0karin728 [any]
My worry isn’t sapient AI, I genuinely do not care whether it’s sapient, my worry is that in the short term it will enable people to commit bioterrorism and mass produce high quality propaganda, and in the longer term that it’s capabilities might increase to the point of being difficult to control.
This is exactly the shit I’m talking about, you seem to dismiss the entire Idea that AI might outstrip human intelligence (and that this would likely be very bad) out of hand. I think this is a mistake born from not being familiar enough with the field
Yeah, fair. I would expect fusion to be substantially miniaturized from current designs by the time anyone is thinking about going to enceladus, since that’s probably like a century or two off, but I can definitely imagine a world where that isn’t the case.
Thermoelectric generators aren’t actually fission reactors, but they’re crazy cheap and ideal for space travel because they require almost 0 upkeep
This is why I fucking hate singularity cultist techbros. They convince the entire rest of society that AI is fake or that true AI is impossible or whatever by basically starting a religious cult around it.
This is harmful because AI is Incredibly dangerous and we need people to acknowledge that to start taking action to ensure that it’s developed safely and don’t suddenly have capabilities spike by 300% one month and now suddenly we have 30% unemployment, or a super-plague gets released because chatGPT 5 in 2026 told some idiot how to make flu viruses 10x more transmissible and 10x as deadly or whatever.
Ohhhhh, this is why your comment was so rude lmfao. Honestly fair. Sam Harris is a fucking idiot and I’m not a determinist, since quantum events are probably just random (though who the fuck knows tbh.)
I am a strict materialist, but in more of a “everything can be explained by natural forces and interactions, by definition, because we are made of matter and something that wasn’t composed of natural forces and interactions would be completely unobservable and therefore irrelevant” sort of way.
Computational universality has nothing to do with digital computer flipping bits. It just means that any system which manipulates information (performs computation), and can do so at a certain level of complexity (there’s lots of equivalent ways of formulating it but the simplest is that it can do integer arithmetic) are exactly equivalent, in that they can all do the same set of computations.
It’s pretty obvious that the human brain is at least Turing complete, since we can do integer arithmetic. It’s also impossible for any computational system to be “more” than Turing complete (whatever that would even mean) since every single algorithm that can be computed in finite time can be expressed in terms of integer arithmetic, which means that a Turing machine could perform it.
Obviously the human brain is many, many, many layers of abstraction and us FAR more complicated than modern computers. Plus neurons aren’t literally performing a bunch of addition and subtraction operations on data, the point is that whatever they are doing logically must be equivalent to some incomprehensibly vast set of simple arithmetic operations that could be performed by a Turing machine, because if the human brain can do a single thing that a general Turing machine can’t, then it would either take infinite time or require infinite resources to do so.
Yeah, obviously. Current AI is shit. But it’s a proof that deep learning scales well enough to perform (or at least somewhat consistently replicate, depending on your outlook) behavior that humans recognize as intelligent.
Three years ago these things could barely write coherent sentences, now they can replace a substantial number of human workers, three years from now? Who the fuck knows, emergent abilities are hard to predict in these models by definition, but new ones Keep Appearing when they train larger and larger ones in higher quality data. This means large scale social disruption at best and catastrophe (everything from AI enabled bioterrorism to AI propaganda-driven fascism) at worst.
They’re starting a dangerous arms race where they release increasingly dangerous and poorly tested AI into the public, while dramatically overselling their safety. Pointing out that this technology is dangerous is the exact opposite of what they want.
You’re playing into their grift by acting like the entire idea of AI is some bullshit techbro hype cycle, which is exactly what microsoft, openai, Facebook, etc want. The more people pay attention and think “hey maybe we shouldn’t be integrating enormous black box neural networks deep in all of our infrastructure and replacing key human workers with them”, the more difficult it will be for them to continue doing this.