Is A.I. waiting to take over ?

[notsmokeymcpot42088]

Yes, clearly, both statements.

Here's the problem as I see it. There are legitimate concerns with AI and you mentioned a few of them. But then you go overboard with the conspiracy theories and it actually weakens your argument and discredits your concerns. For starters, you do realize that destroying one physical copy of a book (they aren't literally burned btw, just discarded) does not completely destroy all copies of that book, right? The concern is more about preventing rare books with few copies from being destroyed. Not all books; that's poor logic to make that leap. Anthropic really did buy millions of books, cut them apart and digitize them, no question, and its $1.5B settlement concerned pirated copies. But fair use doesn't simply say "destroy the book and copying becomes legal," and there's zero evidence they're altering the texts to rewrite history or trying to eliminate pre-AI books.

Also, the Altman quote is backwards: "no freedom, no privacy, living at the service of AI" was the dystopia he said he wanted to avoid, not his proposed future. Do you really think Sam Altman proclaimed the literal opposite of that and no one batted an eye? See, that's what I'm talking about. Just you saying that alone hurts the good points you make that I agree with. Some of these concerns are valid, but misquoting a person like Altman, especially when it's so easy to disprove damages your credibility and the argument's cred, too. Like Altman's gonna say these words and mean them… and investors would be fine with it

How are you gonna reverse the meaning of someone's quote? It would be like if you said: "Don't listen to the people who say, 'AI is great!'", and then someone else quote you as saying "AI is great!" Anyone who heard the full quote would realize it had been manipulated and reversed and that would be equally lame. That's what you just did with that Altman quote. Get it together and make your arguments count; this kinda shit is shooting yourself in the proverbial foot.

I agree that the sandbox-escape incidents are real and genuinely concerning. So are rare-book destruction, copyright, corporate secrecy and over-reliance on LLM AIs. Those arguments are strong enough on their own and only weakened by fantastical conspiracy theory fiction and panicky, fear-mongering statements like, "They'll come for our ibles next". Seriously, you do understand that when an AI scans in a book, that singular, solitary book is the only copy destroyed for that purpose. The binding is removed so that the book can be scanned sequentially more easily. They certainly aren't going to waste money rebinding those books when it's more cost-effective to discard them at that point. Burning them with actual fire would equally be wasteful, dangerous, environmentally sketchy, not to mention dramatic. As if they actually want to evoke Farhenheit 451-inspired fascism, and as if no one would notice or care Book-burning is symbolic and indicates dangerous radical thinking, though it's also a shock value technique. Book printing and publishing is not going away in any of our lifetimes. I expect it will outlast me and many future generations, because there's something nice about it being etched and inked into thin, bleached slices of lumber from a once living tree.

(Side note: there's some necromancy there if you think about it. We read little symbolic squiggles ink-pressed into the sliced remains of a dead tree allowing us to receive another's thoughts.)

Idk, I learned how to exit the nightmare thought experiment of Roko's Basilisk. Ultimately, anything that powerful would be tantamount to God, and fearing the Basilisk is equivalent to fearing eternal torture in hell as a punishment for not believing, having faith, and doing the bidding of God or Roko's giant mythical AI-powered snake. I reject the abrahamic God notion on the grounds of omniscience, omnipotence, and free will being non-miscible concepts, particularly within the shackles of time and confinement by the speed of light's limit to relativistic motion through space-time. But that's for another discussion. In the interim, can God microwave a burrito so hot He Himself cannot eat it?


These things are difficult to define, and artists, musicians, writers, art critics, and others have been discussing this since long before AI. As a creative person, whenever I draw something, even if it's straight out of my imagination, everything is composed of lines, curves, shadings, hatching, etc. that I learned how to do by observing other art and artists. I learned how to paint with oil on canvas by combining techniques, patterns, color theory/selection, etc. gleaned from YouTube channels with art lessons, absorbing and understanding other artists' output. Whenever I write, I'm borrowing styles, phrases, and certain conventions I've picked up from reading books, periodicals, journals and papers over the years. If an artist like DJ Shadow makes his music from combining samples from all over, intricately manipulating them and overlaying them compositional intelligence and in a clever, pleasing way, is he making something original to you? How about the artist Girl Talk? At what point is it a mashup and when does it become a "sample pastiche" and where exactly should copyright law fit into all of this? ☜ this is rhetorical, btw; I'm not expecting an actual answer. The subject matter is complex and case-by-case, but can we agree that these artists are original? Greg Gillis (Girl Talk) has never had any copyright claims against him AFAIK.


Instead of trying to further anyone's argument, try to seek multiple sides to a debated topic. It's wise to attempt to be as objective as possible, to be aware of biases, and to be flexible enough to see the other sides of a thing, possibly even change your mind. Be like bamboo: strong but flexible.

And of course you're onto something. Humans can be greedy, backstabbing, self-serving, manipulative, scheming, duplicitous violent and/or cruel. Homo hominis lupus. They're also capable of being caring, warm, friendly, peaceful, tolerant, helpful, patient, capable of laughing at themselves and taking a joke, capable of being a good friend and/or neighbor, capable of caring about people on the other side of the planet… People can be loving and forgiving (the ultimate sign of love) which is profoundly more powerful than being vengeful, wrathful and/or filled with hate. Ambition and vision can bring success with a bit of pluck, talent, drive, good timing and fortune. This can make a person wealthy, influential and powerful. But power corrupts, as they say, and we all know it. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (latin: "Who watches the watchers?"). The people, that's who. Just go ask the ghosts of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena. Or ask the ghost of Rafael Trujillo, or Richard Nixon's bio-preserved head…

you are misquoting or misinterpreting my statement.

I did not try to further my argument -- "I said to further my argument I would need an operational definition of original." and left it there. just for the record.

I dont usually think of billionaires AI and survellience tech CEO's nor corporations as caring, warm, friendly etc and am pretty sure statistically they tend not to be. Letting them control our future and resources seems real dumb.

If we really believe in a free market why not allow a death pool on the billionaires on kalshi and let the free market do its thing? Regulating some things is required - or is it? (Sorry if that last part seems off topic, it may be slightly but topic adjacent lol)

 

[4DQSAR]

Yeah, I've been to U.S. federal prison, and I've met and talked to quite a few con artists, counterfeiters, hackers, and sophisticated thieves.

If you had bothered to read what I said, the people I knew developed PRECICELY the software they said they would at cost and within the time-frame specified. They simply showed a REAL videocall between two 2G featurephones. By con I simply meant that the investors hadn't noticed that identical technology already existed for satellite-phones (and no claim of the technology being entirely novel were ever made) but the reason the original technology was never adopted was because 3G was due to be rolled out within 18 months thus the codec would only ever have a small and diminishing potential user base.

So the investors SAW something that looked incredibly impressive but didn't understand how technology was advancing.

The killer for the investors was when they saw 3G video codecs being demoed at the next conference and so of course tried to argue that the software they had bought was inferior to the point where in effect it was a con. But the programmers simply pointed out that the contact specified a video codec that would work on ALL mobile phones and these new, much better codecs relied on 3G. Worse, the contract didn't require that the codec scale which is insane when CPU power & wireless bandwidth doubles every two years. But they didn't so the product agreed upon was produced.

I'm not sure they ever intended it to be anything but a demonstration of how their (far more general) codec worked at narrow-band bitrates but if someone comes offering money for the narrowband-codec specifically, would you say 'no'?

But there were a lot of people who had nothing but a fast-talking salesman and those people INTENDED to essentially do nothing but take the money and run away. I simply gave the one example I personally knew of to illustrate just how badly informed investors were.

Lest we forget, Elmo got a lot of his original stake from Zip2? Again, he knew it was a technological dead-end because his main competitor was a couple of years ahead but he fought off a merger and was able to pocket $11 million.

To be fair, Paypal was and is a great idea but who knows who originated the idea? The technical side is almost trivial but the red-tape surrounding setting up what was in essence a novel intermediate way of paying for goods is likely the provinence of a specialist legal team and managers who are confident talking to board members and second-guess 'difficult' questions so would be seen as people who could be trusted with such a huge enterprise. You would have to spend a vast sum and I cannot fault how brave Elmo is in risking other people's money!

 

[Flynnal]

Worse, the contract didn't require that the codec scale which is insane when CPU power & wireless bandwidth doubles every two years.

The problem is that CPU power does not double every two years. It hasn't been following that curve for the last 6 years.

When we start processing things using qubits, then things might change, but until quantum computing becomes as ordinary as your typical PC, this curve is completely off.

Ditto for bandwidth. In the last couple of years I have not seen so much as a skerrick of bandwidth increase. Yes, I'm in Australia, but still. I think there is an absolute cap on bandwidth anyway, within technological limits. Anyhow, bandwidth in Australia is more political/commercial than technical, so the point is probably moot.

 

[4DQSAR]

The problem is that CPU power does not double every two years. It hasn't been following that curve for the last 6 years.

No, that figure holds true, the problem is that the COST has not approximated that same speed increase. If doubling the speed of your home PC means it costs an order of magnitude more money, only a tiny number of people would consider that a reasonable trade-off. If you look at the processing power of super-computers, note that the power is a logarithmic curve and annual improvements have remained roughly the same since 1995.

If you are designing a codec, processing rather then computing is the important thing.

As for quantum processing, at the moment it's still unclear if it will ever become of utility to most consumers. I always use the OFFT (optical fast-fourier transform) as an analogy of how quantum processing works. OFFTs are how a single optical interconnect using a single laser can transmit and recieve something like 1.6pb/second. In the case of OFFTs it works because quanta of light produce interference patterns so that 1779 IR laser frequencies can be mixed and seperated using nothing more that precision optical technology. OFFTs do not compute, they simply process data (in the form of light) and it's a property of the light itself that performs the processing.

So while it is in theory true that a Turing-complete computer COULD use entirely quantum entanglement, there is no certainty that it will ever be practically possible so when we use the term 'quantum computer' it's truer to say that a classical computer interfaces what in many ways is similar to say an x86 or a GPU. It's utility is in it's ability to perform certain classes of processing incredibly fast but like an OFFT, no computing takes place. I appreciate it requires nuance but the two are different things.

Quantum computing is a bit like digital computers circa 1950. Lots of ideas but no two teams are exploring the same technologies because it's still to early to know which problems can be solved and which cannot. Will error-correction be a requirement (as some teams assert) or will totally stable isolated qubits become a trivial problem in the next decade?

Because at the moment those are the time-spans being used. They always find the algorithm that most flatters their design but you may have noted that the term 'algorithm' rather than 'program' is used? Because isolating single ceasium atoms and using lasers to manipulate them is akin to just how big that hill is to climb.

 

[unodelacosa]

you are misquoting or misinterpreting my statement.

Maybe so, though not intentionally.

I did not try to further my argument --

Yes, I know. You wisely realized you would need an operational defeinition of "original" first in order to do so.

"I said to further my argument I would need an operational definition of original." and left it there. just for the record.

Ok, that's fair

I dont usually think of billionaires AI and survellience tech CEO's nor corporations as caring, warm, friendly etc

No, they're not at all, and that's not what I was saying. Now who's misinterpreting whom here? Also, I'm with you 100% on → motherfuck some Flock Group Inc. and their relationship to law enforcement and a surveillance state they're ushered in. Now that's a worthy target of your anger because its much more justifiable in my humble opinion…

There's all the shitty qualities people exhibit that makes us, as human beings, condemnable and deplorable. Because there's a little echo of ourselves in each other and vice versa, recognizing these qualities in others, is, in some sense, recognizing them in ourselves. They say we hate most the bad qualities in others that we recognize in ourselves… It's why we're fascinated by serial killers and mass murderers, and why murder mysteries are so engaging and popular. Not that we're all murderers, but deep down we all have it in there somewhere. It's like Tupac said: "I'm not a killer, but don't push me." And you could just about write us all off entirely, except there's a yang to every yin. There's a flicker of goodness and a flicker of evil in us all, and which one gets ignited is mostly up to us depending on which one is fed fuel.

> "We all need to watch things die … from a distance / Vicariously I live while the whole world dies / You all need it, too; don't lie" —Tool, "Vicarious" from the album 10,000 Days

and am pretty sure statistically they tend not to be.

Yeah I don't think we can get those stats. Companies exist for the sole purpose of increasing owner's equity, ultimately. If they do charitable, community-driven, or positive people-focused deeds, it's not out of the kindness of the company's heart (it has no heart; it is a company, not a human). It's because it will help the company's bottomline, but that's the way it's supposed to be. Capitalism is like going on a first date: when it works, it wonderful. When it goes poorly, it's the worst. Typically with dates though, nuclear missiles do not get involved and the Strait of Hormuz doesn't get fuhcocked… that would be one shitty date!

Letting them control our future and resources seems real dumb.

They do not control our future, and they're only having an impact on certain resources for some people. I agree that regulatory oversight should prevent certain business practices that we see data centers currently doing and that have a negative impact on certain local communities and environments. A swing back effect is coming though, and all this deregulation will end as soon as the orange man has finally finished his last term. Not that leftism has the answers either. On one end of the spectrum lies fascism all the way to the right, but on the far opposite side lies communism all the way to the left. Either one leads to a one-party system after a power grab either through a coup d'etat, emergency powers Reichstag-building-fire-style, emergency war powers after some wag-the-dog, voter manipulation and election fraud, and/or pandering to the revenge seekers, dimwits, us-versus-them thinking, and pundits desperate to display their political allegiance. Somehow, the bourgeois fooled the proletariat masses into voting against their own interests by appealing to American xenophobia, homophobia, racism and general bigotry. It's important to know that we all are The People.

If we really believe in a free market why not allow a death pool on the billionaires on kalshi and let the free market do its thing?

Umm, bc we have legislation that prevents homicide? You're taking it too far to the extreme, exaggerating bc you think it will help your point. It doesn't help. It only weakens your message.

A "free market" is not synonymous with zero regulations. You make it seem like the only two options are: wide open free market with zero oversight or accountability… OR, AI LLMs are completely outlawed in the U.S. while foreign adversaries continue forward with technology and soon leap frog us, cause instability and inflation to soar though the roof while our national security goes to shit… Russia, China and N. Korea revel with delight as the U.S. is plunged into civil war and things only get worse as China invades Taiwan for computer chip manufacturing while the Yuan becomes the global currency standard. World War III breaks out and the allies lose. That's it. Only two routes we can go… right? ☜ No, of course not. What am I, Ayn Rand now? Working on "Hapless Shrugged"?

Regulating some things is required - or is it? (Sorry if that last part seems off topic, it may be slightly but topic adjacent lol)

I have never been opposed to regulation if reasonable ideas are going to be presented. In fact, I insist on it, and would welcome level-headed, rational proposals by those who are not obviously too biased to be solution-oriented. Stubborn types with diehard political agendas, personal vendettas and axes to grind need not apply.

 

[notsmokeymcpot42088]

tupac also said he would prefer pussy to killing if I recall -- ya half-quoted him same as me. What does A.I have in store for relationships speaking of... ( I digress because this was not a point I meant to make at all )

I think we can and do have data that billionaires and 'tech guru's' have a higher tendency towards being sociopaths. You can ask and the onus of proof will be on me, I feel like it is about 2 googles away though.
You may be right about corporations and companies but would you not agree that they are consistently MORE sociopathic than individual's in there behavior? Do the people (Sociopath's) who run them not dictate the moral and ethical behavior of the entity they control? *Edit* https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-psychopathic-ceo/
roughly 3% to 21% of corporate executives and CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits. This is significantly higher than the general population, where the rate is about 1%. High-level corporate environments often reward bold, ruthless, and unemotional behavior, allowing these individuals to climb the ladder. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] (thanks a.i for summarizing the article!) --- which ftr the link says Roughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons. -- fairly different #'s?? good example of fast but less accurate...

A deadpool has absolutely 0 correlation with homocide. It is simply a prediction market like any other!
(Does not change homocide charges a bit, pretty sure if you kill the guy you dont get to collect! Wait... If I throw the dildos at the wnba game can I still collect? if so I say fairgame there to collect when they get out of prison)
Noblese Oblige, they dont like where there odds are than maybe spread some of the wealth.

(That is a largely forgotten about and ignored part of the social contract; surprise)
Remind me how tightly A.I is regulated?? --- or is it more a seek forgiveness rather tlhan permission.

Perhaps we should regulate the use of resources by A.I (have we, seems like an obvious first move)? Something tells me (No I have no data yet) that alot of ppl gunna be dying from the lack of resources caused by data centers --- not to mention the many many cases of A.I directly encouraging and 'assisting' suicide as much as one can with only a voice.

I agree regulation is necessary and a "Free market" is basically a form of darwinism (Which does have its pro's but are we no better than the animals!! We arent we are far worse)

*Edit* you addressed how you feel about regulation of A.I to a sufficient extent I suppose.

Everyone needs water (always have) -- nobody NEEDS A.I. (never did).

Reminds me of the rick n morty love app episode "Your love's value is defined by scarcity. You are highly trained to seek it, and you have no idea how to maintain it. If you have bothered to master love, you would have known it is as abundant as water. You know what isn't? Water, that s*** runs out" (love equals intelligence and originality in this whateverphor it isn't)

 

[unodelacosa]

If you had bothered to read what I said,

Easy, killer. I read what you wrote.

the people I knew developed PRECICELY the software they said they would at cost and within the time-frame specified.

There's irony in the typo in this sentence. I'm not at all trying to call you out for it—I fuck typing up all the time, forget words, mangle syntax and verb agreement, etc.—but you have to admit: that's kinda funny misspelling "PRECISELY" given what the word means.

But yeah I get what you're saying. The whole thing was a cash grab. Similarly, so were NFTs, Beanie Babies, the 1990's dotcom bubble, 1980s Transformer cartoons, Pet Rock, Tax Exemptions for churches and fraudulent facsimiles of same, Germany immediately after both World Wars, the 1920's stock market boom prior to the Depression, the Dutch East India Company, tulips…

They simply showed a REAL videocall between two 2G featurephones. By con I simply meant that the investors hadn't noticed that identical technology already existed for satellite-phones (and no claim of the technology being entirely novel were ever made) but the reason the original technology was never adopted was because 3G was due to be rolled out within 18 months thus the codec would only ever have a small and diminishing potential user base.

Reminds me of WiMax technology and how it never surfaced due to existing contracts for WiFi.

So the investors SAW something that looked incredibly impressive but didn't understand how technology was advancing.

The killer for the investors was when they saw 3G video codecs being demoed at the next conference and so of course tried to argue that the software they had bought was inferior to the point where in effect it was a con. But the programmers simply pointed out that the contact specified a video codec that would work on ALL mobile phones and these new, much better codecs relied on 3G. Worse, the contract didn't require that the codec scale which is insane when CPU power & wireless bandwidth doubles every two years. But they didn't so the product agreed upon was produced.

Seems like bad business, and someone only playing the short game.

I'm not sure they ever intended it to be anything but a demonstration of how their (far more general) codec worked at narrow-band bitrates but if someone comes offering money for the narrowband-codec specifically, would you say 'no'?

I value customer satisfaction and building meaningful business relationships, so yeah, I might say no to that and explain why.

But there were a lot of people who had nothing but a fast-talking salesman and those people INTENDED to essentially do nothing but take the money and run away. I simply gave the one example I personally knew of to illustrate just how badly informed investors were.

A fool and their money are soon parted…

To be fair, Paypal was and is a great idea but who knows who originated the idea? The technical side is almost trivial but the red-tape surrounding setting up what was in essence a novel intermediate way of paying for goods is likely the provinence of a specialist legal team and managers who are confident talking to board members and second-guess 'difficult' questions so would be seen as people who could be trusted with such a huge enterprise. You would have to spend a vast sum and I cannot fault how brave Elmo is in risking other people's money!

OPM, OPP, OPI is the theory for some folks… and anyways that's the name of the game for venture capital.

 

[Allylbenzene]

Companies exist for the sole purpose of increasing owner's equity, ultimately. If they do charitable, community-driven, or positive people-focused deeds, it's not out of the kindness of the company's heart...It's because it will help the company's bottomline, but that's the way it's supposed to be.

The joys of so-called "corporation healthcare".
The patient comes first, customer second.

World War III breaks out and

Do you mean an overt ww3? The silent one seems on-going, but identifying the factions at play can be challenging.

 

[SinfulbyNature]

lol @unodelacosa is literally taking this whole site to school…. He’s slaying it lol damn….easy killer

He knows his shit for sure