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

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ᛗᛜᛜᚺDᛜᎶ Ꮤᛨᚳᚴ said:
I disagree. Once again, if it is all or nothing, I will choose nothing. But to say "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not steal", etc. is only viable if you go with the "Don't use god's name in vain" and "Keep the sabbath holy", I think good points are being missed. Same thing with the guidestones the way I see it. I can hate some songs from an artist but still love others ;~))
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Context matters. "Commandments". They are not suggestions. :rofl You either accept them wholly or not. I mean, they can be cherry picked all day but that's not the point of them.

Ok, no mas. Last one. For realz. :grin
 
FuzzyAce said:
Even if there were a few points on the stones you could go "that's logical, sensible"... the whole thing gets overshadowed and rightfully so by "maintaining human population under 500,000,000..."
Now how exactly do you do that? :knit
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I remember reading some rather elaborated (and very science based) stuff saying that Earth would easily be able to support a self sustainable life/future for vastly more than that, IIRC it's been something around those 8 billion humans we are right now.

Very obviously, that however would demand a more or less drastic change in the way ressources are used and how "wealth" is distributed. The most interesting takeaway however being that the authors said that it'd be possible with capitalism still in place (because they seemed to agree that us humans can't completely avoid capitalism), but it'd take a "modified" version of capitalism, let's call it "sustainable capitalism" (for lack of better words).

Anyhow, whatever the number might be, it's absolutely obvious that Earth can't deal with endless people, so there's a certain limit. But it's still completely stupid to come up with any arbitrary figures (such as those 500,000,000), because if we were taking these as our guideline, it needed drastic measures to get there. Some of them very certainly being pretty anti-human.

Personally, I think that population growth would perfectly regulate itself anyway, in case all/most people were fine with their lives, so it'd very likely become a non-issue.

And whatever the final goal might be, there's no way around us having to start with the situation as is. There's no sense in wild speculations about whatever all-humans-are-happy utopias, in the end they may look completely different anyway.

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Whatever, to get back to topic: AI (along with "robot-ation") so far isn't exactly serving much of the once (and still) promised glory for humans.

The situation regarding AI music pretty much shows that under a lens. Suno has about zero purposes others than making quick money. During the last decades there's never been any shortage of fantastic music of any genre or use case. In fact, the very opposite is true. Even pre-Suno, it's been an overwhelming amount of music to listen to.
There's been no shortage of composers, players, audio engineers, producers and whatsoever.
Oh, sure, there's "but I can't sing so I'm happy about Suno singing for me". But again, that just comes down to laziness and money. There's Fiverr with kickass singers galore if you want to work remotely.
"But that singer doesn't do it as good as Suno!" - so, a) either ask someone else or b) try to get the best out of what you have. These things are part of the very essence of music - not perfection.

And so far it's the very same with each environment that AI is breaking into at this very moment.
It doesn't serve anyone if kids can do their homework via Chat GPT - sure, it's a short time "remedy", but it's still worth noting in the long run.
Being able to create silly videos might be fun for a while - but we're already drowning in them (take a look at TikTok, Instagram and YT) and others than some quick laughs and maybe some quick money for the more successful "creators" there's nothing to be had from them.
Etc.

I said so before: An AI actually serving humans needed to care about humanity's biggest issues (not gonna list them here because that'd take this too much into politics). Taking over jobs, destroying pretty much the entire more or less creative/art scene and what not - none of that has ever been something we needed.

I don't think we will be able to get there, though. For reasons that we can't discuss about here.
 
DrewJD82 said:
It’s always been remarkably daft to me to assume the guidestones were meant for us and not for the next civilization to come after we fuck everything up.

And the very line everyone takes umbrage with gives it away; “maintain” does not mean “eliminate”, “murder”, “decimate” or “euthanize”, it means “provide with necessities for life or existence” When you maintain a garden, you don’t go in and kill all the flowers, you keep the weeds out to allow the flowers to flourish.

Framed through our current civilization, I completely agree, it makes zero sense, but I never believed for an instance it was meant for us.
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Guide to authoritarianism:

1. Invent problem (humanity fucked everything up, overpopulation, etc)
2. Offer solution (here's some handy guidelines for a post-catastrophe world, that I the guideline writer, happened to have a hand in bringing about!)
3. Control the population.

Give me one instance throughout history of a good society that didn't devolve into hell, that proclaimed the kinds of dystopian things that the stones describe, and then maybe I'll take your viewpoint seriously. But to me right now, it not only presupposes a conclusion in a very anti-scientific way, it also indirectly encourages us to do the very things that would positively result in a civilisational catastrophe.

I don't even take issue with the "maintain" bit. I take issue with the "permanent balance with nature bit" - it's absolute fucking hogwash.
 
ᛗᛜᛜᚺDᛜᎶ Ꮤᛨᚳᚴ said:
Stating a goal does not mean all the solutions for implementation are baked in. Because you believe there is not way to implement such a goal is no reason to discard the validity of said goal. You have to work to achieve goals and it always involves compromise, but having a set goal such as the above is a good thing IMO.
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Yeah... sorry, no. I've read the Gulag Archipelago. I know where all of this thinking leads. It leads to North Korea, and selling your children's corpses as food on the streets of Russia. It leads to the Holodomor, and it leads to Mr. Moustache himself.

Utopianism is authoritarianism disguised.
 
Medieval people would seem like zombies to us. Trudging around with their heads bowed, as the landowner creams off the riches.
Then look at today. Zombies trudging around with heads in their phones, as the rich get richer.
If lasting intervention comes in the form of atrocity, I couldn’t give a fuck.
It’s for their own good.
 
Orvillain said:
Guide to authoritarianism:

1. Invent problem (humanity fucked everything up, overpopulation, etc)
2. Offer solution (here's some handy guidelines for a post-catastrophe world, that I the guideline writer, happened to have a hand in bringing about!)
3. Control the population.

Give me one instance throughout history of a good society that didn't devolve into hell, that proclaimed the kinds of dystopian things that the stones describe, and then maybe I'll take your viewpoint seriously. But to me right now, it not only presupposes a conclusion in a very anti-scientific way, it also indirectly encourages us to do the very things that would positively result in a civilisational catastrophe.

I don't even take issue with the "maintain" bit. I take issue with the "permanent balance with nature bit" - it's absolute fucking hogwash.
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That’s because you’re framing everything through “what does this look like placed on our current world and civilization”, which is a mess already.

Put it through the lens of a few hundred people surviving some kind of world war or apocalypse, starting civilization over, I know I’d want to do about a million things differently and rushing to rebuild our current world wouldn’t even be a notion I’d consider if I were around. “Let’s recreate the exact world that made this happen!” doesn’t sound very bright.

Like, imagine if the population started over and they said “Hey guys, let’s not go and make a bunch of babies right away until we can actually feed and house them first…”, that doesn’t exactly sound irrational to me. Everyone wants to clutch pearls at the idea of population control as if it’s unintelligent to ensure we have the proper resources to sustain the population first, before creating the problem and trying to solve it after. “WE MUST CREATE LIFE EVEN IF WE CAN’T SUSTAIN IT!!!!” is one of the dumber human sentiments I’ve encountered in my time on this rock.

At one point in time I wanted to have children, but knew it was stupid to do so as I could barely afford to keep myself fed and housed, it did not seem irrational to me at the time to have those children and I can say 20 years later I was pretty fucking smart for not having them for that exact reason and many more.

The history of humanity is an endless list of atrocities all based upon massive imbalances of wealth and resources, IMO, the Guidestones were a literal attempt at guiding a future civilization away from that.
 
DrewJD82 said:
That’s because you’re framing everything through “what does this look like placed on our current world and civilization”, which is a mess already.
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Yes.

Do you know why I'm doing that?

Go on. Have a guess. I promise it is extremely logical, and also has a good amount of emotional intelligence behind it.

Have a guess, and then I'll deal with all the other stuff you've said. Let's not gish gallop.
 
Sascha Franck said:
An AI actually serving humans needed to care about humanity's biggest issues...
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I'm more concerned about the fact that humanity, collectively, doesn't generally care about humanity's biggest issues.

This brings us back to the "argument" (air quotes because everyone "arguing" is right, IMO) about over-population, "cancer on the earth", et al. Our biggest enemies right now are the economic forces that drive us unconditionally toward growth - often irrespective of population or the actual needs of that population.
 
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mbenigni said:
Are you suggesting that the problem isn't real?
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In many many ways, yes. See, Thomas Malthus got the overpopulation theory going in 1798. Except, his claims have been thoroughly debunked and disproven by now:

But it doesn't stop people from spreading his ideas to this day. Paul Erhlich wrote the Population Bomb in the 1960's, and that brought the concept into everyone's home and everyone's every day lives. But there truly isn't much else to the theory beyond what Malthus originally predicted; none of which came to pass.

Same with Al Gore saying that we'd lose the ice caps by 2016. Never happened. There are all these little anti-science chicken Licken types running around proclaiming the sky is falling down. It never does. A lot of high-profile population doom predictions were overstated, and some were flat-out wrong. This is no different.

Ehrlich-style catastrophism does a disservice to the entire human race. Plenty of overpopulation prophets made confident predictions that failed. Malthus underestimated innovation. Ehrlich underestimated innovation. That does not prove every environmental concern is fake, but it does prove that apocalyptic certainty is not science. It is often just ideology wearing a lab coat.

If you trust these people, but won't trust a preacher when he screams about fire and armageddon, then you've been captured by ideology.
 
FuzzyAce said:
Context matters. "Commandments". They are not suggestions. :rofl You either accept them wholly or not. I mean, they can be cherry picked all day but that's not the point of them.
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Religion presents these to us as "Commandments". IMO they make a lot more sense and bear more wisdom if they're taken as blessings. Sure, "do not kill" is a good, hard and fast rule. But do not covet?? Unless you act on your covetousness, it seems a little off the rails to call it a sin. But obviously we lead a better life if we're happy with our own lot. So, a blessing to my loved ones: "May you not covet." Or as the Great Buddha taught: Do not want.

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Modern religion has gotten a little off track with the word "sin", anyway. So much weight. The original translation of the word was simply "waste", as in don't waste your opportunity to have a better day, life, whatever...
 
Orvillain said:
In many many ways, yes. See, Thomas Malthus got the overpopulation theory going in 1798. Except, his claims have been thoroughly debunked and disproven by now:

But it doesn't stop people from spreading his ideas to this day. Paul Erhlich wrote the Population Bomb in the 1960's, and that brought the concept into everyone's home and everyone's every day lives. But there truly isn't much else to the theory beyond what Malthus originally predicted; none of which came to pass.

Same with Al Gore saying that we'd lose the ice caps by 2016. Never happened. There are all these little anti-science chicken Licken types running around proclaiming the sky is falling down. It never does. A lot of high-profile population doom predictions were overstated, and some were flat-out wrong. This is no different.

Ehrlich-style catastrophism does a disservice to the entire human race. Plenty of overpopulation prophets made confident predictions that failed. Malthus underestimated innovation. Ehrlich underestimated innovation. That does not prove every environmental concern is fake, but it does prove that apocalyptic certainty is not science. It is often just ideology wearing a lab coat.

If you trust these people, but won't trust a preacher when he screams about fire and armageddon, then you've been captured by ideology.
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Well, I didn't quote you regarding overpopulation; I quoted you regarding "overpopulation, fucking everything up, etc." I'm not a research scientist, so to an extent my judgments will always be "second hand". But I think it's empirically evident that we are fucking a lot of things (perhaps not everything) up. (And we're not slowing down; in fact, corporate/ economic/ nationalistic interests are driving unconditional growth.)

tl;dr - You can't talk about population meaningfully without talking specifically about the demands that population is making on its environs, according to its technologies and usage. The body count is just an integer.
 
mbenigni said:
Well, I didn't quote you regarding overpopulation; I quoted you regarding "overpopulation, fucking everything up, etc." I'm not a research scientist, so to an extent my judgments will always be "second hand". But I think it's empirically evident that we are fucking a lot of things (perhaps not everything) up. (And we're not slowing down; in fact, corporate/ economic/ nationalistic interests are driving unconditional growth.)

tl;dr - You can't talk about population meaningfully without talking specifically about the demands that population is making on its environs, according to its technologies and usage. The body count is just an integer.
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You measure one way, someone else measures another way. You come to different conclusions. How do you know who is right and who is wrong? How do you know there even is a right or a wrong?

Empiricism posits that all knowledge comes from experience, observation, and our senses; not reason and logic. But we already know our senses lie to us. We already know experience is subjective and thus its basis as a form of knowledge is quite shaky and needs to be tested thoroughly. We know that observation can be warped by outside influences that we are or even aren't aware of.

Personally, I don't actually see much evidence of unconditional growth. I see much evidence of conditioned and staged growth, gatekeeping, and protection rackets designed to keep people in positions of power, and to pull the ladder up behind them.
 
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