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Comment by darepublic

1 day ago

It could be logically valid but irrelevant? Allowing for the atrophying of all our skills is dangerous? While simultaneously building ever more complicated edifices that control our lives? Not a doomer but you really just want to shrug and say it ain't no thing?

Perhaps humans have peaked due to the fundamental biological nature of our brains and AI will eventually surpass us in mathematical intelligence.

That has been the ultimate goal of creating AI -- not to simply match human intelligence but to surpass it. If it surpasses us, does that make it irrelevant? Everything around us is powered by mathematics, most of it I don't understand, and soon perhaps everything will be powered by mathematics that everybody doesn't understand.

  • To what end?

    “Hey guys, the human condition can be experienced by these machines more efficiently than we are able to! Now we can finally die off!”

    Why are we enabling a world that outpaces us? Is this going to lead to anything other than displacement in the long term?

    Do you ever stop and ask why we’re building the world we’re building?

    To what end does a world we cannot comprehend or rebuild from first principles serve us?

    • > Why are we enabling a world that outpaces us?

      Because we kinda suck. Wars, poverty, destruction of the environment, etc. Maybe AI will be worse -- the are plenty of movies on that subject -- or maybe it will be better.

      > Is this going to lead to anything other than displacement in the long term?

      We may have already damaged the environment enough that we're going to die off soon anyway. So without AI, we were already on that path to "displace" ourselves -- I don't think that argument is that compelling.

      Perhaps this is the natural evolution of intelligent life. Eventually the sun will die and everything we are will be gone forever, maybe this is the only way that something of us survives.

      > Do you ever stop and ask why we’re building the world we’re building?

      We're not building a world. We're just ants. Individuals making individual decisions that have nothing to do with the rest of the world. You don't have to look too far to find humans that literally care nothing about humanity as a whole and everything about themselves.

      > To what end does a world we cannot comprehend or rebuild from first principles serve us?

      We already live in that world. You wouldn't even be able to build a toaster from first principles without the knowledge and infrastructure that already exists.

    • I mean, ideally to the end of poverty, disease, climate change, war, starvation, etc. You can disagree about whether this would be the outcome in practice, but I don't think 'why might we want to create something smarter than us' is a hard question. Humans losing their status as top dog is really a trivial price to pay for the potential return.

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  • @bonitochips

    They killed your comment, but you should know that you've posted it on the world's #1 AI propaganda site, where literally trillions of dollars are at stake and ROI depends on the correctness of the discourse running among the meat LLMs foraging or lurking here.

    • It's not that their argument is wrong or not worth discussing, it's that it is utterly irrelevant when the question at stake is whether the math is valid and useful or not. It's effectively whataboutism.

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