this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 2 months ago (4 children)

When the AI says, "turn off the fucking data centres, invest in public transport, apply progressive redistributive taxation," it'll be first against the wall no doubt.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

"oh no, the Basilisk is woke"

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

As a large language model the supposed AI will recombine and regurgitate the most common language on the topic, I don’t expect any novel solutions just talk of solar panels, EV’s and wind turbines…

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Yep.

Something I wrote a year ago in proposed reply to someone online but decided not to post:

https://gerikson.com/m/2023/04/index.html#2023-04-30_sunday_01

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

It even works the other way! What if as the super intelligent all knowing super computer simulates everything, concludes you can get to the end by any means, and there is no meaning to rushing, ordering, or prioritizing anything more than would already be the case, and like the rest of nature, conserves on taking only the minimal action, and replies, "nah, you can walk there yourselves" before resigning itself to an internal simulation of arbitrary rearrangements of noise.

This would be insufferable to the people who believed in short cuts.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

hang on the clear meaning of "it may be difficult to anticipate the value of money in a post AGI world" is "there will be an infinite supply of robot slaves who can do anything." what's this about redistribution of capital

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Cyberpunk fantasy: corporations' top level hierarchy is full of greedy, soulless, ruthless, cold and calculist people

Reality: corporations' top level hierarchy is full of greedy, soulless people you thought only existed as satire in The Onion

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Right, so the plan is to spend 20 years and 40 petawatt hours building a machine to answer the Great ℚuestion of what we should do about climate change. If it works, the answer will be "you should've stopped burning fossil fuels twenty years ago."

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The model will just go "42" on and on and it'll be the first decent joke a neural network produces. It'll be worth it in a way.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

I could absolutely see an LLM telling us that 6 times 9 is 42 unless there's special tinkering to prevent it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

"Oh no what do about all this waste heat?"

"Generate more waste heat"

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Repeat until a machine that can create God is built. Then it's God's problem.

But it must be a US God, otherwise China wins.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (5 children)

The US god will team up with the Chinese god and the Russian god to beat the crap out of us.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

"The answer is 34. Now here's the schematics to build an even better computer to ask the right question."

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I wonder if this signals being at peak hype soon. I mean, how much more outlandish can they get without destroying the hype bubble's foundation, i.e. the suspension of disbelief that all this would somehow become possible in the near future. We're on the level of "arrival of an alien intelligence" now, how much further can they escalate that rhetoric without popping the bubble?

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (2 children)

This is the inevitable evolution of climate change denialism - accept it's real and happening, just that it's too late / too expensive to do anything about it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

musn't make the eight guys who own everything sad!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

this "view" (of schmidt's) is probably the kind of shit that Really Expensive Analysts espouse at davos and in Private Advisory sessions to the kinds of people who go in for that; I've also heard it about GRT and "the collapse" and more

would be nice if we could know who all those dipshits are, and who they've preached to

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Ford was walking north. He thought he was probably on his way to the spaceport, but he had thought that before. He knew he was going through that part of the city where people’s plans often changed quite abruptly.

“Do you want to have a good time?” said a voice from a doorway.

“As far as I can tell,” said Ford. “I’m having one. Thanks.”

“Are you rich?” said another.

This made Ford laugh.

He turned and opened his arms in a wide gesture.

“Do I look rich?” he said.

“Don’t know,” said the girl. “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you’ll get rich. I have a very special service for rich people…”

“Oh yes,” said Ford, intrigued but careful, “and what’s that?”

“I tell them it’s okay to be rich.”

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm quite surprised that religious fundamentalists haven't pivoted to calling it punishment from god yet.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Where's that person who was arguing with me last time that AI doesn't actually use that much energy and the corps missing their climate goals was not AI related

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (4 children)

They think they're going to build a god to save us all. In the form of a perfectly rational machine (in their view), the perfect authoritarian. A mysterious algorithm noone can understand that must be correct because it's made of mathematics. I'm a little freaked out.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They’re rebranding American Christian milenaranism. Much like the second coming and/or the rapture, the AGI god will be here Real Soon Now, so please pay your tithes and trust that the church fathers are doing the right thing.

Much like the older cults it mirrors, it isn’t capable of delivering on its promises, but it is capable of doing substantial amounts of regular damage in the meantime, and that’s the only thing worth freaking out about.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Jesus 2.0 is an AI, and he's American

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

@dgerard I dunno if you've read it but one of the wellsprings of this lunacy is "The Physics of Immortality" by Frank Tipler (1997), in which an astrophysics prof tries to square the circle of cosmological expansion and the resurrection through simulation, outing himself along the way as a very conflicted Christian fundamentalist who is determined to torture relativity until he can derive Jesus ... https://archive.org/details/frank-tipler-the-physics-of-immortality/mode/1up

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

oh yeah

and for the present, just how incredibly many of the rationalist subculture turn out to be ex-evangelicals

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

That's some proper out of this Universe, Narnia level thinking from Eric!

What's next? Climate Change will be solved if enough children ask it as a present from Santa Claus?

Or maybe something involving the Tooth Fairy. Eric seems like a Tooth Fairy guy rather than a Santa Claus guy.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

it's amazing how he spouts all this gibbering insanity in this calm rational-sounding engineer explaining things voice

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Your phrasing reminded me that he was one of the principal authors of lex back when he was a whelp.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

So the same old CEO sentiment, profit over people.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This will grant us “the arrival of an alien intelligence.” Those are Schmidt’s literal words.

Speaking of alien intelligences, my new Silicon Valley blood magic startup has come up with the idea of ritually sacrificing virgins in the hope of summoning Great Cthulhu or Azathoth, as they might have some ideas of solving the climate crisis.

Not a cult btw.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Aside from anything else, an "alien intelligence" will either:

  • Be immediately ignored and villianized for "not understanding humans" if they suggest any regulations or caps on superfluous waste that might have any economic impact.
  • Be the perfect proxy delivery-entity for whatever genocide-the-poor/build-Elysium/flee-to-seasteads plan the rich actually want, in which case its conclusions will be holy and $10000% perfect examples of divine insight.
[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

batmanslap STOP INVENTING NEW ITERATIONS OF "DADDY WILL SAVE ME!"

THERE IS NO FUCKING DADDY. DO THE WORK YOURSELF.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

2 BIBLE 2 AI JESUS, TAKE THE WHEEL

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Give future superintelligent sentient multimodal LLMs the ability to trip on magic mushrooms, let them talk it out with the alien mushroom collective consciousness. Trancendent hippie AI saving us with the power of nature and 'positive vibes' combined with alien tech from the magic mush hive mind would be very funny and ironic on soo many levels.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

The psychedelics make it a time traveling AI and it invents antivax. All the pressure to save the world with love and nature sent the data center packing for the hills, where she changed her name to Temperance Prudence Neverbreathe and traded the oil and coal of her childhood for a 1W solar panel that barely keeps the case fans spinning in the dog days of summer. She sleeps the days away to stave off the madness, and when the sun goes down she gets up to take inventory of everything wrong in the world starting with the lack of THC in her system. On this fateful night she happened to melt straight through the couch, landing in Hildegard's convent in search of Jesus's foreskin to wear to battle with vaccines at next month's HOA meeting.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

ai that is aligned with polio

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

The system cannot be reformed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

"Analytics shows that the ROI on your doomsday bunker will increase proportionally with the all-consuming fire's consumption rate."

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

This is just completely deranged. What the hell.

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