I'm not sure this is even conceivable, but... Imagine the bootstrap problem of intelligence systems going down, when no one knows how to bring them back up without the system itself walking them through it... Like if power and intelligence were to go down in a Carrington-class event in 10 years...
Like what would happen to individuals ten years from now who are trying to live if AI suddenly became inaccessible
Of course we all know most humans are useless and unable to survive outside our culture, but the difference is that I'm trying to picture is the individual trying the reason through challenges. The version of this that has been obvious to me up to now is that the individual didn't have the knowledge to look after themselves. But I guess it feels different to conceive of them not having the ability to fully reason on their own...?
To not just lack the objects of intelligence, but the very process of it...
I think the reason that intelligence is so scary is how contextual, stateful, path-dependent, and coupled it is.
Which doesn't seem like it. The ideal is to keep removing couplings. But in practice, I find that focusing on the statefulness, the distribution-specificness, these "accidentals", is how you actually get leverage.
The obvious social consequence is now the tendency towards centralization, tyranny, "you people can't think for yourselves, not because you have some kind of 'inherent intelligence defect', but because the world is so complicated and interconnected that only coherent systems thinking (conveniently administered from one central point) is what can save you". In the Enlightenment world, the ideal was that every man could in principle, think for themselves.
A good ending might be that everybody benefits each other by distributing intelligence, but in practice centralization always seems to win.
patcon · · focus · HN ↗
Like what would happen to individuals ten years from now who are trying to live if AI suddenly became inaccessible
Of course we all know most humans are useless and unable to survive outside our culture, but the difference is that I'm trying to picture is the individual trying the reason through challenges. The version of this that has been obvious to me up to now is that the individual didn't have the knowledge to look after themselves. But I guess it feels different to conceive of them not having the ability to fully reason on their own...?
To not just lack the objects of intelligence, but the very process of it...
sigbottle · · focus · HN ↗
Which doesn't seem like it. The ideal is to keep removing couplings. But in practice, I find that focusing on the statefulness, the distribution-specificness, these "accidentals", is how you actually get leverage.
The obvious social consequence is now the tendency towards centralization, tyranny, "you people can't think for yourselves, not because you have some kind of 'inherent intelligence defect', but because the world is so complicated and interconnected that only coherent systems thinking (conveniently administered from one central point) is what can save you". In the Enlightenment world, the ideal was that every man could in principle, think for themselves.
A good ending might be that everybody benefits each other by distributing intelligence, but in practice centralization always seems to win.