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. hardbass · 1791098613 · focus · HN ↗

               Many people even here seem very cagey about the fact that human beings and brains are physical systems following physical laws.

               1. threethirtytwo · 1791104306 · focus · HN ↗

                  Most of the world believes in crazy shit. Religion is mostly fantasy. Believing All powerful beings aka gods are crazy in every context and really mental institution level insanity except in the context of religion.

                  Humans are crazy. Thats just how it is.

                  1. BlipBlopBlap · 1791105787 · focus · HN ↗

                     The reason is the appalling amount of existential dread that follows from accepting that notion.

                     1. hardbass · 1791106187 · focus · HN ↗

                        Why would one feel existential dread? I am the same person as before?

                        1. BlipBlopBlap · 1791107678 · focus · HN ↗

                           Because the notion of one's non-existence is the very root of existential dread.

                           If you accept you are just meat. Just mundane matter shaped in a way where it has thoughts. Then you accept your own true non-existence is inevitable. With no get-outs like returning to god or some spirtual unity with the universe or reincarnation or whatever.

                     2. threethirtytwo · 1791125668 · focus · HN ↗

                        This isn’t true. Plenty of people aren’t religious. The explanation for why is more mundane.

                        It’s because of identity. Because people who are religious spent years and years and most of their lives not only studying and believing what they believe but also building community and centering their behavior around it. Abandoning that is the harder thing to give up.

                        If it were existential dread then we wouldn’t have entire countries like China being mostly atheist.

                     3. copperx · 1791126999 · focus · HN ↗

                        Nonsense.
                  2. antonvs · 1791112845 · focus · HN ↗

                     > really mental institution level insanity except in the context of religion.

                     The DSM even has to include an explicit exception to prevent the clinical definition of “delusion” from applying to religious belief. Without that ad hoc exception, religious belief would be classified as clinically delusional.

                     1. mdp2021 · 1791113140 · focus · HN ↗

                        Still children that have obtained some power and try to exert it over the rest. Scholarization has failed.

                        1. threethirtytwo · 1791125847 · focus · HN ↗

                           People who believe in religion should by logic mostly agree with psychiatrists that religion is mostly bullshit.

                           Because religion describes all kinds of religions from Greek mythology to Buddhism. If you are religious then almost all of these religions are utter bullshit except for the one religion you believe.

                           So from your perspective those psychiatrists are mostly right. They just forgot to make the one exception for your own personal religion.

                  3. mdp2021 · 1791113016 · focus · HN ↗

                     Many are ignorant and believe childish things, many are similarly ignorant and live in the same childish framework only to condemn it. Then there are the adults, and they have an idea of what they are talking about.

                     1. threethirtytwo · 1791125511 · focus · HN ↗

                        You’re angry but every single word I said is truth.
                  4. nphard85 · 1791128271 · focus · HN ↗

                     The alternative is to believe that the mind, conditioned and optimized by millions of years of evolution for the survival of the organism under constant threat of hostile natural forces, can capably perceive reality as it is.

                     1. threethirtytwo · 1791155358 · focus · HN ↗

                        You do not need to understand reality to survive. Does your pet turtle understand your true nature and the true nature of reality? No. Yet it survives.

                        Understanding reality is orthogonal to survival. In fact given that MORE people in this world are religious than not, one can argue that delusion. contributes MORE to survival than being a realist.

                        1. nphard85 · 1791164284 · focus · HN ↗

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