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Looks like we are the paper clip optimising narrow AI we’ve all been afraid of after all… We don’t make paper clips though, we’ve optimised to make money and t

Looks like we are the paper clip optimising narrow AI we’ve all been afraid of after all… We don’t make paper clips though, we’ve optimised to make money and turn everything into it. So ashamed to be part of of it,

throwanem 3y ago
Many science fiction authors have made surprisingly incisive contemporary critiques in the forms of allegory and metaphor. Bostrom is unusual mainly in that he doesn't seem to know when he is doing it.
- stevenwoo 3y ago
  Asimov’s The Gods Themselves description of economics reads sort of like Onion headlines of today but from fifty years ago.
ASalazarMX 3y ago
We've optimized so hard we can make money out of negative money.
aaron_m04 3y ago
I'm starting to accept that we are done for. The only thing that gives me hope is that maybe some alien civilization out there in the universe successfully avoided this great filter.
- titzer 3y ago
  The Earth seems to want to evolve towards a giant tropical rainforest and keeps getting smacked by one disaster after another. This time it's just an infestation of apes that will knock out some unknown chunk of life and probably gobble up and pave over half the surface before collapsing under its own weight.
- stevenwoo 3y ago
  Speculative fiction of Lilith’a Brood by Octavia Butler comes to mind, it was good but so bleak I had to stop in second book.
noduerme 3y ago
I think we're a little better than that. No one actually wants a world where everything is turned into financial statements. The tragedy of the commons is a bug, whereas wholesale conversion to paper clips for Clippy is a feature.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  So I think we are this, even if we don't want to be. We just don't have the (whatever it is) to not do it. I think where we've made the mistake was deferring everything to technological solutions, which arguably created the problem in the first place. This is not to say technology won't help, or even eventually solve it, but we should work harder on the people and governmental problems.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - noduerme 3y ago
    But when you think of people and governments, the range of beliefs and behavioral choices is enormous. Certainly some people and some societies and governments have more of (whatever it is) than others, if it is the capacity to prioritize long-term, multigenerational self-preservation and quality of life over short-term gains. Money, in the purest sense as a means of exchange, isn't the culprit; the trouble is the culture that (a) generates wealth via extraction and (b) wastes it on immediate consumption, rather than investing in a sustainable future. I'd even argue that "money" is a red herring. What we're really paperclipping is mostly-disposable stuff. In the long term, we'll probably be remember for being really good at turning a deep geological layer of carbon into a shallower one of plastic. But it's worth saying that we are 7 billion or so individuals capable of making decisions, with vastly different aims and priorities, rather than one monolithic thing obsessed with a particular shiny object.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> We don’t make paper clips though, we’ve optimised to make money and turn everything into it. Paperclips are at least real objects. Money doesnt even exist if everyone isndead, its not real.
- netsharc 3y ago
  I just had a curious realization.. Money is a representation of trust, it says so on the dollar bill, that the piece of paper can be traded for something at the US treasury, and we all trust this to be true. Indeed "credit" means "trust". So I wonder if we've been wanting to collect bigger and bigger amounts of "trust" because, hey, who doesn't like being trusted? And funny how people can't see when just looking at your briefcase or bank account full of money if you got your money through scamming people (exploiting their trust), so indeed this decoupling has been harmful (if you're a decent guy but you're homeless, people don't look at you twice, if you're Elon Musk people treat you nice...)
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  There is a great podcast series called 'The Great Simplification' by Nate Hagens. It is basically just a series of interviews with people about the predicaments of our times. Nate has been working on this theory of 'the great simplification' being a coming event when our monetary systems catch up with the ecological systems that actually govern our world. That there is a lot of credit embedded within our very monetary system that cannot be redeemed long term. That we have issued credits for energy and materials that we cannot actually claim at the volumes needed. It is a compelling idea and that looks fairly plausible. Nate does a great job of walking the fine line between pessimism and optimism, something which Cory Doctoro describes as both side being defeatist.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Fiat money only has value because we accept that it does, corporation stocks are only valued what they are because we believe they're valuable. It's all hardly based on anything real anymore, it's just recursive speculation. The world's billionaires have so much made up stock money that they can borrow against, but never use a significant amount of because it fundamentally does not exist. The only thing that's stopping the whole system from imploding is maintaining the constant imaginary growth. And climate change will forcibly shatter the illusion eventually. There is this theory that we've peaked with our net energy extraction in the 1970s, and the graphs that start to diverge that year sure are plentiful and puzzling. It may just be that the last 5 decades have just been us deluding ourselves into believing there's value where very little or none exists, and we only keep afloat because there have been marginal efficiency gains along the way.
over_bridge 3y ago
Line go up. Everything else can be sacrificed as long as the line keeps going up (GDP, stock market, revenue, profit, share price - take your pick). No politician will risk doing anything that makes the line go down even if it boosts 'non line' metrics like happiness, health, social connections, free time, any environmental measures, home ownership, min wage)
NovaDudely 3y ago
This is a point Daniel Schmachtenberger has argued. We worry about rouge AI's and the paper clip optimizer problem and yet that is essentially the path our current economic system operates on.

throwanem 3y ago

Many science fiction authors have made surprisingly incisive contemporary critiques in the forms of allegory and metaphor. Bostrom is unusual mainly in that he doesn't seem to know when he is doing it.

stevenwoo 3y ago
Asimov’s The Gods Themselves description of economics reads sort of like Onion headlines of today but from fifty years ago.

ASalazarMX 3y ago

We've optimized so hard we can make money out of negative money.

aaron_m04 3y ago

I'm starting to accept that we are done for. The only thing that gives me hope is that maybe some alien civilization out there in the universe successfully avoided this great filter.

titzer 3y ago
The Earth seems to want to evolve towards a giant tropical rainforest and keeps getting smacked by one disaster after another. This time it's just an infestation of apes that will knock out some unknown chunk of life and probably gobble up and pave over half the surface before collapsing under its own weight.
stevenwoo 3y ago
Speculative fiction of Lilith’a Brood by Octavia Butler comes to mind, it was good but so bleak I had to stop in second book.

noduerme 3y ago

I think we're a little better than that. No one actually wants a world where everything is turned into financial statements. The tragedy of the commons is a bug, whereas wholesale conversion to paper clips for Clippy is a feature.

ChatGTP 3y ago
So I think we are this, even if we don't want to be. We just don't have the (whatever it is) to not do it. I think where we've made the mistake was deferring everything to technological solutions, which arguably created the problem in the first place. This is not to say technology won't help, or even eventually solve it, but we should work harder on the people and governmental problems.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- noduerme 3y ago
  But when you think of people and governments, the range of beliefs and behavioral choices is enormous. Certainly some people and some societies and governments have more of (whatever it is) than others, if it is the capacity to prioritize long-term, multigenerational self-preservation and quality of life over short-term gains. Money, in the purest sense as a means of exchange, isn't the culprit; the trouble is the culture that (a) generates wealth via extraction and (b) wastes it on immediate consumption, rather than investing in a sustainable future. I'd even argue that "money" is a red herring. What we're really paperclipping is mostly-disposable stuff. In the long term, we'll probably be remember for being really good at turning a deep geological layer of carbon into a shallower one of plastic. But it's worth saying that we are 7 billion or so individuals capable of making decisions, with vastly different aims and priorities, rather than one monolithic thing obsessed with a particular shiny object.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

> We don’t make paper clips though, we’ve optimised to make money and turn everything into it. Paperclips are at least real objects. Money doesnt even exist if everyone isndead, its not real.

netsharc 3y ago
I just had a curious realization.. Money is a representation of trust, it says so on the dollar bill, that the piece of paper can be traded for something at the US treasury, and we all trust this to be true. Indeed "credit" means "trust". So I wonder if we've been wanting to collect bigger and bigger amounts of "trust" because, hey, who doesn't like being trusted? And funny how people can't see when just looking at your briefcase or bank account full of money if you got your money through scamming people (exploiting their trust), so indeed this decoupling has been harmful (if you're a decent guy but you're homeless, people don't look at you twice, if you're Elon Musk people treat you nice...)
NovaDudely 3y ago
There is a great podcast series called 'The Great Simplification' by Nate Hagens. It is basically just a series of interviews with people about the predicaments of our times. Nate has been working on this theory of 'the great simplification' being a coming event when our monetary systems catch up with the ecological systems that actually govern our world. That there is a lot of credit embedded within our very monetary system that cannot be redeemed long term. That we have issued credits for energy and materials that we cannot actually claim at the volumes needed. It is a compelling idea and that looks fairly plausible. Nate does a great job of walking the fine line between pessimism and optimism, something which Cory Doctoro describes as both side being defeatist.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Fiat money only has value because we accept that it does, corporation stocks are only valued what they are because we believe they're valuable. It's all hardly based on anything real anymore, it's just recursive speculation. The world's billionaires have so much made up stock money that they can borrow against, but never use a significant amount of because it fundamentally does not exist. The only thing that's stopping the whole system from imploding is maintaining the constant imaginary growth. And climate change will forcibly shatter the illusion eventually. There is this theory that we've peaked with our net energy extraction in the 1970s, and the graphs that start to diverge that year sure are plentiful and puzzling. It may just be that the last 5 decades have just been us deluding ourselves into believing there's value where very little or none exists, and we only keep afloat because there have been marginal efficiency gains along the way.

over_bridge 3y ago

Line go up. Everything else can be sacrificed as long as the line keeps going up (GDP, stock market, revenue, profit, share price - take your pick). No politician will risk doing anything that makes the line go down even if it boosts 'non line' metrics like happiness, health, social connections, free time, any environmental measures, home ownership, min wage)

NovaDudely 3y ago

This is a point Daniel Schmachtenberger has argued. We worry about rouge AI's and the paper clip optimizer problem and yet that is essentially the path our current economic system operates on.