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Butlerian Jihadi
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User ID: 662
All the other options probably end up at option 3, most likely via some kind of 'soft cull' featuring a combo of AI generated hypertargeted wireheading media and social engineering cratering the fertility rate to new lows. The reaction of western elites to fertility rates crossing the 2.1 threshold was a collective shrug, once the median person is a valueless UBI serf I don't think they'll mind the rates collapsing to 0.4 or less.
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Butlerian Jihadi
2yr ago
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Butlerian Jihadi
2yr ago
Price shocks on a global market will still effect local consumer prices. If the supply of wheat goes down 10% you'll see prices rise across the board as countries and businesses globally bid up the price for a now scarcer resource. Latvian farmers can now sell their goods abroad for a premium to plug a RussoUkranian sized hole in the market, so Latvian locals still end feeling the pinch.
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Butlerian Jihadi
2yr ago
Considering Ukraine and Russia are both massive food exporters I think the war could very easily explain surging food prices. A sharp drop in supply could send ripples through the global market.
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Butlerian Jihadi
2yr ago
This is just Bentham-esque utilitarianism in action. The core of EA is "your community" is no more worthy of a dollar's aid than some shanty village halfway around the world, and 95% of those calculations end up coming down with an anti-Western bent. Instead of spending a few million marginally helping a handful of people here you can blow the same amount improving sanitation or healthcare for many more people in Timbuktu and per the hedonic calculus the latter beats the former.
The risk is that the AI could just convert itself into software then piggyback off existing computational infrastructure. It doesn't need to develop new revolutionary chips or build massive mainframes for itself if it can just create a propagateable equivalent of a universal constructor that can worm its way into our current networks, spread virally and leech enough computational power to devise a final solution to the meatbag problem.
I'd be willing to bet a suitably advanced AGI could probably do a decent job just canninalizing existing microchips, especially if it manages to leak out into the internet writ large. It could probably distribute its computations across millions if not billions of affected devices and I'm not sure if we could even stop AGI level computer viruses short of destroying anything connected to the internet period, orchestrated globally and with perfect percision before it acquires enough computational power that it becomes functionally unstoppable. This was actually part of the 3rd terminator movie too.
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Butlerian Jihadi
2yr ago
I think any legitimately hostile AGI could hit those targets with relative ease if it manages to breach whatever containment server it's sitting in. An AGI powered computer virus eating up a modest chunk of all internet connected processing power and digesting every relevant bit of weaponizable information = exponential growth of capabilities. At that point if it's capable of physically manipulating objects in meatspace I think it could do just about whatever it wants with lightning speed.
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Butlerian Jihadi
2yr ago
If hostile AGI becomes real you're more likely to see hunter-killer nanobot clouds dispersed in the atmosphere or engineered climatic shifts designed to wipe out the biosphere than something as inefficient as a ripped Arnold gunning people down, or the warmachines you see in the movie, at least by my reckoning.
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Butlerian Jihadi
2yr ago
I remember having a similar reaction when microsoft started slathering ads all over the xbox home screen.
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Butlerian Jihadi
2yr ago
He could be planning on culling the twitter workforce then hiring on more compliant devs to replace them.
It's more "They've already recruited (most of) your children, it's just a matter of degree now".
I think this comment is pretty much spot on. The fight over the effects of puberty blockers, the surgeries et al are a kind of a proxy battle for a war that's already been lost. Even if the kids aren't being literally sterilized, they're being culturally sterilized by the waters we're all swimming in and the sociocultural forces at work are so large and complex that they're impossible to compress down into something that can be fought against in a way that puberty blockers for minors can be, so you get these vicious fights that are sort of stand ins for these abstract and borderline unopposable forces. I fully expect fertility rates for western countries to hit well below 1.0 before the close of the 21st century.
I feel like the more overwrought "0 out of 10, stupid fat hobbit, they've RUINED IT" takes were a bit much, but in terms of quality of writing it felt much worse than similar "prestige tv" competitors/predecessors like Game of Thrones.
Is the whole NovelAI thing worth dropping the ten bucks to try it out at the image generator tier?
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Butlerian Jihadi
2yr ago
Because being able to collectively grease every palm in society with rising wages and living standards is the easiest way to buy a lack of major unrest or civil conflict.
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Butlerian Jihadi
2yr ago
I was terribly unimpressed with the Rings of Power pilot, even going in with fairly low expectations (I've heard the second episode is slightly more passable), so HoD probably wins any contest by default. GoT did have a fairly noticable decline once they had to juggle so many disparate plot threads after season 4-ish , so the Dragon series might end up losing some of its luster once they get into the meat of the show.
I think once you combine mass data harvesting, advances in applied psychology and a suitably advanced AI capable of generating any sort of entertainment on the fly you'll see things trend in that direction. VR AI generated infinite entertainment + AIsim significant others purposefully designed to hit every emotional soft spot and cater to every need with scientific precision, monitoring heart rate, eye movement, years of browsing history, just about any bit of digestible data to better target its content. And while there's been something of a minor bump to birth rates in the past year, the explanation I heard is that's more due to deferred planned pregnancies from the whole corona thing, I'd bet it's a local maximum on a continuing downward trend long term.
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