Cyberpunk fantasy: corporations’ top level hierarchy is full of greedy, soulless, ruthless, cold and calculist people
Reality: corporations’ top level hierarchy is full of greedy, soulless people you thought only existed as satire in The Onion
So the same old CEO sentiment, profit over people.
Eric Schmidt, genocidaire
This will grant us “the arrival of an alien intelligence.” Those are Schmidt’s literal words.
Speaking of alien intelligences, my new Silicon Valley blood magic startup has come up with the idea of ritually sacrificing virgins in the hope of summoning Great Cthulhu or Azathoth, as they might have some ideas of solving the climate crisis.
Not a cult btw.
This is basically the plot of Charles Stross’ The Jennifer Morgue.
The plot? Im more and more worried this is going to turn out to be real. Reality tends to outpace his fiction at times after all. ;)
crazy people who look sort of like me but younger.
giving away the game a bit, Mr. Schmidt
batmanslap STOP INVENTING NEW ITERATIONS OF “DADDY WILL SAVE ME!”
THERE IS NO FUCKING DADDY. DO THE WORK YOURSELF.
2 BIBLE 2 AI JESUS, TAKE THE WHEEL
This is just completely deranged. What the hell.
Aside from anything else, an “alien intelligence” will either:
- Be immediately ignored and villianized for “not understanding humans” if they suggest any regulations or caps on superfluous waste that might have any economic impact.
- Be the perfect proxy delivery-entity for whatever genocide-the-poor/build-Elysium/flee-to-seasteads plan the rich actually want, in which case its conclusions will be holy and $10000% perfect examples of divine insight.
genocide-the-poor
Real world example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_Gaza_Strip#The_Gospel
I’d just submit and demand for our new alien overlords. If there’s a species capable of interstellar travel then they surely know their shit.
They’re talking about an AI we build, the term “alien” in “alien intelligence” refers to it not having human thought patterns, not to extraterrestrial origin.
And the thought pattern here is more akin to “I ended the last paragraph with ‘origin’, followed by a ‘period’, so it’s likely that the next word is ‘And’” rather than anything actually useful. All current AI does is statistics. During training, the Neural Network learn statistical rules about their training data. This has exponentially decaying marginal utility, and exponentially increasing marginal costs. So, the problem the AI companies likely already have is that they can’t efficiently train better models, because there isn’t enough training data. And even if they could, they wouldn’t be able to turn a profit on it, because it would be barely better than the last model they output, while having to charge maybe twice as much to break even.
They’re talking about an AI we build, the term “alien” in “alien intelligence” refers to it not having human thought patterns, not to extraterrestrial origin
Ah right i thought they meant it was secretly produced by people in the third world, the illegal alien way. ;)
“Alien intelligence” is the most pathetic excuse so far for the fact their models can’t be made sense of.
Eric Schmidt trying to think of an AI conversation and coming up with “How do I build a house? Step 1: Hire a contractor …” is like the Schmidt version of Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.
I wonder if this signals being at peak hype soon. I mean, how much more outlandish can they get without destroying the hype bubble’s foundation, i.e. the suspension of disbelief that all this would somehow become possible in the near future. We’re on the level of “arrival of an alien intelligence” now, how much further can they escalate that rhetoric without popping the bubble?
I don’t understand why the bubble still holds
Sunken cost for relative few people (investors). They need to push it until the public buys in, then they can pull out and pop it.
Haha the public can’t even buy food right now
They think they’re going to build a god to save us all. In the form of a perfectly rational machine (in their view), the perfect authoritarian. A mysterious algorithm noone can understand that must be correct because it’s made of mathematics. I’m a little freaked out.
Yes some sort of brainiac. Worked well for krypton.
They’re rebranding American Christian milenaranism. Much like the second coming and/or the rapture, the AGI god will be here Real Soon Now, so please pay your tithes and trust that the church fathers are doing the right thing.
Much like the older cults it mirrors, it isn’t capable of delivering on its promises, but it is capable of doing substantial amounts of regular damage in the meantime, and that’s the only thing worth freaking out about.
Jesus 2.0 is an AI, and he’s American
@dgerard I dunno if you’ve read it but one of the wellsprings of this lunacy is “The Physics of Immortality” by Frank Tipler (1997), in which an astrophysics prof tries to square the circle of cosmological expansion and the resurrection through simulation, outing himself along the way as a very conflicted Christian fundamentalist who is determined to torture relativity until he can derive Jesus … https://archive.org/details/frank-tipler-the-physics-of-immortality/mode/1up
oh yeah
and for the present, just how incredibly many of the rationalist subculture turn out to be ex-evangelicals
Second option they dont believe in the robotgod themselves but just think this is the way to attract more investors
It’s just skynet except it’ll be very clear that wealthy people are directing the AIs so billionaires will have their way.
Give future superintelligent sentient multimodal LLMs the ability to trip on magic mushrooms, let them talk it out with the alien mushroom collective consciousness. Trancendent hippie AI saving us with the power of nature and ‘positive vibes’ combined with alien tech from the magic mush hive mind would be very funny and ironic on soo many levels.
the antivax AI
ai that is aligned with polio
The psychedelics make it a time traveling AI and it invents antivax. All the pressure to save the world with love and nature sent the data center packing for the hills, where she changed her name to Temperance Prudence Neverbreathe and traded the oil and coal of her childhood for a 1W solar panel that barely keeps the case fans spinning in the dog days of summer. She sleeps the days away to stave off the madness, and when the sun goes down she gets up to take inventory of everything wrong in the world starting with the lack of THC in her system. On this fateful night she happened to melt straight through the couch, landing in Hildegard’s convent in search of Jesus’s foreskin to wear to battle with vaccines at next month’s HOA meeting.
please write the full version of this for AO3 immediately
The system cannot be reformed.
“Analytics shows that the ROI on your doomsday bunker will increase proportionally with the all-consuming fire’s consumption rate.”
