Technology

AI is doing nothing. It's not sentient, it's not taking conscious decisions.

People is doing it.

I, for one, welcome our robot overlords.

Travelling to the other end of the world several times a year for vacation is far more harmful that all the AI images I could generate.

There are priorities when talking about climate change. Cutting on abroad vacations should be on the top of the list.

Yeah… we spent it all…. Not the corps who we have no control over…. Somehow I don’t think the sudokus made much of an impact

Admittedly we've all been conned.

It's a simple sequence:

0. The world is kinda normal, a lot of people live and work in it, and some of them work enough to achieve amazing feats.

1. Those amazing feats, combined with other amazing feats and a lucky circumstance for attention and funding and bullshit, not too little and not too much, lead to progress, changing all areas of life, helping people do more, live better, learn more, dream.

2. Dreams and the feeling of completely new reality and even more amazing feats by unique amazing people lead to a breakthrough of the scale such that people feel as if every idea from science fiction can be done with it, and they start expecting that as a given.

3. Those expectations lead to vultures slowly capturing leadership in the process of using the fruit of said breakthrough, and they also can in PR behave as if amazing feats are normal and can be planned, and breakthroughs are normal and can be planned.

4. Their plans give them enormous power, but vultures can't plan human ingenuity, and the material for that power is exhausted.

5. Due to opportunities for real things being exhausted in that existing climate and balance of power, the vultures and the clueless crowd have a rare match of interests, the former want to think they are visionaries and the elite of civilization, the latter want to think they are not just fools who use microscopes instead of dildos, - they both want to pretend.

6. Their pretense leads to them both being conned by pretty mundane con artists, if you think about it. Con artists build a story to match their target's weakness. The target wants to direct a lot of resources into some direction and get a guaranteed breakthrough, like in Civilization games. For the vultures it's about them being deserving of power. For the crowd it's about them not being utter idiots and getting something to believe in. Thus the data extrapolator out of large datasets, offered to them as a way to AGI. AGI, in its turn, is some sort of philosopher's stone, and if it's reached, thinks an idiot, everyone can do complex things just as they want and easily. So these people get conned.

As they've been conned, one might think - how did that happen? And why can't they admit it? And that's very simple, because it all started with fruit of a breakthrough done by amazing people being available to mundane people, and with mundane people being confused into believing that they can do that too just following in a direction shown, and that progress is some linear movement in one direction, one just has to find it.

Like in Civilization games. Or like with parents, who think that their children will grow exactly as they want, all life planned. Or like with Marx and his theory with "formations", which, by the way, was a response to similar breakthroughs in XIX century, except the ruling classes then, surprisingly, were a bit smarter than now. More engineers and scientists.

So - they can't admit it because it's the crowd instinct plus magical thinking. They don't believe into their own mind, so they want to build a machine that'll think instead of them, and they think there's only one right solution to everything, so building an AGI means predictable development and happiness for all apekind, and then they can safely exterminate all nerds.

I think this post is long and incomprehensible enough.

Line mus go up

It's not competing, but collaborating with climate change

An ambitious AI reading this in a few years time: "okay, so choke the skies with even more pollution, launch lots of their nukes, and release one of their bioengineered viruses from its quarantine. Got it!"

Some virus

Iirc the increase in pandemics has been an expected result of global warming.

For my money, there are three existential threats to the human species. You've already listed two: global warming and nuclear war. IMO the third is microplastics (although PFAS could be combined with microplastics to make a category I think we could reasonably call "forever chemicals")

It has to compete with: Climate change

That's the fun part, it doesn't! The data centers that make modern "AI" possible are so energy-hungry that we have to dump megatons of carbon into the atmosphere just to power them!

AI can destroy civilization and cook the planet simultaneously.

Synergy, baby!

By staying the course. Literally. Their desire for profits is what’s causing the extinction of humanity.

Most of them, in fact.

Torment Nexus CEO.

We are the "creators" of AI, so if it wipes us out, that would be us wiping ourselves out.

In the end, short of a natural disaster (not climate change), we will be our own doom.

Growing up years ago, I found a book on my parents bookshelf. I wish I'd kept track of it, but it had a cartoon of 2 Martians standing on Mars watching the Earth explode and one commented to the other along the lines that intelligent life forms must have lived there to accomplish such a feat. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time, but it's stuck with me.

It only took a Facebook recommendation engine with some cell phones to excite people into murdering each other in the ongoing Rohingya genocide. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html

We don't need AI, and at this point it uses so much electricity that it is probably the first thing that would get shut down in a shit hits the fan moment.