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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38427 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Sure, AI being capable of all that should be argued for first. But plenty of people believe "AI will become as smart as, or smarter than, humans eventually", but don't take that all the way to "... and will determine the future of human civilization on this planet" as a result.

GPT-4 sure seems like it's capable of a lot of things! What, exactly, separates 'GPT-4 but scaled up 1000x' from what people can do? Even outside that, what, in principle, prevents a computer from being intelligent? And we're sure trying very hard to create intelligent machines. Even if you'd claim something not-mechanistic, like a spirit or something is important in human experience or intelligence - clearly the 'matter', the incredibly complex biology of the brain, is plays a big role in human intelligence, so why can't machines with that be intelligent too? And then technology has revolutionized every other facet of human life, and the smartest people are putting their effort into creating intelligence on a computer ... even if the current 'make transformers scale' thing fails somehow, they'll be hard at work for something that does.

I’m not saying there won’t be AGI sometime. Or very smart AI. But then it’s the taking over the world in an unexplained way that’s not explained.

The AI is rounding up humans and turning us into batteries within a few years. What’s never explained is how.

If you accept the possibility of the existence of a hyper-intelligent AI then there is no utility in trying to guess how such an AI might take over the world. By mere virtue of the AI being hyper-intelligent and you being, well not, the AI is sure to out think you.

Also I disagree that such explanations don't exist in the first place. Off the top of my head I think of nanobot swarm, but I could think of ten more in an hour.

That’s basically an argument religious people make about the mind of God. In this case however the god is in a little box and can be turned off.

Nanobots were last generations existential panic, and possible future technology. But 2000 called and wants its moral panic back.

Oh well that's good, atleast we can rest assured knowing it's unfashionable.

A valid technology has to actually work.

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