Comment by bbor

8 hours ago

I don’t see any reason this highly chaotic system is most likely to settle in a spot that we happen to enjoy/see as a compromise of some sort.

The point is that we now have superintelligence; either it helps us conquer death, or it poses a massive —say, existential- risk to us all. It’s hard to imagine such a powerful tool resulting in just another century of slightly-better capitalist nationalism.

I guess there could be a second AI winter around the corner that we haven’t seen coming yet. That would be nice! Not likely IMHO, but nice.

I'm still not seeing the route to that existential risk, not yet anyway.

Far more imminent is the very real risk of unbounded greed and power that wields those AIs, in full swing as we watch: unchecked global warming, pollution, poverty, authoritarianism, plummeting biodiversity, and more.

The corporations are like out of control AIs themselves, that will do anything to make their paperclips.

  • > The corporations are like out of control AIs themselves, that will do anything to make their paperclips.

    Ideas manipulate humans like pets.

    Ideas have a life of their own and the evolutionary context within which they live is human culture which they have instigated and change, but also in grey matter, which itself is the product of DNA which is really just information in physical form.

    It’s information across the stack. Or perhaps the way to think about it is as a dimension, much like time, that cuts perpendicularly through the stack.