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. throwaway27448 · 1791103199 · focus · HN ↗

         I'd take ASI (or even AGI) more seriously if we could actually propose problems such things could solve. That's actually fun to think about! As it is, it feels a lot more like a really crappy drug that got slipped into some peoples' drinks that makes them ramble in random fits of psychotic mania.

         Manipulating people is not a very difficult problem, frankly. You certainly don't need AI for that; it just made it cheaper.

         1. Kinrany · 1791122223 · focus · HN ↗

            It can farm resources in a game for you.

            Yes, so can a custom model trained just for this, and so can a guy on the other side of the world that makes 5$/hour.

            Like computers or electricity, the point is not being able to do anything specific, but being able to solve problems not known in advance, cheaper than it was possible before.

            1. throwaway27448 · 1791123997 · focus · HN ↗

               > but being able to solve problems not known in advance

               So.... people expect it to read minds?

               This is such a silly game to play, trying solving problems we haven't even created yet.

               1. Kinrany · 1791152868 · focus · HN ↗

                  No, it's problems specified after making it rather than explicitly considered before making it.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.