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Since around 2004, seemingly all additional compute the human race had developed for itself has been put towards gathering and processing telemetry for the purp

Since around 2004, seemingly all additional compute the human race had developed for itself has been put towards gathering and processing telemetry for the purposes of marketing and control. AI as a technology is simply more horsepower and automation for surveillance. I see your comment as a strange mix of optimism about humanity's creative abilities and fatalism about the end of the world coming soon. Not like this is news, but the end of world has always been right around the corner - most everything is broken here and death is everywhere. The strangest thing to me about comments like this is the assumption that a nefarious super-intelligence would stop at subjugating us. If a super-intelligence was evil and had power to act, it would just kill us all and sterilize the planet, given the chance. I just don't believe we have the ability to make a standalone computer super-intelligence - we universally suck at coding at-scale. Don't get me wrong, the AI and machine learning algorithms we have are amazing, but we're not going to get a being out of those experiments. What I'm worried about is humans: humans continuing to turn tech against other humans for surveillance and telemetry in support of totalitarianism. And, I'm worried about humans augmenting their brains with compute. If there ever will be an evil super-intelligence, I wager it will be a (meta-)man.

johnchristopher 9y ago
> I see your comment as a strange mix of optimism about humanity's creative abilities and fatalism about the end of the world coming soon. There's a very large and vocal group on HN that believes in the advent of AI and regularly comments as is it was a done deal. Almost every robot/AI/ML thread gets hijacked with this idea/meme. In the meantime Google can't get my first language right, the windows 7/8/10 search is a joke and Facebook wants me to be friends with my SO's exes. And 2017's revolution ? Dial menus in messenger. I suppose when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
- EdSharkey 9y ago
  Yeah, I think it's human nature to blow mysterious things all out of proportion. And then when we get together and tell ghost stories about the mysterious thing, and it starts to take on a life of its own. I was so convinced Y2K was going to crash society. I was all looted up, ready to bug out when the city started burning. Turns out, there was enough preparation (and money dumped on the problem), and like only one power station that didn't get the upgrades on the east coast went down for 15 minutes. I'm just as guilty of telling ghost stories and contributing to the disinformation. I remember writing a frantic, doomsday prediction email to my house rep in the lead up to Y2K and I swear based on some of his public comments that I was responsible for him quitting the house and heading for early retirement. I have no proof that was the case, but I'm still not proud of what I wrote.

johnchristopher 9y ago

> I see your comment as a strange mix of optimism about humanity's creative abilities and fatalism about the end of the world coming soon. There's a very large and vocal group on HN that believes in the advent of AI and regularly comments as is it was a done deal. Almost every robot/AI/ML thread gets hijacked with this idea/meme. In the meantime Google can't get my first language right, the windows 7/8/10 search is a joke and Facebook wants me to be friends with my SO's exes. And 2017's revolution ? Dial menus in messenger. I suppose when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

EdSharkey 9y ago
Yeah, I think it's human nature to blow mysterious things all out of proportion. And then when we get together and tell ghost stories about the mysterious thing, and it starts to take on a life of its own. I was so convinced Y2K was going to crash society. I was all looted up, ready to bug out when the city started burning. Turns out, there was enough preparation (and money dumped on the problem), and like only one power station that didn't get the upgrades on the east coast went down for 15 minutes. I'm just as guilty of telling ghost stories and contributing to the disinformation. I remember writing a frantic, doomsday prediction email to my house rep in the lead up to Y2K and I swear based on some of his public comments that I was responsible for him quitting the house and heading for early retirement. I have no proof that was the case, but I'm still not proud of what I wrote.