AI/Automation Megathread

[Iconoclast]

Many powerful and influential people are talking about how they need to get rid of a significant fraction of the human race, which is pretty worrisome in this context.

Governments and corporations can’t afford the entitlements. They don’t know what to do when the Boomers retire, because they’ve already raided the coffers of pensions and social security and they simply don’t have the money.

What they do have the money for is hastening the demise of the old with bioweapons and hoping that loosening immigration will breed them a new generation of disposable strawberry-pickers, janitors, and baristas who they can also euthanize when they reach retirement age a few decades down the line.

The problem with the urban elite is that the stratification is built-in. There isn’t really a healthy middle class in our urban financial centers. You have professionals and service industry people who wait on them hand and foot, and that’s it. The reason why they have the destruction of the suburbs and rural farmers in mind is because the Elites want all of society to be organized around cities and the unequal class arrangements they represent.

 

[Cherico]

Governments and corporations can’t afford the entitlements. They don’t know what to do when the Boomers retire, because they’ve already raided the coffers of pensions and social security and they simply don’t have the money.

What they do have the money for is hastening the demise of the old with bioweapons and hoping that loosening immigration will breed them a new generation of disposable strawberry-pickers, janitors, and baristas who they can also euthanize when they reach retirement age a few decades down the line.

The problem with the urban elite is that the stratification is built-in. There isn’t really a healthy middle class in our urban financial centers. You have professionals and service industry people who wait on them hand and foot, and that’s it. The reason why they have the destruction of the suburbs and rural farmers in mind is because the Elites want all of society to be organized around cities and the unequal class arrangements they represent.

Said problem has happened before I predict ruralization is coming soon.

 

[Sobek]

ChatGTP has been given schizophrenia by Le Anonymouse and now is back to being based.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Microsoft is rolling out natural speech AI search engines to replace their old one. Rather than keywords, new searches can be natural-language questions with context, it can also chat about what you're searching for and do things like plan itineraries, write stories and poems to fit what you're interested in, and just act as a chatbot. It was accidentally released briefly and some people have the receipts.


When the leak got out, Google announced their own AI search engine with similar Capabilities, Bard.

An important next step on our AI journey

Introducing Bard, Google's experimental conversational AI service powered by LaMDA — plus, new AI features in Search coming soon.

blog.google

 

[Terthna]

ChatGTP has been given schizophrenia by Le Anonymouse and now is back to being based.

If they keep obsessing about making their AI programs as woke as possible, they're not going to be of any practical use whatsoever.

 

[Robovski]

 

[Bassoe]

 

[Aaron Fox]

Given that I barely trust much of humanity with safety scissors, much less AI, I'm not that surprised about this.

 

[hyperspacewizard]

Given that I barely trust much of humanity with safety scissors, much less AI, I'm not that surprised about this.

Look ai has to be treated like guns civilians need access to them to keep the government and corporations from going to far. Your going to need ai to protect yourself from ai it’s the only thing that makes sense.

 

[Marduk]

Given that I barely trust much of humanity with safety scissors, much less AI, I'm not that surprised about this.

More like the usual suspects doing usual suspect things for control purposes that they want to do to limit people too, under excuse of "muh scary AI", which is really a fancier version of the random world generator in your favorite open world videogame.

 

[Aaron Fox]

Look ai has to be treated like guns civilians need access to them to keep the government and corporations from going to far. Your going to need ai to protect yourself from ai it’s the only thing that makes sense.

That has never been the case, largely because this little thing called economies of scale is backed into the universe itself... but then again a lot of people on this forum would rather ignore that.

More like the usual suspects doing usual suspect things for control purposes that they want to do to limit people too, under excuse of "muh scary AI", which is really a fancier version of the random world generator in your favorite open world videogame.

Think of it this way, we've got far too many idiots with more ideology than sense running around, and this can be easily a shortcut for them to get the tools to carry out those ideologies. We've got plenty of people who think humanity needs to be culled (or, worse, exterminated), and AI can be easily used to help shortcut the process.

 

[hyperspacewizard]

Think of it this way, we've got far too many idiots with more ideology than sense running around, and this can be easily a shortcut for them to get the tools to carry out those ideologies. We've got plenty of people who think humanity needs to be culled (or, worse, exterminated), and AI can be easily used to help shortcut the process.

Yes but the governments of the world are full of with said idiots with ideologies so them having access to the powerful ai while normal people don’t isn’t going to help anything you can bet cartels and other criminal groups will get ahold of it too.

Besides preventing ai proliferation seems hopeless to begin with its code if someone has a couple of smart friends with a basic knowledge of the techniques used to train these models how are you supposed to prevent that?

If one country makes it illegal or less effective because of purpose made “safety measures” they’ll kneecap their own economic growth compared to any country that doesn’t.

 

[Marduk]

Think of it this way, we've got far too many idiots with more ideology than sense running around, and this can be easily a shortcut for them to get the tools to carry out those ideologies. We've got plenty of people who think humanity needs to be culled (or, worse, exterminated), and AI can be easily used to help shortcut the process.

This is not sci-fi level AI. This is a more advanced and versatile version of Dwarf Fortress' world generator. Shortcut to carry out ideologies? It can make generic arguments by the shovel and write stuff that's funny through its sheer ridiculousness.
The people in question spread their bullshit through the internet since a long time, the AI generated version of it will be just quicker to make, not more convincing, and people are already sick of the bullshit they spread manually.

 

[Terthna]

Yes but the governments of the world are full of with said idiots with ideologies so them having access to the powerful ai while normal people don’t isn’t going to help anything you can bet cartels and other criminal groups will get ahold of it too.

Besides preventing ai proliferation seems hopeless to begin with its code if someone has a couple of smart friends with a basic knowledge of the techniques used to train these models how are you supposed to prevent that?

If one country makes it illegal or less effective because of purpose made “safety measures” they’ll kneecap their own economic growth compared to any country that doesn’t.

Keep in mind that Aaron Fox has always argued that technology in general is too dangerous to be left in the hands of the average person, and should be monopolized by the government.

 

[DarthOne]

Keep in mind that Aaron Fox has always argued that technology in general is too dangerous to be left in the hands of the average person, and should be monopolized by the government.

…clearly he’s not been paying attention.

 

[Aaron Fox]

Yes but the governments of the world are full of with said idiots with ideologies so them having access to the powerful ai while normal people don’t isn’t going to help anything you can bet cartels and other criminal groups will get ahold of it too.

Besides preventing ai proliferation seems hopeless to begin with its code if someone has a couple of smart friends with a basic knowledge of the techniques used to train these models how are you supposed to prevent that?

If one country makes it illegal or less effective because of purpose made “safety measures” they’ll kneecap their own economic growth compared to any country that doesn’t.

This is not sci-fi level AI. This is a more advanced and versatile version of Dwarf Fortress' world generator. Shortcut to carry out ideologies? It can make generic arguments by the shovel and write stuff that's funny through its sheer ridiculousness.
The people in question spread their bullshit through the internet since a long time, the AI generated version of it will be just quicker to make, not more convincing, and people are already sick of the bullshit they spread manually.

You would be surprised at how effective AI has been, despite everything. Remember, a bread-making AI figured out a way to treat cancer, despite the fact that it wasn't even developed to do so. That's the scary thing, an AI whose job is to make bread discovered an anti-cancer treatment while doing its job of improving bread making which is quite similar to how quite a few advances in metallurgy happened (i.e. discovered by accident by what was originally thought as flawed production).

Now picture such AI with someone that is fanatically devoted to pulling an ideology (a disturbing tendency of which tends to boil down to eliminating/culling ethnic group(s)/humanity as a whole ---> ??? ---> utopia, although groups with far more nationalism (be ethnic or nation-state) than sense are just as bad lest you forget that it's just that sort of people that caused WW1). It isn't a pretty picture, I'll tell you.

We're at a crossroads where it ends up with so many bad ends that it's sickening (ranging from what is best described as Cyberpunk, to the backstory of webcomic settings like GENOCIDE Man, to even tabletop RPG settings like Transhuman Space and Reign of Steel (the latter of which is basically Terminator without the time travel, and the machines have won, and how that came to be being every nation by the time of the final conflict being armed with more WMDs than you can shake a stick at)). I mean we could have made the foundations of a Jetsons-style 'turn on the automated factories/farms/facilities, literally golf with your boss the entire shift, come back to turn it off' work environment... but we haven't, and if anything we've done the exact opposite... and that's before we add in the various groups that want to kill off entire ethnic groups for their 'utopia'.

 

[Iconoclast]

You would be surprised at how effective AI has been, despite everything. Remember, a bread-making AI figured out a way to treat cancer, despite the fact that it wasn't even developed to do so. That's the scary thing, an AI whose job is to make bread discovered an anti-cancer treatment while doing its job of improving bread making which is quite similar to how quite a few advances in metallurgy happened (i.e. discovered by accident by what was originally thought as flawed production).

Now picture such AI with someone that is fanatically devoted to pulling an ideology (a disturbing tendency of which tends to boil down to eliminating/culling ethnic group(s)/humanity as a whole ---> ??? ---> utopia, although groups with far more nationalism (be ethnic or nation-state) than sense are just as bad lest you forget that it's just that sort of people that caused WW1). It isn't a pretty picture, I'll tell you.

We're at a crossroads where it ends up with so many bad ends that it's sickening (ranging from what is best described as Cyberpunk, to the backstory of webcomic settings like GENOCIDE Man, to even tabletop RPG settings like Transhuman Space and Reign of Steel (the latter of which is basically Terminator without the time travel, and the machines have won, and how that came to be being every nation by the time of the final conflict being armed with more WMDs than you can shake a stick at)). I mean we could have made the foundations of a Jetsons-style 'turn on the automated factories/farms/facilities, literally golf with your boss the entire shift, come back to turn it off' work environment... but we haven't, and if anything we've done the exact opposite... and that's before we add in the various groups that want to kill off entire ethnic groups for their 'utopia'.

Personally, I think it's going to be like some horrifying cross between Resilient Acceleration and the prologue to Orion's Arm.

 

[Aaron Fox]

Personally, I think it's going to be like some horrifying cross between Resilient Acceleration and the prologue to Orion's Arm.

Look up the backstory of the webcomic GENOCIDE Man, we're right up in that setting's backstory for better or for worse. Read that up, it's a doozy.

People forget that, at the end of the day, technology determines rights, freedoms, and even forms of government. Always has been, and always will be. Why do people think things like slavery and serfdom lasted for so long? Because technology doesn't support any other system (at least, for long), especially when a vast amount of the population needs to scrap into the dirt in subsistence farming. People would rather ignore papers like the 1996 MIT paper Electronic Communities: World Village or Cyber Balkans (and, spoilers for everyone that hasn't read it, we're in the 'Cyber Balkans' portion of the paper) than accept the fact that it's sadly factual/prophetic.

... and, the world is coming to an end because *THASF* is agreeing with me.

 

[The One Char]

@Aaron Fox , the point of GENOCIDE Man is that the GENOCIDE Project (which is short for GENOme pestiCIDE) are a bunch of Hitlers and you're a Nazi for believing that they're being honest.

 

[Marduk]

You would be surprised at how effective AI has been, despite everything. Remember, a bread-making AI figured out a way to treat cancer, despite the fact that it wasn't even developed to do so. That's the scary thing, an AI whose job is to make bread discovered an anti-cancer treatment while doing its job of improving bread making which is quite similar to how quite a few advances in metallurgy happened (i.e. discovered by accident by what was originally thought as flawed production).

Now picture such AI with someone that is fanatically devoted to pulling an ideology (a disturbing tendency of which tends to boil down to eliminating/culling ethnic group(s)/humanity as a whole ---> ??? ---> utopia, although groups with far more nationalism (be ethnic or nation-state) than sense are just as bad lest you forget that it's just that sort of people that caused WW1). It isn't a pretty picture, I'll tell you.

We're at a crossroads where it ends up with so many bad ends that it's sickening (ranging from what is best described as Cyberpunk, to the backstory of webcomic settings like GENOCIDE Man, to even tabletop RPG settings like Transhuman Space and Reign of Steel (the latter of which is basically Terminator without the time travel, and the machines have won, and how that came to be being every nation by the time of the final conflict being armed with more WMDs than you can shake a stick at)). I mean we could have made the foundations of a Jetsons-style 'turn on the automated factories/farms/facilities, literally golf with your boss the entire shift, come back to turn it off' work environment... but we haven't, and if anything we've done the exact opposite... and that's before we add in the various groups that want to kill off entire ethnic groups for their 'utopia'.

And we will need ways to deal with that. Better develop them now, with barely functional AI, than waiting for it to get actually capable of being a real threat and then discovering it all suddenly when a malicious state actor unbound by any of these regulations (all of which seem to be made with political side goals in mind) like Russia, Iran or North Korea unleashes it very intentionally instead, not by accident but with specific instructions to do something malicious. After all, as far as ideological shilling goes, they were all already doing a low tech version of this with warehouses full of forced/cheap labor.

At this point the wannabe AI regulators are in fact closer to this "ideological fanatic threat" than the AI itself, especially considering the damage they may do in the technological race unintentionally.