Will technology end humanity?

[ihateclowns]

AI is basically a red herring.

It doesn't do much that is actually valuable. In terms of economic value, studies continue to find that it rarely makes companies more profitable.

We don't need studies it is common sense when people are kicked out of jobs they won't spend on things frivolously hoping they would get job back in 6 months and after a while people will only spend on survival nothing else. For the people in silicon valley who act as the smartest humans on the earth they are actually pretty dumb and stupid. They think AI will make them super wealthy but they are just doing what they are being told.

But some governments like Trump's are pushing AI while EU started cracking down on AI and social media because things are really getting out of control. So, it won't take a genius to figure out there is a clear agenda to push AI everywhere to cause total chaos and complete anarchy.

When did celebrities ever endorse adopting a technology to make our lives better? Since we are on the occult forum it needn't be said that this is the work of sick entities who want to keep humanity under their control there is no conspiracy there.

 

[Eldros]

Yet another incarnation of the same, old, boring "hUmAnS eXtInCt ThEmSeLvEs" trope. I cordially despise how slimy morals all those narratives seem imply. The whole conversation is tediously derivative and completely unproductive. There is no "we" to control anything, and it's not some wild force of nature to finish us off by itself - even if it could, there's very little actual, practical power that it could have beyond what is already in hands of some humans. It's just a tool, ultimately.

I get your point, but I’m not sure “it’s just a tool” really answers the question.
We make tools all the time, but sometimes the consequences end up being way bigger than what we intended..
So I’m not really interested in the whole “AI will kill us all” story. I’m more curious about if we can actually stay in control of something as strong as AI.

 

[ihateclowns]

I’m more curious about if we can actually stay in control of something as strong as AI.

Someone creates something and says it is beyond me "I can't control the monster is alive", these are all good for sci-fi like Frankenstein. But we know the people in silicon valley are doing things intentionally to destroy society and humans.

There is a debate whether AI will be conscious some are for it and some against it, as long as we have clowns in the governments AI will control us. Surveillance is a just a mechanism instead of a guy pushing the button some AI will do it that is all.

 

[Eldros]

AI is basically a red herring.

It doesn't do much that is actually valuable. In terms of economic value, studies continue to find that it rarely makes companies more profitable. The reason that we are hearing so much about it is mostly just because of hype, which is a side-effect of the AI-bubble, which is in turn a very conventional economic phenomenon resulting from low interest rates intended to juice an economy which does not have many avenues of genuine growth for investment money to be directed toward. In other words, the economy is stagnant (largely for reasons having to do with resource depletion) so the government keeps interest low, but since there is little valuable work for that additional money to do, it just goes into creates bubbles. AI just happens to be the latest bubble.

Consumer prices for AI are currently being kept artificially low by the bubble (ie the investment/market capture phase that the technology is currently in). Once the bubble passes, the price that consumers need to pay for AI usage will go up dramatically, leading to a similar dramatic decrease in usage (because, again, it is not actually that useful).

The other big thing about AI is its surveillance value, but in the end I doubt that in itself will be much of a game changer either.

The actual existential and civilization-wrecking threats that we are facing are the ecological crisis and the resource depletion crisis. Anything that takes our eyes off of those balls is an epi-phenomenal distraction.

Maybe we're giving AI too much attention when there are bigger problems in front of us.
But even if AI isn't as useful as people think, what happens when we keep making more powerful technology and start depending on it.
I don't think AI will wipe us out. I just ask myself if we'll stay in control, or we will start changing our lives around it without even noticing...

 

[Nembra]

I get your point, but I’m not sure “it’s just a tool” really answers the question.
We make tools all the time, but sometimes the consequences end up being way bigger than what we intended..
So I’m not really interested in the whole “AI will kill us all” story. I’m more curious about if we can actually stay in control of something as strong as AI.

It's never "the Consequences", it's always just particular people making personal choices. The same story since the mythical beginnings of time - the Tree is good, humans make bad choices. What irks me in this whole topic is the insinuation that human race has some collective intention, will or responsibility. There is never a "we".

Also, AI is not strong. It's at best smart, it can only become powerful if you give it the nuke button (or equivalent) that several humans already have under their finger. How is the question of controlling AI any different from controlling those humans?

 

[PedroM]

Just mass panic. In my opinion, it seems just like War of the Worlds urban legend and the RPG/Dungeons and Dragons that happened in the early 80´s.

 

[Eldros]

It's never "the Consequences", it's always just particular people making personal choices. The same story since the mythical beginnings of time - the Tree is good, humans make bad choices. What irks me in this whole topic is the insinuation that human race has some collective intention, will or responsibility. There is never a "we".

Also, AI is not strong. It's at best smart, it can only become powerful if you give it the nuke button (or equivalent) that several humans already have under their finger. How is the question of controlling AI any different from controlling those humans?

Thing is, I’m not really worried about AI becoming powerful on its own, more about what happens when we start giving it more and more power.
Because even if there’s no real “we”, people making their own choices can still end up creating something nobody really intended.
And when you add climate change, nuclear weapons, and all the other things we’ve managed to create… well, things can get pretty messy.

 

[Frater M.M.]

It reminds me of Isaac Asimov. He didn't really need extraterrestrials or evil machines to explore these ideas. In many cases, his intelligent robots actually helped humans.
What's cool about it is that things could still go wrong simply because humans didn't fully understand what they'd created.
Feels pretty relevant today.

Interesting article..
Back when I used to read Asimov, I always liked how he would take those

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and turn them into completely different stories. The rules were simple, but things got interesting pretty quickly when he started asking, “Yeah, but what if…?”

Same with AI today.
Maybe AI needs its own version of Asimov’s laws - a few simple principles around things like not harming people, respecting human control, being honest, and serving humanity.
Coming up with the rules is the easy part. The difficulty starts when two of them tell you to do different things.

Yeah, his robot stories were great. I read them all as a teenager. Aside from being entertaining sci-fi adventures, I guess they really were a way to highlight the difficulties of controlling AI by examining edge cases.

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Consumer prices for AI are currently being kept artificially low by the bubble (ie the investment/market capture phase that the technology is currently in). Once the bubble passes, the price that consumers need to pay for AI usage will go up dramatically, leading to a similar dramatic decrease in usage (because, again, it is not actually that useful).

Yeah, this is the question really. On the one hand, it’s destroyed a lot of jobs (like my old one). On the other, access to the best models (in ChatGPT) still seems quite limited, even if the underlying API cost per token has actually been coming down. They’ve also started putting ads into the Free and Go plans over here, after testing them in the US earlier this year.

Obviously, investors will eventually want to see a return, especially if/when OpenAI goes public. It may well get to the point where some companies find it cheaper to hire humans, or use a hybrid model with fewer humans and more limited AI usage.

I don’t know enough about the tech side to even venture a guess as to whether cheaper hardware and lower operating costs are likely to offset rising ChatGPT prices (for example).

 

[Eldros]

Yeah, his robot stories were great. I read them all as a teenager. Aside from being entertaining sci-fi adventures, I guess they really were a way to highlight the difficulties of controlling AI by examining edge cases.

Yes, he wrote quite a few robot stories.
There’s one character who appears throughout many of his books:

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. He was a very long-lived robot who lived for many years.
I really enjoyed his

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series...

 

[Kepler]

Yes, he wrote quite a few robot stories.
There’s one character who appears throughout many of his books:

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. He was a very long-lived robot who lived for many years.
I really enjoyed his

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series...

Foundation is a great example of how Ai helps humans end. By ending I mean evolve past what they were into something alien. More than the species was before, and more than the sum of the new parts. Galaxia.
With Ai helping process the shadow of the human for a new somatic existence with the evolutionary advantage establishing new consciousness.
Movies like I am Mother have this theme in them too, maybe not as drastic.
Fear of destruction by Ai is a fear of change, in letting go of the old. A hypervigilant fear of sentries and protectors showing themselves in the irrational outbursts responding to these changes as threats to things that aren't valid to the species anymore. Eventually guided to standing down which allows the old to be let go and the somatic realigns to new boundaries of the emergent consciousness.

 

[Eldros]

Foundation is a great example of how Ai helps humans end. By ending I mean evolve past what they were into something alien. More than the species was before, and more than the sum of the new parts. Galaxia.
With Ai helping process the shadow of the human for a new somatic existence with the evolutionary advantage establishing new consciousness.
Movies like I am Mother have this theme in them too, maybe not as drastic.
Fear of destruction by Ai is a fear of change, in letting go of the old. A hypervigilant fear of sentries and protectors showing themselves in the irrational outbursts responding to these changes as threats to things that aren't valid to the species anymore. Eventually guided to standing down which allows the old to be let go and the somatic realigns to new boundaries of the emergent consciousness.

I think fearing AI destruction assumes that most societies would have AI deeply integrated into their systems and infrastructure.
But an AI attack would probably affect mostly the societies that actually depend heavily on AI, - and maybe the ones closely connected to them - not necessarily the whole world equally.

 

[Frater M.M.]

Yes, he wrote quite a few robot stories.
There’s one character who appears throughout many of his books:

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. He was a very long-lived robot who lived for many years.
I really enjoyed his

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series...

Yeah, I remember him from Caves of Steel. Great stuff.

I didn't get into Foundation series until many years later when I heard half of it on YouTube (I used to be more into metaphysics than ethics/politics/sociology). There's a rather charming BBC

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made from it with lots of strange 70s synthesiser noises reminiscent of Jon Pertwee Doctor Who episodes or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio play.