The Official Original Artificial Intelligence We're All F***ing Doomed Thread

season 1 sb 129 GIF by SpongeBob SquarePants
 
Re: Overpopulation

It's a thing, no matter how you put it. All we shouldn't do is to speculate about numbers too much - but otherwise, it *can* become a serious issue, for plain logical reasons alone.
500 millions are fine? Ok, why not.
10 billions are fine? Ok, why not.
So what about 500 billions? I guess we could all agree that these would be too much for Earth (unless we start using space, but we're not even remotely there yet).
IOW: At one point in time, overpopulation will become a serious problem. And as we don't know about the exact numbers (and never will, simply because it depends on too many things), we better don't try our best to find out and try to leave at least some kinda headroom.

It's pretty easy, really.
 
Alex Kenivel said:
I don't have a ton of experience with AI but I have been ducking around with it lately. I had used it (Gemini) to do some math for me, and recently used it to figure out some electrical stuff, for which it needed a little hand-holding because actual physical items and real-world spaces were involved.

Then this past week I decided to let it plan out a toolshed build and it couldn't remember left from right, forgot tons of important stuff, forgot a roof, didn't Slope the beams for the sloped roof it would need, and would have really fucked me had I blindly listened to it.

This shit is nowhere near ready to take over the world if it can't correctly wire a blower fan or design a box.
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Oh great, change the subject back to OP!?
how dare you picard GIF
 
Orvillain said:
No. I'd already considered the possibility.

But it is irrelevant to my perspective. I just don’t find it compelling.

I root my position as I do, because we are here. Right here. Right now. We're not going anywhere. I don't want to live in a world where as a society we plan for the worst, and we expect to fail. I don't want to live in a society that conditions itself for armageddon or apocalypse. I want to live in a world where we care for the people who are here right now.

Your characterisation of me merely playing contrarian is not accurate, nor is it honest, nor is a good faith interpretation of anything I've said.

I'm not being contrarian. I genuinely regard those stones and others like it as an emblem of authoritarianism, technocratic utopianism, cold-war elite thinking, and ultimately at best, just naive about human nature. My issue with the stones isn’t resource awareness or even restraint in principle. It’s what they represent.

Your thought experiment bakes in an assumption that "we can define and enforce the 'correct' population and behaviour without corruption" - and real pragmatic history says, no. You can't.

My position is ultimately:
  1. Centralised control is more dangerous than instability
  2. Humans shouldn’t be managed like a system variable
  3. "Guiding humanity" quickly becomes dominating humanity
On the not having children thing.... I mean, you do you. But as someone who has two kids, who wasn't necessarily prepared for fatherhood, and who had a pretty violent, abusive, and traumatic upbringing myself, I conditioned myself for decades to not have them. Eventually we did, and just speaking as an individual, I strongly regret my earlier anti-natalist stances.

I did find becoming a father very difficult. I had to burn off the parts of me that were no longer conducive to being a caring and thoughtful person. I had to melt away all my selfishness and self-aborption, in order to really become the person my kids needed me to be.

I don’t really see "don’t have children until conditions are perfect" as a neutral or obviously rational stance. It’s just a different value judgment about risk, responsibility, and what makes life meaningful.

I also think you've massively over-simplified the history of the world there. A lot of atrocities do involve resource imbalance, sure. But they’re just as often driven by ideology, power consolidation, identity politics, religion, nationalism, anti-nationalism, or straight-up human tribalism. But the principles in the guidestones don't fix that. They just move the problem elsewhere. Because ultimately that vision of the world involves some moral arbiter, making decisions for the entire planet, on behalf of everyone. Do you really want that? I suspect not.
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I disagree with the premise that framing everything through the lens of our current world history would directly apply to another civilization that came after us, just because “humans are human”, but I’m not in the mood for arguing hypotheticals.

Once I gained a little adult wisdom I quickly realized I wanted nothing to do with having kids, mainly to not inflict a single thing my childhood delivered on another human and I certainly wish more people I grew up with had that same mentality, because I see a lot of kids growing up the exact same way we did and that’s a massive bummer. My nephew being one of them.
 
Orvillain said:
No. I'd already considered the possibility.

But it is irrelevant to my perspective. I just don’t find it compelling.

I root my position as I do, because we are here. Right here. Right now. We're not going anywhere. I don't want to live in a world where as a society we plan for the worst, and we expect to fail. I don't want to live in a society that conditions itself for armageddon or apocalypse. I want to live in a world where we care for the people who are here right now.

Your characterisation of me merely playing contrarian is not accurate, nor is it honest, nor is a good faith interpretation of anything I've said.

I'm not being contrarian. I genuinely regard those stones and others like it as an emblem of authoritarianism, technocratic utopianism, cold-war elite thinking, and ultimately at best, just naive about human nature. My issue with the stones isn’t resource awareness or even restraint in principle. It’s what they represent.

Your thought experiment bakes in an assumption that "we can define and enforce the 'correct' population and behaviour without corruption" - and real pragmatic history says, no. You can't.

My position is ultimately:
  1. Centralised control is more dangerous than instability
  2. Humans shouldn’t be managed like a system variable
  3. "Guiding humanity" quickly becomes dominating humanity
On the not having children thing.... I mean, you do you. But as someone who has two kids, who wasn't necessarily prepared for fatherhood, and who had a pretty violent, abusive, and traumatic upbringing myself, I conditioned myself for decades to not have them. Eventually we did, and just speaking as an individual, I strongly regret my earlier anti-natalist stances.

I did find becoming a father very difficult. I had to burn off the parts of me that were no longer conducive to being a caring and thoughtful person. I had to melt away all my selfishness and self-aborption, in order to really become the person my kids needed me to be.

I don’t really see "don’t have children until conditions are perfect" as a neutral or obviously rational stance. It’s just a different value judgment about risk, responsibility, and what makes life meaningful.

I also think you've massively over-simplified the history of the world there. A lot of atrocities do involve resource imbalance, sure. But they’re just as often driven by ideology, power consolidation, identity politics, religion, nationalism, anti-nationalism, or straight-up human tribalism. But the principles in the guidestones don't fix that. They just move the problem elsewhere. Because ultimately that vision of the world involves some moral arbiter, making decisions for the entire planet, on behalf of everyone. Do you really want that? I suspect not.
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Orv, if you secretly used AI to write this I'm gonna be so pissed. :rofl
 
The irony of population dynamics is that we have discovered it is not
governed by rational actors.

For instance, the more a population is threatened and experiencing loss
and degradation of its members the more imperative there is to procreate.

Biologically it makes sense, if not rationally.

"People are dying, we need to have more children! NOW"

It's that actually that literal.

Contrarily, the more secure a population is and protected
the less children they have---which is an issue in most developed
nations, where birthrates have plummeted to the point that together
with increasing lifespans this will exhaust taxpayers/taxbase to the point of
breaking. Just not enough young, working people to support the aging/older
peoples.

Seems there's just way more going on here on Planet Earth than what our rationale
and reasoning would like us to believe. Which is maybe why clear and common-sense
solutions often don't amount to an hill of beans.

It's not as simple as "Just don't have kids," or "You people need to learn how to share."
Even if it seems simple to us that it should be.

It's a mess, honestly. Check that. We're a mess.
:LOL:

Not exactly a shocking statement is it? :rofl

Ok, back to Waylon and Willie before I lose my way and go knock someone up. Again. :oops::clint:unsure::rofl
 
DrewJD82 said:
mainly to not inflict a single thing my childhood delivered on another human
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Yes. I used to tell myself this too. Who wants a cute little 8 year old boy to be hit with belts and plastic rods? No sensible person that's for sure. But you do realise you have a choice right? The sins aren't automatically inherited by the child, unless the parents will that into being.

The real problem is, there are so many shitty parents out there, and shitty parents raise shitty kids who raise shitty kids of their own, etc.

I'm not saying definitely do it, or change your mind, or anything like that. Just sharing my perspective.
 
Orvillain said:
There's a level even before that where you have to decide whether the scientific community is actually the scientific community, or whether all voices are represented well enough to give a balanced view.
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So we have two options here:

a) Throw up our arms and say, "It's impossible to know anything. Move along. Nothing to see here."

b) Consider motives. The "scientific" studies that suggest climate change hasn't been massively skewed by post-industrial revolution carbon emissions are often funded by the same people selling us those carbon-based products. (Look to the tobacco industry in the 20th century for a similar template.)

Orvillain said:
FWIW my perspective is; climate change is real, humans are a primary driver of it, but it is also a natural phenomenon that happens all of the time without our involvement too. I think our best chance of dealing with it is through technological progression, not through control systems designed to completely change our way of life.
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I don't exactly disagree with this. Hell, I'm sitting in a big oil-heated house as I type this, so I'm not exactly perched on a high horse. But I think there's a kind of "cranky optimism" that comes from those opposed to green initiatives (reduction, renewables, etc.), which basically amounts to, "Fuck off, this is all going to work itself out, and I like things the way they are." As I've admitted, I'm not inclined toward optimism, and my intuition (the opposite of science, granted) says we'd better tackle this by way of c) All of the above.
 
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la szum said:
Contrarily, the more secure a population is and protected
the less children they have---which is an issue in most developed
nations, where birthrates have plummeted to the point that together
with increasing lifespans this will exhaust taxpayers/taxbase to the point of
breaking. Just not enough young, working people to support the aging/older
peoples.
Click to expand...
You're tapping into another relevant discussion...
which we best shouldn't bring up. :rofl
 
Alex Kenivel said:
I don't have a ton of experience with AI but I have been ducking around with it lately. I had used it (Gemini) to do some math for me, and recently used it to figure out some electrical stuff, for which it needed a little hand-holding because actual physical items and real-world spaces were involved.

Then this past week I decided to let it plan out a toolshed build and it couldn't remember left from right, forgot tons of important stuff, forgot a roof, didn't Slope the beams for the sloped roof it would need, and would have really fucked me had I blindly listened to it.

This shit is nowhere near ready to take over the world if it can't correctly wire a blower fan or design a box.
Click to expand...
AI doesn't need to do a good job to ruin our proverbial day. It might do so even quicker by doing things terribly.
 
DrewJD82 said:
...I see a lot of kids growing up the exact same way we did and that’s a massive bummer. My nephew being one of them.
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I see a lot of kids growing up quite differently than I did, and it's also a massive bummer. (And this in spite of the fact that most of the kids I observe today are far more privileged than I was.)
 
DrewJD82 said:
because I see a lot of kids growing up the exact same way we did
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Sorry to hear you must have had a tough go. I wish kids grew up more like I did. Middle class, relatively quiet neighborhood, outside until the street lights come on. Watch TV at night or Saturday morning. No internet. No social media. I wish I appreciated more when I was experiencing it.
 
paisleywookiee said:
Sorry to hear you must have had a tough go. I wish kids grew up more like I did. Middle class, relatively quiet neighborhood, outside until the street lights come on. Watch TV at night or Saturday morning. No internet. No social media. I wish I appreciated more when I was experiencing it.
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My bigger point was in regard to Orvie’s response about having kids and showing two sides of a coin as it related to the discussion of a future civilization; while we both grew up in shitty situations, “human is gonna human” did not apply to both us. And that’s not to say Drew is a bad person for having kids and I’m awesome, we had different experiences growing up, but despite the similar metrics/shared shitty experience, different paths were taken in the long run in how we moved forward with our own lives.

And if ya grew up where I did, chances are your parents wouldn’t have let you hang out with me due to where I lived and my stepdad’s name being in the police log every other month.
 
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