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.
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!"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
"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 ...>"
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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!
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
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
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.
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.
But that's it. I don't think there's more cultural references to be found.
they idolatre Iron Man/stark like a god.
Real socialism just has been tried yet. And further 145 million dead is a small price to pay for the socialist utopia.
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.
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 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 ...>"
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qSgsHIj7jpg
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRjRVyOP5DtHQkX2-K-fTNm...
FYI, your second link is not working or it's set to private.
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.
Because they were published in 1984 and 1992 respectively
Maybe I didn’t understand
There's no direct lineage.
Turns out it is both at the same time.
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.
https://x.ai/colossus
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".
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.
It really was an enjoyable movie.
Way less offline, but the 50% have too much influence and money.
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 think Trump (who IMO works for Thiel et al through donations) is the messiah.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
*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.
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.
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.
Is that not religion? Believing nothing else but humans could exhibit "true intelligence"?
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.
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!
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?
- 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.
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...
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/