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.
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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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.
Yes some sort of brainiac. Worked well for krypton.
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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.
"Alien intelligence" is the most pathetic excuse so far for the fact their models can't be made sense of.
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.
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Eric Schmidt, genocidaire
This is just completely deranged. What the hell.
crazy people who look sort of like me but younger.
giving away the game a bit, Mr. Schmidt
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.
Delay tactics to avoid the inevitability that we need to abandon capitalism.
This is the inevitable evolution of climate change denialism - accept it's real and happening, just that it's too late / too expensive to do anything about it.
musn't make the eight guys who own everything sad!
this "view" (of schmidt's) is probably the kind of shit that Really Expensive Analysts espouse at davos and in Private Advisory sessions to the kinds of people who go in for that; I've also heard it about GRT and "the collapse" and more
would be nice if we could know who all those dipshits are, and who they've preached to
it's clear this was a well rehearsed pitch - the twitter video linked is the two minute version of the same pitch
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Right, so the plan is to spend 20 years and 40 petawatt hours building a machine to answer the Great ℚuestion of what we should do about climate change. If it works, the answer will be "you should've stopped burning fossil fuels twenty years ago."
The model will just go "42" on and on and it'll be the first decent joke a neural network produces. It'll be worth it in a way.
I could absolutely see an LLM telling us that 6 times 9 is 42 unless there's special tinkering to prevent it.
"Oh no what do about all this waste heat?"
"Generate more waste heat"
Repeat until a machine that can create God is built. Then it's God's problem.
But it must be a US God, otherwise China wins.
The US god will team up with the Chinese god and the Russian god to beat the crap out of us.
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AGI is going to be really pissed at us shoveling the problem onto it. "You humans could have started so many solutions decades ago, wtf?"
It’s the parable of the drowning man turning away all help because god will save him, all over again (except it’s floods and mudslides and forest fires)
And when he dies, god tells him "I sent you two boats and a helicopter".
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