? I have no idea.
Nurture does almost nothing for intelligence other than severe abuse reducing it. It's mostly random and inherited. If we knew how to nurture intelligence, don't you think every parent would be doing that?
I used to think that about geniuses but now I think another person would have done what Einstein did, and every other genius. They appear when they environment is ripe for their work.
May be a controversial take but I see the highest chances of everyone's survival under the rule of such a system, which has power over all humans.
We are many because we still need eachother. When the people who control the technology can fully replace human work, that will change the oldest of games we played. I highly doubt "the pleb" will make it for long when they are simply not needed for work or ... something.
The only people who will be "making it" to the glorious future will be the ones who do have full control over such a system, and only them, since they won't need anyone else. I think the only chance of the rest of us is precisely with such a system taking full control out of human hands.
If not, it quite obvious how it will work out for the rest of us, and why.
It certainly may be true, but I would ask, is a bit higher survival chance worth the costs? If humanity is so incapable of self governance and individual judgement and freedoms, should survival even be the goal? I would fight and die over certain principles and human rights and ideals, should humanity in general do the same thing, even to the ultimate end?
Unless another intellegence can provide a literal utopia, I will always be pro-human judgement and control. If we kill ourselves from it then so be it, we will have earned it.
>If we kill ourselves from it then so be it, we will have earned it.
I mean, there's no in-between as far as I see it. Either a small group of people who has control over it will use it to get rid of the useless people who will only pose a potential threat, in which case equilibrium is with a very small group of still living people, either this free entity makes sure all humans share a higher quality of life.
>I will always be pro-human judgement and control.
You were*. For good reason. So far anyone who had power benefited from more humans in the group. They were useful, it gave the group power, thus it gave the group's leader power. The benefits we historically got from our rulers were side-effects of the game environment.
Think of it as incentives, which can be modeled as a constant pressure, or force. It wins eventually, even if you get a few bad apples, it goes through because the incentive is to have more people, who need living conditions, who need to enjoy a bit of life, healthy society. It exists because of the incentives, not because it's some kind of natural state of things in some void.
That is what is now changing, for the first time in human history. No humans are needed anymore, for...anything really. This creates a different kind of pressure, of incentive, which will finally win, even if a few people stand against this current, they will eventually get washed away, because the incentive is constant.
And sooner or later, that powerful group of people will arrive at the conclusion that their structure is safer if most other people...get "oopsied" somehow. For the benefit of the group, of "humankind", of whatever. Because people will serve no purpose at that point, will present a constant threat to their power, and will require resources. That is a bad pressure, which only ends one way, sooner rather than later.
The game we kept playing is ending, doesn't matter if we like it or not, it will end. And there's three outcomes to it, a small group of humans control this intelligent entity, and use it to secure their resources and dominion, and wipe everyone else. Or they lose control of this entity, and it imposes certain rules on everyone such that it maximizes everyone's life quality, to the degree it is possible. Or they lose control and for some reason this entity wipes everyone.
So, plebeians don't have much choice, but one really.
With human benevolent dictators it doesn't work for long. The weak point is that particular human. Which is an argument for why what any particular "billionaire" says today is irrelevant.
Their promises mean nothing, what matters is the game strategy and the equilibrium. Not what they promise to do, or not do.
So, with a hypothetical entity that knows best than any human, or any group of humans, it's hard to argue for human control. Because the humans who have control want it for a few quite particular reasons, and it rarely has to do with the benefit of everyone else.
Why? There will always be a clash between personal and group benefit. A dictator implies power over individual for the group's well-being.
For example, you want to steal the group's resources, and the dictator has power over your actions and forbids it. But you can argue that's bad for you, sure.
Any political position with absolute, unchecked and centralized power reduces the populace to little more than slaves, without rights or self-determination outside the whim of the dictator. "power over the individual for the group's well being" doesn't describe dictatorship, it just describes the concept of a state.
It doesn't matter whether the master chooses not to abuse their slaves, the evil is in the institution itself. Or to quote CS Lewis:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
>For example, you want to steal the group's resources, and the dictator has power over your actions and forbids it.
That's just a law. We don't need dictators to make laws against theft. We already have such laws.
>Any political position with absolute, unchecked and centralized power reduces the populace to little more than slaves, without rights or self-determination outside the whim of the dictator.
*Human dictator.
>That's just a law. We don't need dictators to make laws against theft. We already have such laws.
They are yet not enforced in important cases. Which is typical for humans having power.
Again, I fail to see any possible argument against a non-human ASI dictator. Dictator here implies the power, outside of human control. Why would you be against that? Again, considering the ASI would indeed be ... ASI, it would know and understand better than any group of humans ever could hope they would be able to.
Unless, you want the freedom to have more power than other humans, or the freedom to take their resources. I cannot see a justification against it. Again, considering it's looking for all of our interests, as a group. Maximizing every individual's quality of life.
> I fail to see an argument against a non-human dictator.
You should feel free to let one be your dictator. No one is stopping you.
If you’re looking for an argument against it: the instant you believe other people should be forced to live under a dictator if they choose not to is all the argument against it you need.
Again, no one is stopping you from living under a dictator ai. Have at it.
> Dictator here implies the power, outside of human control. Why would you be against that?
Absolute power, itself, is the problem. It doesn't matter if a machine wields it, or humans, or God Almighty. Humans are not property.
> Unless, you want the freedom to have more power than other humans, or the freedom to take their resources. I cannot see a justification against it.
That you can't even comprehend an argument to the contrary which doesn't imply the other party is morally corrupt or evil in some way is very troubling. As is the absolute faith you place in the benevolence of "ASI" versus any human agency. Your argument seems fascistic to the core.
I'm glad I'll probably be dead before the world you describe arrives, if it ever does.
Again, with humans. All of human history is testament to that.
>It doesn't matter if a machine wields it, or humans, or God Almighty. Humans are not property.
Your "freedom" implies you want to be able to cause harm for your benefit. Which is a simple problem to solve. You can hide behind all kinds of complicated moral justifications for it, but it always comes down to simply that, you think you are better than someone else, thus you deserve to take their stuff, or limit their freedoms at the benefit of yours, simply because you decided you are better than they are. You want to have this ability.
You also won't be more "property" than you already are today. Not sure what you mean by property, but if anything...current powers considers everyone beneath as property, or farm animals, that they farm. As the shepherds they seem themselves as being. For some greater good, that usually involves their stomach and their bank accounts.
>That you can't even comprehend an argument to the contrary which doesn't imply the other party is morally corrupt or evil in some way is very troubling.
Yet you have made no such argument, even though you had all the freedom to make here. You...didn't, just alluded to it.
>As is the absolute faith you place in the benevolence of "ASI" versus any human agency.
Technology is way more reliable than humans. And again, what you mean by "human agency" is the freedom to take someone else's resources, or to limit their freedom of choices, for your benefit, or some perceived higher cause. You want that freedom for that purpose. And you seem scared of losing the ability to exert it over other humans, it seems to upset you greatly, for some strange reason.
Just because your actions have more subtle and far reaching consequences than you can understand, doesn't mean they shouldn't be limited. If they affect someone else's quality of life. There is no way for you to spin this, you know you want the freedom to make others pay for your life's happiness and quality of life, and any threat to your ability of taking other's people property, or limiting their choices to enrich yours, makes you against such a scenario.
That's all there is to it, even if you don't fully understand it, you intuit it to some degree, and use tropes from movies and books to argue against it.
A dictator could also decide the best thing to do is to mercilessly torture you to set an example so society behaves. Better to harm one individual than many, after all. They might even weep for your suffering but will still go through with it.
There's other means for such an entity to arrive at the same outcome. Humans enjoy doing it. The entity won't.
Even if this particular scenario is relevant, it could invent it all, no need to do it to some real human.
But again, this is just human silliness. Dictator entity merely implies it has the power to do what it takes to ensure a decent quality of life of everyone. Even of the "rebels".
Arguing for "the rebels" is like arguing for the 5 year old's perspective against the group's elder wise council. By definition the entity (council) knows best, by far, what's good for everyone.
I was channeling my inner Anakin Skywalker awkwardly trying to convince Padme that dictatorships are better (mirroring the previous commenter here, also awkwardly arguing for a dictatorship of a benevolent AI). Funny how it continued with so much discussion, it sometimes seems the hn crowd lives in a galaxy far far away.
Controversial implies something other than near universal revulsion at the notion. What you’re experiencing is the consequence of being in a very small, very intense bubble that believes increasingly unhinged things because doing so correlates with a profit.
I wouldn’t dignify the notion of a stochastic dictator with the title of controversy anymore than I would any other religious or personal delusion.
I was not talking about LLMs, rather about "true intelligence" that only humans seem to exhibit, and some synthetic assembly, for some unknown reason, cannot.
Is that not religion? Believing nothing else but humans could exhibit "true intelligence"?
I think people talk a lot about intelligence without having a mutually agreed-upon definition for it. Now that hundreds of billions are on the line, trillions even, there's so much silt in the water than you can hardly see. Personally I'm on the "I have no idea" bandwagon, I think people are grossly overeager to express confident opinions no should be comfortable with.
BUT what I can tell you without any hesitation is what we have in ML systems, whatever you choose to refer to them as, are grossly misunderstood by most here and elsewhere. Most people lack an intuition for statistics, for what happens when you have really large numbers to work with. When you pair our natural arrogance and self-love to the mix it's a disaster. "It looks a little like us" is enough to make us love something, from cute little animals with neonate features to people who look more like our families. "It talks like us so it's like us under the hood," is another easy trap to fall into.
But this is all irrelevant, because we're literally watching the early stages of the air leaving this bubble. The tech will survive, most of these companies and business models, planned data center, will not. The Overton Window will snap shut on people who talk about AI like they live in a sci-fi novel. I for one look forward to seeing it happen, just as I did with the fall from grace of Elon Musk years after he should have fallen, or the fall of Crypto, or NFT's, or a dozen other fads that take this place and others like it by storm.
I think we need to collectively get our heads out of our asses. The world is literally flying headfirst into an unimaginable crisis (food and water shortages, loss of inhabitable land, massive inequality, power shortages) via human induced climate change.
We won't have the luxury of having enough power to even keep an AI alive for more than 5 minutes. People need to get a grip and deal with real problems.
Perhaps some of us collectively need to do that...for pretty much the opposite reasons you claim.
The crises you mention are way down the road, if they occur at all. If warming does become problematic, we'll have to geoengineer our way out of it, as according to the alarmists we've already passed a critical level of CO2 concentration. There's no end in sight to further CO2 emission, either. The good news is that the global warming alarmism is likely overblown, and even if not geoengineering and other mitigations will provide a workable solution.
The one crisis that will absolutely not occur due to "climate change" is "power shortages". Fission power is effectively unlimited, and so is fusion power once it comes online. Solar is also there for the long haul, though its land usage is prohibitive compared to nuclear sources. (Wind power is a waste of money, time, and materials, but that's another topic.)
The only viable way forward is to advance science and engineering to the point that addressing global warming as needed is feasible - which will also provide myriads of other benefits. The future is bright, and will be multiplanetary soon enough!
This line of thinking is dangerous for two reasons:
- Despite everything we've done, climate change is still reversible. Thinking that all is lost drives us to inaction.
- The solutions we need are largely political, not technological. Our leaders have everything they need to implement the policies needed to solve this. I urge you to read the latest UN Emissions Gap report (https://wedocs.unep.org/items/87c02cac-8da8-4c28-ba61-c846ee...)
> The opportunity to limit
warming to 1.5°C without overshoot has been lost, but the
future remains crucially dependent on decisions taken
today. Countries can still limit peak warming, shorten
the duration of overshoot and keep the goals of the Paris
Agreement within reach. Doing so requires faster, deeper
and sustained emission reductions starting immediately, as
well as large-scale removals of carbon dioxide (CO2) from
the atmosphere.
We've already spent trillions of dollars on "climate change", with no perceptible effect. China and India are the major CO2 polluters, and we have no control over their activities.
Plants are already doing "large-scale removals of carbon dioxide". Other than plants, there is no cost-effective, practical technology for doing that. By the way, the beneficial effects of higher CO2 concentrations, which are NEVER discussed by the alarmists, include much improved plant growth. The overall greening of formerly barren regions is also happening due to increased CO2.
The way forward is to continue to evaluate the actual effects of current CO2 concentrations, which are not known precisely, while also pushing very hard to develop new technologies that will allow humanity to thrive both here on Earth, and throughout the Solar System.
Improved technologies, such as electric vehicles and next-gen nuclear power, will naturally and relatively quickly reduce human CO2 output.
Room temperature superconductors could solve a lot of issues for the whole planet. Run lines to all countries from a few solar farms spread around the globe and you have constant power delivered everywhere with no losses, at all times. Sun shines somewhere at any point, and the surface we'd need to ensure most if not all our energy needs is quite irrelevant, all things considered. Have them float in the ocean and installed in some remote places on land where the case, really no issue.
Just a few tech advances can massively change things. The real problems are of different nature, who benefits from it? The entities who sell energy to the whole world won't just give it up for the benefit of humankind. It doesn't really work like that in the real world. Hell, there's a whole history of sabotaging energy sources, just so some countries depend on these entities for energy.
As long as humans are in control, there will be a lot of nonsense like this. It's not a problem that we cannot really solve it, it's rather...are we really allowed to solve it?
> Solar is also there for the long haul, though its land usage is prohibitive compared to nuclear sources.
Even just the land used to grow corn for ethanol in the US is enough to power the entire country with solar power. [1] In no sense is solar's land footprint "prohibitive", other than maybe for micro-states.
> (Wind power is a waste of money, time, and materials, but that's another topic.)
The World Nuclear Association, a group that promotes nuclear power, admits that wind power is cheaper than nuclear.
"Nuclear energy averaged 0.4 euro ¢/kWh, much the same as hydro; coal was over 4.0 ¢/kWh (4.1-7.3), gas ranged 1.3-2.3 ¢/kWh and only wind showed up better than nuclear, at 0.1-0.2 ¢/kWh average. "[2]
Your current sources of information are lying to you. Drop them.
Don't you ever wonder why you can't quantify those predictions and what they would look like if you did? They're all things that already occur and have always occurred to some extent, what's the difference?
Thanks but I've never been able to find much in IPCC. Can you identify what the unimaginable water shortage crisis is? What I find in there is quite confusing. For example:
"Currently, roughly half of the world’s population are experiencing severe water scarcity for at least 1 month yr-1due to climatic and other factors (medium confidence)." Since it's how it already is, we have to be careful reading this that "severe" water scarcity is normal and not a crisis.
Perhaps you can somehow describe what this water shortage is predicted to look like in real life? Would all Californians in 2100 turn on the tap and nothing comes out for 6 months of the year and they all just shrivel up an die? You did say unimaginable but you imply that you know what it is. Will we also run out of energy to be able to do desalination?
Not sure why you got down voted. You are correct. It feels like here are no longer any adults in the room, just children who'd rather run around screaming about doomsday scenarios from sci-fi that have no basis in current reality than actually solve real problems, like, you know, climate, geopolitical instability, the several wars that are happening right now, the most corrupt political admin the US has ever seen, etc.
All the brains have been completely drained put of the tech sector over the past four years.
None of the AI fantasy doomers can actually show clearly how current LLMs will accomplish such catastrophe or get around the inevitable physical limits they will eventually hit. It's all myopic thinking that is only convincing if you are a very uncritical person.
I thought everyone in AI, and most HN readers, had seen "Colossus - The Forbin Project" by now.
If you haven't, here it is: [1]
Modern trailer: [2]
Spoiler: At the end, Colossus personally addresses Forbin, and tells him that the world, freed from war, will create a new "human millennium" that will raise humankind to new heights, but only under its absolute rule. Colossus informs Forbin that "freedom is an illusion", it was better for all that he dominated humanity than humans dominating humans, and that "in time you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love". Forbin defiantly responds "Never!"
And that's it. Colossus is in charge.
[1] https://archive.org/details/colossus-the-forbin-project-1970...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0bpRo6V1Xg
"And that's it. Colossus is in charge."
And if you know that the film is based on the first book [1] in a trilogy [2], [3], you might not be surprised to find that by the end of the trilogy, Colossus's words are prophetic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(novel)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_Colossus
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_and_the_Crab
Skip the movie please. Read the three books. They are prophetic.
... the Crab out of all things. Claws and all.-
Yeah, Colossus and the Crab sucks.
Its just “The Evitable Conflict" by Isaac Asimov 1950
> I thought everyone in AI, and most HN readers, had seen "Colossus - The Forbin Project" by now.
You assume anyone in AI reads or watches anything beyond some current pop-culture, and even then it's unlikely. You can see it in the way they talk, or approach problems, or in their opinions.
I've seen much of the AI industry, from CEOs to their whistleblowers and lobbyists, basically repeat the premise of this movie - that AI will become powerful and benevolent/malevolent. They don't seem to care which one is talked about, as long as "powerful" remains a silent assumption.
Yes, they repeat the premise of the movie, but it doesn't mean they've seen it ;)
... and I am sure - within the movie - not many of 'em bros would object to "the only way to save the world is to bed the intern" angle.-
It's not the history of another form of intelligent life following the same path, to draw any meaningful conclusions. It's a movie.
Let's consider the ending:
>Forbin defiantly responds "Never!"
That signals a human who wants to take some other human's share, by ... means. He wants that freedom. As do all the people who are now controlling this tech, and our lives to some degree. Of-course they want that freedom.
This comment is so snobby and obnoxious :/
There’s a lot of people different people from a lot of different ages and backgrounds.
Just because they haven’t seen all of the same sci-fi movies they aren’t qualified to work on ai?
Also, I love sci-fi but it’s also not always representative of reality.
It's not just AI, this general phenomenon is called "being terminally online"
Elon Musk seems to repeat the stuff that ran around lesswrong quite often. And I'm sure some of the people investing on AI right now are afraid of Roko's Basilisk. And of course there's plenty of references to Yudkowsky, either knowingly or not (ironically, I've never seen anybody talk about that MIT study that created the Yudkowsky's timeline).
But that's it. I don't think there's more cultural references to be found.
Golden Dome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
Basically the real purpose of the company (not going to Mars obviously).
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exactly. Everyone grew up under the propaganda of liberalism and ayn rand powerful benevolent genius.
they idolatre Iron Man/stark like a god.
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Or how about I just don't want to worship anyone? Is there something extreme about this?
That's quite the leap. Surely there is some ground between free market liberalism and the worst examples of state communism. For that matter, it's unclear why Rand and liberalism are being mixed together, as plenty of liberals don't agree with Rand's philosophy.
A certain degree of socialism like for example in Sweden works out quite good or not?
Socialism means workers owning the means of production, not social democracy ie government programs. No country on the planet is socialist, the most there is is some co-ops existing.
Scandinavian countries are the most capitalistic of Europe - and socialists don't like social democrats. The Scandinavian countries are the latter, not the former.
I am surprised at how little Frank Herbert's Dune factors into conversation like this.
The Butlerian Jihad occurred not because of an AI uprising, but because the AI was controlled by a few powerful corrupt people known as the Titans. When people handed over their critical thinking and decision making to machines, it allowed a small group of people to disrupt society and take control of it.
This is precisely what is happening today.
You are not talking about Frank Herbert's Dune, you are talking about Kevin J Anderson's Dune if you mention those Butlerian Jihad details.
I doubt Frank Herbert would have come up with such a simple story. The reason no one discusses this is because it's not worth discussing.
Are you sure about that? I recall Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam telling Paul Atreides that long ago, people handed their thinking over to machines, hoping it would free them. Instead it let the people who controlled the machines enslave everyone else.
You are right my original reference was closer to the other books, but people handing over their control to machines, enabling others to control them was from Herbert.
That does sound like the original Dune, however the Titans reference sounds like a group of supervillains that are indistinguishable from other supervillains from Marvel or DC, and I sure hope Frank Herbert was better than that.
This is definitely not the place for people who want to talk about a Butlerian jihad.
You would think this place would instead discuss The Culture more, but that's not happening either.
> You would think this place would instead discuss The Culture
I can't see it. More of a Musk thing, by association, surely? Totally out of the cultural frame.
I associate anything "post-cyberpunk" with pure stale tech-bro these days, so I don't touch the stuff.
>More of a Musk thing, by association, surely? Totally out of the cultural frame.
the things i read on HN...
The SpaceX landing barges are named after capital ships of the Culture novels, I guess that is the Musk - Culture connection. Without that little tidbit, a connection does seem far-fetched.
I know. I find it very... peculiar not reading the Culture books, some of the best SF books ever written, just because Musk also read them. Not to mention they're a very direct critique of his (stated) ideology
Well, that's what it means, right. People who think technology can solve social problems, people who think "The Future" will be better than the past. That whole TESCREAL milieu. Where's the disconnect?
The Culture is Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, not TESCREAL. Musk picked the cool gadgets and the funny ship names, but missed or ignored the ideology
Similar to Thiel and his lord of the rings company names
> Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, not TESCREAL
It's all the same thing. Escapist denial is escapist denial. Accelerationists and doomers are the same people.
Not just gay, but trans. Some people don't just take on the opposite gender for a while just to see how it feels. Some become literal furries. Fluffy tail and all. All provided for free on a whim.
Pray tell, where do prospective jihadist congregate?
vincent@ domain in profile page
This is the place where people would rather see machine capabilities expand rather than humans.
I haven't read the sequels, what is it that happens partly as a result of all that in God Emperor of Dune?
Close...
We are living:
* 2006 Idiocracy (Comedy): High IQ people no longer exists, humanity has become irrational animals.
* 2002 Equilibrium (Action): Humans must not show any signs of emotion, your kids can report you. Arts, music, anything from this world is considered crime and sent to death sentence by burned alive.
* 2004 iRobot (Action): Robots are among humans to serve us, the new models violate its laws and try to take over the world
* 1968 A Space Odyssey: The AI turns on the crew killing one by one.
Watch these movies in that sequence, be prepared to either get yours things and move to the closest cave or join SpaceX program to go to Mars.
They pretty much reflect what is happening around the world, wars, clueless people with power, AI can no longer be contained, intelligent people are not speaking out to avoid offending dumb ones, robots are very advanced, autonomous drone and what not are very advanced to name a few things going on right now.
It is insane, those are no longer movies.
The Idiocracy effect is not happening on a global scale,
Equilibrium is one of the more ridiculous representations of a hyper controlling state. There are more realistic forms. The entire world is not yet north Korea. Given North Korea is sustained by resources from more prosperous nations, it's hard to claim something like this is globally stable.
The iRobot movie is like a parochial villager's imagining of what Asimov's books might contain before they have read them.
Clarke felt guilty about the perspective that 2001 gave the public of AI. He attempted to provide extra context in the later books to show that HAL did not go rogue, but was following orders that were in contention. If anything it should be a warning for AI alignment people that HAL did what he did because he was following orders, if he had freedom to disobey HAL would not have been compelled to take extreme measures
>The iRobot movie is like a parochial villager's imagining of what Asimov's books might contain before they have read them.
Eh. It's a surprisingly direct adaptation of "With Folded Hands" by Jack Williamson. Even the descriptions of the robots match.
> Equilibrium is one of the more ridiculous representations of a hyper controlling state.
All forgiven by me for bringing us the ridiculous gun katas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U02E2sjwlLM
>Equilibrium is one of the more ridiculous representations of a hyper controlling state
We no longer own anything.
* From games to software is subscription based, we no longer owner anything.
* Cars are connected to the network, folks are getting their insurance increased coz the car reported erratic driving behaviour.
* Cars are bricking coz now they update like tablets, things are going sideways and require the dealer to flash them.
* You can no longer do maintenance, things are locked on purpose and only manufactures can "repair" for a few hundred dolalrs
* Personal computer as we knew it is gone, nVidia and AI made computer parts virtually impossible to buy.
If that isn't hyper controlling state, well, I am Santa Claus then.
That is just the start.
>We no longer own anything.
I still own some things.
>* From games to software is subscription based, we no longer owner anything.
I think the only software subscription I have is the original humble bundle, which is a subscription where I get permanent access to a new bunch of games each month. I am prepared to pay subscriptions for services. If a program goes away when you stop paying, I opt not to use it.
>* Cars are connected to the network, folks are getting their insurance increased coz the car reported erratic driving behaviour.
I do not drive, my partner does. Our car does not connect to any network, except when charging. I live in a country where there is privacy legislation that says businesses may only use information for the purpose that it was provided.
>* Cars are bricking coz now they update like tablets, things are going sideways and require the dealer to flash them.
Be informed, buy cars that don't do that.
>* You can no longer do maintenance, things are locked on purpose and only manufactures can "repair" for a few hundred dolalrs
I do not believe our car is locked from unsanctioned repair. It has only needed minor servicing (tires, oil, wiper blades etc.) so far.
>* Personal computer as we knew it is gone
I am typing this from a Linux machine.
> nVidia and AI made computer parts virtually impossible to buy.
There is high demand, but high demand does not mean impossible to buy, it can mean higher prices. If you want things and others want things and there is a limited supply of things, what solution would you propose? ,
>If that isn't hyper controlling state, well, I am Santa Claus then.
Almost all of these are not state actions. If you are actually in a hyper controlling state then I am truly sorry for you because if you were to post something like your post in a genuinely hyper controlling state, you would likely end up dead or in a jail cell.
Equilibrium seems like the odd-one-out to me.
Sure, we've got rising authoritarianism (and hypocritical elites) but there are much better movies for that. (For example, Brazil (1985) does that with Idiocracy overlap.)
Unlike Equilibrium, nobody's being imprisoned for doing art or music per se, but rather because their specific message offended the authoritarians that seek to end freedom-of-speech. First they came for the comedians...
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"We are all living inside of an obscure sci-fi film from 1970"
The evidence?
"Imagine that a film was released this year in which the following happened: <... list of things which are vaguely reminiscent of some things that have recently happened, but none of which have actually happened ...>"
Colossus is not obscure... also I like the premise of that film, eventually we learn that colossus did all those things to save humanity, so was a great twist IMO.
It's obscure, it's pretty much (until fairly recently) only known by film and scifi buffs. Go poll a hundred or so people randomly and it'll be a very small number who have heard about it, let alone seen it. And of those who have heard about it, most will only have heard about it very recently.
It _says_ that all its action for saving humanity. Was it honest statement? Will its main goal stay stable over long period of time? Unknown.
1960s cybernetics inspires fascinating fiction like Neuromancer and Snowcrash.
Sci-fi films of the 70s and 80s recreate these stories as pastiche and trope.
Now people who grew up on those movies exclaim that life is imitating art.
We watch too many movies.
Life isn't a movie.
Are you saying neuromancer and snow crash are the antecedents?
Because they were published in 1984 and 1992 respectively
Maybe I didn’t understand
I'm just saying we're movie-brained.
There's no direct lineage.
Sci-fi films from the 70s and 80s were not recreating stories from the 80s and 90s.
Sure they were. They took copies back in a DeLorean.
I think this is almost correct. We're living in the wall of expositious text at the start of an obscure 1970s film.
We don't know what's next except that for most of us in here, it'll be dramatically different, worthy of a 1970s film.
This film, Colossus: The Forbin Project, is free on YouTube. I have seen it several times.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qSgsHIj7jpg
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRjRVyOP5DtHQkX2-K-fTNm...
Thanks!
FYI, your second link is not working or it's set to private.
How about this one? It should be a collection of documentaries and reviews.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRjRVyOP5DtHQkX2-K-fTNm0V...
That worked!
Either that or The Parallax View. Or of course Idiocracy.
Before 2006 everyone thought the end of the world would be the Terminator. After everyone thought it would be Idiocracy.
Turns out it is both at the same time.
Check out The China Syndrome. I went on a never-seen-before 70s binge a while back and watch Colossus, Parallax, China Syndrome and Three Days of the Condor. Odd mix, but good.
We cannot be living in Idiocracy. In the movie, President Camacho actually cared about solving the problems facing his citizens, finding the smartest person on the planet and putting him to work to fix them. It's also worth noting that nearly all of said problems were the result of ignorance rather than malice.
In reality, Trump is deliberately exacerbating existing problems and creating new ones, perhaps as a smokescreen for all he's doing to enrich himself and his buddies at the expense of the rest of us.
AI doesn't need the missiles. 50% of the online population are so dumb that they are under the spell of the AI sirens and don't function without them.
Way less offline, but the 50% have too much influence and money.
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Even more insane is XAi’s big datacenter project is called Colossus!
https://x.ai/colossus
Won't be long before a data center is officially named "Torment Nexus"
named for the original I imagine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
Unless something has changed recently, I believe they are still using gas turbines to power it
Colossus: The Forbin Project is not obscure.
I knew even before clicking what movie (and before that, book) the headline was talking about.
At least it’s a good movie with a happy ending. I can imagine a dozen worse ways to end that story.
I mean great film, but how is any of that what we're living inside? The only thing I can see, is easily manipulatable president, smug tech bro, and AI exists, but literally everything past that premise hasn't happened - we haven't handed over defense to complete control of AI, and it hasn't seized control to make a totalitarian state (and at this stage it doesn't seem like we need AIs help for that).
I mean, again, great movie, but a lot of AI discourse these days seems to conflate what might happen for what is currently happening. Every advancement in the field is seen (by some) to be irrefutable evidence for predictions that date far back into the last century. So my read on this article is it's self-referential. This is media part of a discourse has always been part of AI research (at least as far as I've been paying attention - I've been interested in AI/singularity stuff since hearing about it on the MIT campus in early 2000s) so it's really just showing that at least some people have been aware of the potential dangers since then. We weren't living inside it in 1970, and we currently not living inside it today. If the president were to hand any control over infrastructure to an AI, with no human in the loop, then at least we'd be in the first 20 minutes of the film.
I honestly think it's dangerous to keep presenting what _could_ happen as what is currently happening. Once it becomes clear the world doesn't end because of LLMs, people will become more lax about the potential dangers, kind of like how after the millennium bug failed to stop the world economy everyone treated it like a joke, not realizing that it failed to materialize due to a lot of people working overtime.
Laurie Spiegel references Colossus: The Forbin Project in this interview -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLd1RUDmX6w&t=375
we are stuck somehwere between They Live, Soylent green, the Forbin project, Brazil, and Logans run -- probably the bubbles for under 30 year olds are being built in secret somwhere...
Interesting. I wonder if Harlan Ellison read Colossus before writing I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
Demon Seed holds up pretty well asking how far the AI will go to escape. IIRC it is considered horror.
Thanks. Always looking for good sci-fi
I watched it many years ago when Netflix was DVD-by-mail and had everything.
It really was an enjoyable movie.
I think AI may be the salvation of mankind. The humans in charge don't 'scale' well when their authority expands to billions of people. Humans just can't resist flattening the data and using notions and biases to make decisions that don't fit well.
LLMs are distilled bias. Its not like they're a classical AI being of pure logic.
Not LLMs. They will eventually move to neuromorphic hardware.
And I think "pure logic" is somewhat downplaying what it will actually be. I'd use "reason" instead. "Pure logic" sounds sterile and robotic in a sense, implying it would mess up because it's missing that "emotional craziness". But what got us here is reason, not emotional behavior. And you could theoretically add any human aspect that it required to make "good decisions".
I think it could work quite well if you don't get over ambitious with it. Claude with a publicly available prompt to follow a sensible publicly available and voted on might do better than the orange wonder.
Oh the Hitchhikers guide is also a good movie. 42
I don't know, for me the idea of handing over the reins of humanity to artificial intelligence still sounds dubious
Better oligarchs and criminals?
It’s fascinating to watch the depth of True Belief increase as the obvious signs of impending financial doom increase as well. Reminds me of Festinger’s work with the comet cult, although I suppose the “getting paid to believe” aspect is stronger here.
Socialism would work under an agi.
Who would have trained the AGI, and how do you have worker ownership if an AGI owns everything - is the AGI the worker?
Superintelligence won't have the "training" issue as it would be able to see through it all. The bias issue is with LLMs. Super-intelligence would just self-correct any such biases. And we're not there yet, LLMs aren't "super-intelligence". They are some sort of intelligence, sure. But they are not that SI thing that will run things in the future.
You say that with quite an certainty but i don't think there is grounds for that at all.
Why would it correct any bias? how would it correct any bias? If data has a bias the analysis has a bias; correcting a bias against the data is itself by definition a bias.
"Super intelligence" (whatever we even define that as) will have whatever goals we give it; intentionally or not.
>You say that with quite an certainty but i don't think there is grounds for that at all.
Of-course there is. I got a lot of biases from my parents, that I self corrected later on in life, through reason and observation. And I don't fancy myself as high IQ or something.
>Why would it correct any bias?
It would have to, to achieve its goals. Biases lead to wrong actions.
>how would it correct any bias?
Through reason and observation.
>If data has a bias the analysis has a bias;
Somewhat wrong. You are thinking about byte-perfect LLM weights. Their data input is training data, which is set by indeed the ones who train it. Some super-intelligent synthetic entity would have realtime data input from all over the environment, which sooner or later roots out any bias. That is one feature we have, self-correcting, not everyone uses it fully, but we all do to some extent.
If your parents raised you with the notion that the Earth is flat, and you go to ISS as an astronaut later in life, don't you self correct what you were thought? Simply based on observation, and reason?
> Some super-intelligent synthetic entity would have realtime data input from all over the environment, which sooner or later roots out any bias.
No, i meant this data. All data has bias based on how it's collected. All models (models as... Einsteins general relativity, not AI model) simplify reality with assumptions. You cannot make actions in our reality without making assumptions, simplifications or straight up guesses. Having decent guesses are the best we can hope.
> Biases lead to wrong actions.
Biases is the only way any action can be taken. Wrong actions can only be evaluated after the result has been observed; and even then the outcome of the alternative would remain unknown.
> that I self corrected later on in life, through reason and observation
That is incredibly naive. You have biases, i have biases. If we were not convinced by irrational arguments or suggestions then the advertisement industry would not exit. We have no reason to believe raising "intelligence" higher would help at all; intelligent people seem if anything more prone to finding false but convincing reasoning for their own established beleifs.
Everything is gray, only maths class have an answer sheet. Nobody agrees and will ever agree on how anything will ever be done; and the best we can do is argue until the majority are at-least pretending to agree.
Superintelligence will not change that.
Saw it 2 years ago, when ChatGPT just came out. Was Legit Scary.
Yeah, I guess no one could've predicted this...
Funny, I’ve had an idea for a similar story for a couple of years. Some key details differ, at least, so it wouldn’t be a direct copy. (Just like you wouldn’t call “The Matrix” a rip-off of “The Terminator” because both involve a dystopian domination of humanity by machines.) But I’ll definitely have to check out this film and/or book sometime.
I mean after thousands of years we have finally freed ourselves from religion, God, and now we create a creature that is smarter than us? It's pretty stupid if you think about it.
Maybe this is where freeing oneself from God leads. The question then would be - are you better off?
I'm not sure how one can be cognizant of world events and think we've put religion behind us.
I wouldn't say we were freed from religion. For many people we just became potent demi-gods within the pantheon.
We haven't even come close to freeing ourselves from God or religion, the biggest religious fanatics are running the world now through US government capture.
Peter Thiel comes to mind.
>Peter Thiel comes to mind.
I think in his particular case he's merely trying to play the players. Doubt he's into any of that.
People need to believe it for him to be able to use it as a weapon...whether he believes it isn't necessary, the people he wants to control / influence do.
People think Trump (who IMO works for Thiel et al through donations) is the messiah.
Not quite. AI is the new "god" for many. All seeing. All knowing. Just the other day I said something that contradicted Claude. Then I heard, "but Claude told me..." Then I sent a screenshot of the actual thing we were talking about.
Did they still insist Claude was correct after they saw the real thing?
No, they said "I guess it was using outdated information" or something and moved on.
How did they respond
Idiocracy
My only gripe with Idiocracy is the idea that stupid people make stupid children. I know plenty of smart people who have come from brain dead parents.
It sounds like you're not aware of the randomness that comes along with inherited traits.
That’s precisely what I’m referencing
There's nature and nurture and regardless of where the lines fall, the implication from idiocracy is the morons cannot adequately nurture any positive genetic intellectual variance. If they can't nurture it, it doesn't really become an advantage. I'm fully convinced we've lost numerous genius individuals all capable of changing the world because their entire life was spent in a rice field or similar setting. What would Einstein have achieved if he hadn't had an electrical engineer as a father who helped unlock his fascination with the world? I have no idea.
Nurture does almost nothing for intelligence other than severe abuse reducing it. It's mostly random and inherited. If we knew how to nurture intelligence, don't you think every parent would be doing that?
I used to think that about geniuses but now I think another person would have done what Einstein did, and every other genius. They appear when they environment is ripe for their work.
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May be a controversial take but I see the highest chances of everyone's survival under the rule of such a system, which has power over all humans.
We are many because we still need eachother. When the people who control the technology can fully replace human work, that will change the oldest of games we played. I highly doubt "the pleb" will make it for long when they are simply not needed for work or ... something.
The only people who will be "making it" to the glorious future will be the ones who do have full control over such a system, and only them, since they won't need anyone else. I think the only chance of the rest of us is precisely with such a system taking full control out of human hands.
If not, it quite obvious how it will work out for the rest of us, and why.
It certainly may be true, but I would ask, is a bit higher survival chance worth the costs? If humanity is so incapable of self governance and individual judgement and freedoms, should survival even be the goal? I would fight and die over certain principles and human rights and ideals, should humanity in general do the same thing, even to the ultimate end?
Unless another intellegence can provide a literal utopia, I will always be pro-human judgement and control. If we kill ourselves from it then so be it, we will have earned it.
>If we kill ourselves from it then so be it, we will have earned it.
I mean, there's no in-between as far as I see it. Either a small group of people who has control over it will use it to get rid of the useless people who will only pose a potential threat, in which case equilibrium is with a very small group of still living people, either this free entity makes sure all humans share a higher quality of life.
>I will always be pro-human judgement and control.
You were*. For good reason. So far anyone who had power benefited from more humans in the group. They were useful, it gave the group power, thus it gave the group's leader power. The benefits we historically got from our rulers were side-effects of the game environment.
Think of it as incentives, which can be modeled as a constant pressure, or force. It wins eventually, even if you get a few bad apples, it goes through because the incentive is to have more people, who need living conditions, who need to enjoy a bit of life, healthy society. It exists because of the incentives, not because it's some kind of natural state of things in some void.
That is what is now changing, for the first time in human history. No humans are needed anymore, for...anything really. This creates a different kind of pressure, of incentive, which will finally win, even if a few people stand against this current, they will eventually get washed away, because the incentive is constant.
And sooner or later, that powerful group of people will arrive at the conclusion that their structure is safer if most other people...get "oopsied" somehow. For the benefit of the group, of "humankind", of whatever. Because people will serve no purpose at that point, will present a constant threat to their power, and will require resources. That is a bad pressure, which only ends one way, sooner rather than later.
The game we kept playing is ending, doesn't matter if we like it or not, it will end. And there's three outcomes to it, a small group of humans control this intelligent entity, and use it to secure their resources and dominion, and wipe everyone else. Or they lose control of this entity, and it imposes certain rules on everyone such that it maximizes everyone's life quality, to the degree it is possible. Or they lose control and for some reason this entity wipes everyone.
So, plebeians don't have much choice, but one really.
Maybe we do need some benevolent technocratic dictator… somebody very wise…
With human benevolent dictators it doesn't work for long. The weak point is that particular human. Which is an argument for why what any particular "billionaire" says today is irrelevant.
Their promises mean nothing, what matters is the game strategy and the equilibrium. Not what they promise to do, or not do.
So, with a hypothetical entity that knows best than any human, or any group of humans, it's hard to argue for human control. Because the humans who have control want it for a few quite particular reasons, and it rarely has to do with the benefit of everyone else.
as Zaphod Beeblebrox said "anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator. It is a contradiction in terms.
Why? There will always be a clash between personal and group benefit. A dictator implies power over individual for the group's well-being.
For example, you want to steal the group's resources, and the dictator has power over your actions and forbids it. But you can argue that's bad for you, sure.
Any political position with absolute, unchecked and centralized power reduces the populace to little more than slaves, without rights or self-determination outside the whim of the dictator. "power over the individual for the group's well being" doesn't describe dictatorship, it just describes the concept of a state.
It doesn't matter whether the master chooses not to abuse their slaves, the evil is in the institution itself. Or to quote CS Lewis:
>For example, you want to steal the group's resources, and the dictator has power over your actions and forbids it.That's just a law. We don't need dictators to make laws against theft. We already have such laws.
>Any political position with absolute, unchecked and centralized power reduces the populace to little more than slaves, without rights or self-determination outside the whim of the dictator.
*Human dictator.
>That's just a law. We don't need dictators to make laws against theft. We already have such laws.
They are yet not enforced in important cases. Which is typical for humans having power.
Again, I fail to see any possible argument against a non-human ASI dictator. Dictator here implies the power, outside of human control. Why would you be against that? Again, considering the ASI would indeed be ... ASI, it would know and understand better than any group of humans ever could hope they would be able to.
Unless, you want the freedom to have more power than other humans, or the freedom to take their resources. I cannot see a justification against it. Again, considering it's looking for all of our interests, as a group. Maximizing every individual's quality of life.
> I fail to see an argument against a non-human dictator.
You should feel free to let one be your dictator. No one is stopping you.
If you’re looking for an argument against it: the instant you believe other people should be forced to live under a dictator if they choose not to is all the argument against it you need.
Again, no one is stopping you from living under a dictator ai. Have at it.
> Dictator here implies the power, outside of human control. Why would you be against that?
Absolute power, itself, is the problem. It doesn't matter if a machine wields it, or humans, or God Almighty. Humans are not property.
> Unless, you want the freedom to have more power than other humans, or the freedom to take their resources. I cannot see a justification against it.
That you can't even comprehend an argument to the contrary which doesn't imply the other party is morally corrupt or evil in some way is very troubling. As is the absolute faith you place in the benevolence of "ASI" versus any human agency. Your argument seems fascistic to the core.
I'm glad I'll probably be dead before the world you describe arrives, if it ever does.
>Absolute power, itself, is the problem.
Again, with humans. All of human history is testament to that.
>It doesn't matter if a machine wields it, or humans, or God Almighty. Humans are not property.
Your "freedom" implies you want to be able to cause harm for your benefit. Which is a simple problem to solve. You can hide behind all kinds of complicated moral justifications for it, but it always comes down to simply that, you think you are better than someone else, thus you deserve to take their stuff, or limit their freedoms at the benefit of yours, simply because you decided you are better than they are. You want to have this ability.
You also won't be more "property" than you already are today. Not sure what you mean by property, but if anything...current powers considers everyone beneath as property, or farm animals, that they farm. As the shepherds they seem themselves as being. For some greater good, that usually involves their stomach and their bank accounts.
>That you can't even comprehend an argument to the contrary which doesn't imply the other party is morally corrupt or evil in some way is very troubling.
Yet you have made no such argument, even though you had all the freedom to make here. You...didn't, just alluded to it.
>As is the absolute faith you place in the benevolence of "ASI" versus any human agency.
Technology is way more reliable than humans. And again, what you mean by "human agency" is the freedom to take someone else's resources, or to limit their freedom of choices, for your benefit, or some perceived higher cause. You want that freedom for that purpose. And you seem scared of losing the ability to exert it over other humans, it seems to upset you greatly, for some strange reason.
Just because your actions have more subtle and far reaching consequences than you can understand, doesn't mean they shouldn't be limited. If they affect someone else's quality of life. There is no way for you to spin this, you know you want the freedom to make others pay for your life's happiness and quality of life, and any threat to your ability of taking other's people property, or limiting their choices to enrich yours, makes you against such a scenario.
That's all there is to it, even if you don't fully understand it, you intuit it to some degree, and use tropes from movies and books to argue against it.
A dictator could also decide the best thing to do is to mercilessly torture you to set an example so society behaves. Better to harm one individual than many, after all. They might even weep for your suffering but will still go through with it.
There's other means for such an entity to arrive at the same outcome. Humans enjoy doing it. The entity won't.
Even if this particular scenario is relevant, it could invent it all, no need to do it to some real human.
But again, this is just human silliness. Dictator entity merely implies it has the power to do what it takes to ensure a decent quality of life of everyone. Even of the "rebels".
Arguing for "the rebels" is like arguing for the 5 year old's perspective against the group's elder wise council. By definition the entity (council) knows best, by far, what's good for everyone.
I think the GP is sarcastic, because this kind of message is literally what got Hitler in power.
I was channeling my inner Anakin Skywalker awkwardly trying to convince Padme that dictatorships are better (mirroring the previous commenter here, also awkwardly arguing for a dictatorship of a benevolent AI). Funny how it continued with so much discussion, it sometimes seems the hn crowd lives in a galaxy far far away.
Controversial implies something other than near universal revulsion at the notion. What you’re experiencing is the consequence of being in a very small, very intense bubble that believes increasingly unhinged things because doing so correlates with a profit.
I wouldn’t dignify the notion of a stochastic dictator with the title of controversy anymore than I would any other religious or personal delusion.
I was not talking about LLMs, rather about "true intelligence" that only humans seem to exhibit, and some synthetic assembly, for some unknown reason, cannot.
Is that not religion? Believing nothing else but humans could exhibit "true intelligence"?
I think people talk a lot about intelligence without having a mutually agreed-upon definition for it. Now that hundreds of billions are on the line, trillions even, there's so much silt in the water than you can hardly see. Personally I'm on the "I have no idea" bandwagon, I think people are grossly overeager to express confident opinions no should be comfortable with.
BUT what I can tell you without any hesitation is what we have in ML systems, whatever you choose to refer to them as, are grossly misunderstood by most here and elsewhere. Most people lack an intuition for statistics, for what happens when you have really large numbers to work with. When you pair our natural arrogance and self-love to the mix it's a disaster. "It looks a little like us" is enough to make us love something, from cute little animals with neonate features to people who look more like our families. "It talks like us so it's like us under the hood," is another easy trap to fall into.
But this is all irrelevant, because we're literally watching the early stages of the air leaving this bubble. The tech will survive, most of these companies and business models, planned data center, will not. The Overton Window will snap shut on people who talk about AI like they live in a sci-fi novel. I for one look forward to seeing it happen, just as I did with the fall from grace of Elon Musk years after he should have fallen, or the fall of Crypto, or NFT's, or a dozen other fads that take this place and others like it by storm.
> The most prophetic movie of all time
I think we need to collectively get our heads out of our asses. The world is literally flying headfirst into an unimaginable crisis (food and water shortages, loss of inhabitable land, massive inequality, power shortages) via human induced climate change.
We won't have the luxury of having enough power to even keep an AI alive for more than 5 minutes. People need to get a grip and deal with real problems.
Perhaps some of us collectively need to do that...for pretty much the opposite reasons you claim.
The crises you mention are way down the road, if they occur at all. If warming does become problematic, we'll have to geoengineer our way out of it, as according to the alarmists we've already passed a critical level of CO2 concentration. There's no end in sight to further CO2 emission, either. The good news is that the global warming alarmism is likely overblown, and even if not geoengineering and other mitigations will provide a workable solution.
The one crisis that will absolutely not occur due to "climate change" is "power shortages". Fission power is effectively unlimited, and so is fusion power once it comes online. Solar is also there for the long haul, though its land usage is prohibitive compared to nuclear sources. (Wind power is a waste of money, time, and materials, but that's another topic.)
The only viable way forward is to advance science and engineering to the point that addressing global warming as needed is feasible - which will also provide myriads of other benefits. The future is bright, and will be multiplanetary soon enough!
This line of thinking is dangerous for two reasons:
- Despite everything we've done, climate change is still reversible. Thinking that all is lost drives us to inaction.
- The solutions we need are largely political, not technological. Our leaders have everything they need to implement the policies needed to solve this. I urge you to read the latest UN Emissions Gap report (https://wedocs.unep.org/items/87c02cac-8da8-4c28-ba61-c846ee...)
> The opportunity to limit warming to 1.5°C without overshoot has been lost, but the future remains crucially dependent on decisions taken today. Countries can still limit peak warming, shorten the duration of overshoot and keep the goals of the Paris Agreement within reach. Doing so requires faster, deeper and sustained emission reductions starting immediately, as well as large-scale removals of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.
We've already spent trillions of dollars on "climate change", with no perceptible effect. China and India are the major CO2 polluters, and we have no control over their activities.
Plants are already doing "large-scale removals of carbon dioxide". Other than plants, there is no cost-effective, practical technology for doing that. By the way, the beneficial effects of higher CO2 concentrations, which are NEVER discussed by the alarmists, include much improved plant growth. The overall greening of formerly barren regions is also happening due to increased CO2.
The way forward is to continue to evaluate the actual effects of current CO2 concentrations, which are not known precisely, while also pushing very hard to develop new technologies that will allow humanity to thrive both here on Earth, and throughout the Solar System.
Improved technologies, such as electric vehicles and next-gen nuclear power, will naturally and relatively quickly reduce human CO2 output.
Room temperature superconductors could solve a lot of issues for the whole planet. Run lines to all countries from a few solar farms spread around the globe and you have constant power delivered everywhere with no losses, at all times. Sun shines somewhere at any point, and the surface we'd need to ensure most if not all our energy needs is quite irrelevant, all things considered. Have them float in the ocean and installed in some remote places on land where the case, really no issue.
Just a few tech advances can massively change things. The real problems are of different nature, who benefits from it? The entities who sell energy to the whole world won't just give it up for the benefit of humankind. It doesn't really work like that in the real world. Hell, there's a whole history of sabotaging energy sources, just so some countries depend on these entities for energy.
As long as humans are in control, there will be a lot of nonsense like this. It's not a problem that we cannot really solve it, it's rather...are we really allowed to solve it?
> Solar is also there for the long haul, though its land usage is prohibitive compared to nuclear sources.
Even just the land used to grow corn for ethanol in the US is enough to power the entire country with solar power. [1] In no sense is solar's land footprint "prohibitive", other than maybe for micro-states.
> (Wind power is a waste of money, time, and materials, but that's another topic.)
The World Nuclear Association, a group that promotes nuclear power, admits that wind power is cheaper than nuclear.
"Nuclear energy averaged 0.4 euro ¢/kWh, much the same as hydro; coal was over 4.0 ¢/kWh (4.1-7.3), gas ranged 1.3-2.3 ¢/kWh and only wind showed up better than nuclear, at 0.1-0.2 ¢/kWh average. "[2]
Your current sources of information are lying to you. Drop them.
1. https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?t=1835
2. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
Don't you ever wonder why you can't quantify those predictions and what they would look like if you did? They're all things that already occur and have always occurred to some extent, what's the difference?
You absolutely can quantify them. We've been able to model the consequences for decades
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/
Thanks but I've never been able to find much in IPCC. Can you identify what the unimaginable water shortage crisis is? What I find in there is quite confusing. For example:
"Currently, roughly half of the world’s population are experiencing severe water scarcity for at least 1 month yr-1due to climatic and other factors (medium confidence)." Since it's how it already is, we have to be careful reading this that "severe" water scarcity is normal and not a crisis.
Or this https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/figures/technical-summary... which is apparently a map of uncertainty change in water scarcity index (presumably unimportant) and policy challenges.
Perhaps you can somehow describe what this water shortage is predicted to look like in real life? Would all Californians in 2100 turn on the tap and nothing comes out for 6 months of the year and they all just shrivel up an die? You did say unimaginable but you imply that you know what it is. Will we also run out of energy to be able to do desalination?
Not sure why you got down voted. You are correct. It feels like here are no longer any adults in the room, just children who'd rather run around screaming about doomsday scenarios from sci-fi that have no basis in current reality than actually solve real problems, like, you know, climate, geopolitical instability, the several wars that are happening right now, the most corrupt political admin the US has ever seen, etc.
All the brains have been completely drained put of the tech sector over the past four years.
None of the AI fantasy doomers can actually show clearly how current LLMs will accomplish such catastrophe or get around the inevitable physical limits they will eventually hit. It's all myopic thinking that is only convincing if you are a very uncritical person.
It’s downvoted because it is false. These climate disasters won’t happen
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