Thread

1. dzink · 1791065932 · focus · HN ↗

   A huge chunk of humans are sedated with infinite supply of cortex-disabling short form video and games.

   Another huge chunk are too distracted by having to scrape by for a living and work multiple jobs or raise kids and survive financially until exhausted. That second group will keep increasing as the first flows into it.

   The rest are aging, disabled, or too young and pegging themselves majorly in the first category until they hit the second.

   The people aware enough to hold on to their brain and do something with it in their time available are trying to figure out AI and how to make money with it. The variable rewards of promoting AI are turning into an addiction with some of them, especially if grasping for straws with little inherent insights into the problems prompted.

   So if you are able to fly above the AI-generated addictions and have the privilege of time to do it, see what you can do.

   1. lukifer · 1791068181 · focus · HN ↗

      One of the dilemmas of trying to communicate the full spectrum of AI Risk, is trying not to insult the intelligence of the human animal in the process. And don't get me wrong: what human wetware can accomplish with 20 watts is the most miraculous thing in the known universe. And yet how many of us can have our cognitive sovereignty one-shotted by engagement algos, Skinner boxes, gameplay loops, propaganda, advertising, flattery, social conformity, bias, fantasy, charismatic demagoguery, or straight-up bullshit?

      If we grant that we are on track to make something smarter than humans (I think so): it's almost a face-saving white lie to spin yarns about a Skynet nuclear apocalypse, or a 7D chess move to mass-assemble a nanovirus with 100% lethality without anybody noticing. I do think those scenarios are worth taking seriously; but what's harder to communicate, is just how effectively a superhuman AI (or a diverse ecology of agent swarms) might be able to manipulate human behavior. It's something few of us are able or willing to truly process (not least because how many of us live in denial of how much our nervous systems are already hacked by technomodernity).

      The appropriate analogy for what's to come may look less like the anthill carelessly demolished to make room for a highway, than the domesticated worker ants from Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time".

      1. Lerc · 1791069186 · focus · HN ↗

         >trying not to insult the intelligence of the human animal in the process

         I don't think it is insulting the intelligence. It's damaging the pride.

         In Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan describes it as a repeating phenomenon in human history. A lot of people want humans to be the special ones, and will fight any suggestion that we are just a natural part of the universe.

         1. ACCount39 · 1791069850 · focus · HN ↗

            A lot of "AI denial" we see is rooted in the same impulse.

            If AI is not "actually intelligent", then humans can stay unique and special.

            And if it is? If all "intelligence" ever was could be captured by a construct of matrix math and executed by a server rack? Then what is it that humans still have left that would make them stand out?

            1. bananaflag · 1791101779 · focus · HN ↗

               To me humans can stay unique and special because they weren't created by anyone.

               AI, no matter how better than humans it becomes, will be less special because it was created by other intelligent beings.

               The only way we would become less unique and special is if we discover alien beings.

               1. DonHopkins · 1791104184 · focus · HN ↗

                  [delayed]
               2. optimalsolver · 1791108769 · focus · HN ↗

                  >humans can stay unique and special because they weren't created by anyone

                  Neither were rats. It's hardly an exclusive club.

                  1. bananaflag · 1791117469 · focus · HN ↗

                     Rats aren't as intelligent as humans ;)

                     1. optimalsolver · 1791128186 · focus · HN ↗

                        What intelligence level certifies a being as unique and special?

                        Are there humans who don't make the cut?

               3. lukifer · 1791132124 · focus · HN ↗

                  There's a sense in which humans were created... by other humans. :) Until you go far back enough in the evolutionary chain, when the creators were our primate ancestors.

                  Douglas Adams had a yarn about evolution, about a puddle that wakes up, and declares that the hole in which it sits must have been perfectly designed for it by its Creator. But of course for a puddle to exist, it must perfectly mirror its environment. It makes no sense for a puddle to not fit its hole. Emergent complexity has the same characteristic: it's inseparable from the environmental pressures which led to it. Two sides of one coin.

                  It's a deep rabbit hole, but there is also a sense in which we co-evolved with memeplexes, biological and informational life forms, each shaping and adapting to the other. To the extent our nervous systems act as a substrate for memetic evolution, perhaps LLMs offer memetic "life" a new evolutionary environment.

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