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My (paranoid) unpopular take: the AI boom we’re currently experiencing is a concerted effort by the billionaires to maintain operational agency (the ability to

My (paranoid) unpopular take: the AI boom we’re currently experiencing is a concerted effort by the billionaires to maintain operational agency (the ability to think and do at a massive scale) once society begins to collapse due to climate change. ~~ edit ~~ Thank you for the sane responses. I’m reconsidering how much I believe this.

fmbb 11mo ago
How would that work? AI cannot run if society collapses. Maintaining all that infrastructure and supplying spare parts is not going to work. Also AI cannot do anything on its own. Barely anything with support from humans.
- ceejayoz 11mo ago
  > AI cannot run if society collapses. That doesn’t mean some idiot billionaires huffing each others’ farts can’t think it can.
- ademup 11mo ago
  Respectfully disagree. An AI with full access to robots could do everything on its own that it would need to "survive" and grow. I argue that humans are actually in the way of that.
  - kubb 11mo ago
    I think this is a very common opinion here. I'd say at least 15% people believe that.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 11mo ago
    Yeah? How many robots? What kind of robots? What would the AI need to survive? Are the robots able to produce more robots? How are the robots powered? Where will they get energy from? Sure it's easy to just throw that out there in one sentence, but once you actually dig into it, it turns out to be a lot more complicated than you thought at first. It's not just a matter of "AI" + "Robots" = "self-sustaining". The details matter.
  - mariusor 11mo ago
    "robots" is a very hand wavy answer. There's so much that goes into the supply chain of improving and running AI that I, a human, feel quite safe.
    - malwrar 11mo ago
      Is there any particular element of the supply chain that you feel make “robots” hand-wavy?
      - mariusor 11mo ago
        The length and breadth of it mostly.
      - nosianu 11mo ago
        In support of the other reply, here is a look at the supply chain of a very simple product - a can of Coke. https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d449929ef https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d4499... (https://archive.md/PPYez https://archive.md/PPYez) The highlighted parts are a kind of TL;DR, but in the context here actually reading it - it is not much - is actually required to get anything out of it for the arguments used here. Anything technological is orders of magnitude more complex. Pointing to any single part really makes no sense, the point is the complexity and interconnectedness of everything. Some AI doing everything is harder than the East Bloc countries attempting to use central planning for the whole economy. Their economy was much more simple than what such a mighty AI would require for itself and its robot minions. And that's just the organization. I did like "Gaia" in Horizon Zero Dawn (game) because it made a great story though. This would be pretty much exactly the kind of AI fantasized about here. Douglas Adams hints at hidden complexity towards the end of HHGTTG, talking about the collapse of Golgafrincham's society. You overlook just one single tiny thing and it escalates to failure from there. Biological systems don't have that problem, they are self-assembling no matter how you slice and dice them. You may just end up with a very difference eco-system, but as long as the environment is not completely outside the useful range it will grow and reorganize. human-made engineered things on the other hand will just fail and that's it, they will not rise on their own from nothing. Human-made systems are much much more fragile than biological ones (even if you can't guarantee the kind of biological system you will get after rounds of growth and adaptations).
- mariusor 11mo ago
  This is also my reasoning for why I think AI alignment is not going to be a problem for humanity any time soon. By the time AI will be capable of maintaining the whole supply chain required to keep itself running sufficient time will have passed so we can come up with something viable.
  - gnarlouse 11mo ago
    I think Billionaire alignment is a much larger problem than AI alignment. To use Bostrom's language, it's not full-on owl domestication, but sparrows with owl-like powers that we need to worry about. https://lukemuehlhauser.com/bostroms-unfinished-fable-of-the-sparrows/ https://lukemuehlhauser.com/bostroms-unfinished-fable-of-the...
- Teknomadix 11mo ago
  Long before 2100, critical AI system will no longer be operating from this soil. They are in Earths orit, and on its moon.
  - vardump 11mo ago
    And the industrial base that maintains it? Chips have a limited lifespan.
    - febusravenga 11mo ago
      It will collapse, surely but 10-20-50 years after human civilization collapsed on earth. Trope explored already in sci-fi long time ago.
dkdcio 11mo ago
do you think it’s one person or a group of them that meets? design by committee? how are they getting it all done? let’s hear it!
- gnarlouse 11mo ago
  I don’t know if I believe it’s an active conspiracy. Instead I think it’s more of a very concerning, very plausible eventuality.
  - dkdcio 11mo ago
    FWIW I do agree with the operational agency at scale bit and I’m always fascinated by these conspiracy theories, was genuinely hoping to get one (but also happy to see you’re challenging your own position). the idea of people coordinating on these things is very funny to me I think like all tech people will use it for good and bad. those in power have more power etc etc I think it tends to boil down to whether you believe people are, overall, good or bad. over time, that’s what you’ll get with use of tech
    - gnarlouse 11mo ago
      You should go see "Bugonia" by Yorgos Lanthimos, if you haven't yet, then! That movie might be straight up your alley.
- exe34 11mo ago
  it's very easy to achieve great things without coordination if you can just do what's best for yourself and help your peers achieve their collective goals. but they do meet at davos every now and again, without the democratic shackles.
- bryanrasmussen 11mo ago
  I guess it's whoever was in that Doug Rushkoff meeting with the whole idea we'll have security forces with those exploding dog collars to keep them in line and to keep revolutionary forces from killing us and taking our food supply! https://english.elpais.com/technology/2023-09-20/writer-douglas-rushkoff-the-tech-elite-are-planning-for-the-apocalypse.html https://english.elpais.com/technology/2023-09-20/writer-doug...
andybak 11mo ago
This makes no sense. It takes a complex industrial society to keep that tech going. The supply chain to make GPUs would not survive even a modest disruption in the world economy. It's probably the most fragile thing we currently manufacture.
- ben_w 11mo ago
  If you're an AI company and you believe your own hype (like Musk seems to), you'll probably believe that you can automate everything from digging minerals out of the ground all of the way up to making the semiconductors in the robots that dig the minerals. As you may infer from my use of the word "hype", I do not think we are close to such generality at a high enough quality level to actually do this.
  - gnarlouse 11mo ago
    While I believe we’re in a slow takeoff, I believe we are in a takeoff. The important question to my mind is whether AGI comes before systemic societal collapse due to climate change. I think it does, and my tin foil hat grows a wider brim with each passing day. I hope I’m wrong!
    - ben_w 11mo ago
      Mm. I don't know. My expectation is that a lot of social breakdown happens with AI that's not quite capable of fully replacing human labour. A lot of angry unemployed people, or a lot of people who suddenly find they're unable to compete with data centres for electricity and can no longer afford to keep their freezer frozen, groups like that may not be able to pull of a Butlerian Jihad, but they're absolutely relevant to the timelines, and I think they happen before fully-automated security bots that are worth bothering to install. Fun failure mode: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marines-ai-paul-scharre/ https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marines-ai-paul-scharre/ Humans that aren't trying to hide are likely easier, so search-and-rescue bots will happen well before security bots are worth bothering with.
  - SoftTalker 11mo ago
forinti 11mo ago
If there's an evil plot, it's goal must surely be to accelerate environmental degradation. First we had the blockchain, now AI to consume enormous amounts of resources and distract us from what we should be investing in to make the environment healthier.
barbazoo 11mo ago
Concerted effort among the greediest people in the world all competing with each other? I find that very hard to imagine.

fmbb 11mo ago

How would that work? AI cannot run if society collapses. Maintaining all that infrastructure and supplying spare parts is not going to work. Also AI cannot do anything on its own. Barely anything with support from humans.

ceejayoz 11mo ago
> AI cannot run if society collapses. That doesn’t mean some idiot billionaires huffing each others’ farts can’t think it can.
ademup 11mo ago
Respectfully disagree. An AI with full access to robots could do everything on its own that it would need to "survive" and grow. I argue that humans are actually in the way of that.
- kubb 11mo ago
  I think this is a very common opinion here. I'd say at least 15% people believe that.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 11mo ago
  Yeah? How many robots? What kind of robots? What would the AI need to survive? Are the robots able to produce more robots? How are the robots powered? Where will they get energy from? Sure it's easy to just throw that out there in one sentence, but once you actually dig into it, it turns out to be a lot more complicated than you thought at first. It's not just a matter of "AI" + "Robots" = "self-sustaining". The details matter.
- mariusor 11mo ago
  "robots" is a very hand wavy answer. There's so much that goes into the supply chain of improving and running AI that I, a human, feel quite safe.
  - malwrar 11mo ago
    Is there any particular element of the supply chain that you feel make “robots” hand-wavy?
    - mariusor 11mo ago
      The length and breadth of it mostly.
    - nosianu 11mo ago
      In support of the other reply, here is a look at the supply chain of a very simple product - a can of Coke. https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d449929ef https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d4499... (https://archive.md/PPYez https://archive.md/PPYez) The highlighted parts are a kind of TL;DR, but in the context here actually reading it - it is not much - is actually required to get anything out of it for the arguments used here. Anything technological is orders of magnitude more complex. Pointing to any single part really makes no sense, the point is the complexity and interconnectedness of everything. Some AI doing everything is harder than the East Bloc countries attempting to use central planning for the whole economy. Their economy was much more simple than what such a mighty AI would require for itself and its robot minions. And that's just the organization. I did like "Gaia" in Horizon Zero Dawn (game) because it made a great story though. This would be pretty much exactly the kind of AI fantasized about here. Douglas Adams hints at hidden complexity towards the end of HHGTTG, talking about the collapse of Golgafrincham's society. You overlook just one single tiny thing and it escalates to failure from there. Biological systems don't have that problem, they are self-assembling no matter how you slice and dice them. You may just end up with a very difference eco-system, but as long as the environment is not completely outside the useful range it will grow and reorganize. human-made engineered things on the other hand will just fail and that's it, they will not rise on their own from nothing. Human-made systems are much much more fragile than biological ones (even if you can't guarantee the kind of biological system you will get after rounds of growth and adaptations).
mariusor 11mo ago
This is also my reasoning for why I think AI alignment is not going to be a problem for humanity any time soon. By the time AI will be capable of maintaining the whole supply chain required to keep itself running sufficient time will have passed so we can come up with something viable.
- gnarlouse 11mo ago
  I think Billionaire alignment is a much larger problem than AI alignment. To use Bostrom's language, it's not full-on owl domestication, but sparrows with owl-like powers that we need to worry about. https://lukemuehlhauser.com/bostroms-unfinished-fable-of-the-sparrows/ https://lukemuehlhauser.com/bostroms-unfinished-fable-of-the...
Teknomadix 11mo ago
Long before 2100, critical AI system will no longer be operating from this soil. They are in Earths orit, and on its moon.
- vardump 11mo ago
  And the industrial base that maintains it? Chips have a limited lifespan.
  - febusravenga 11mo ago
    It will collapse, surely but 10-20-50 years after human civilization collapsed on earth. Trope explored already in sci-fi long time ago.

dkdcio 11mo ago

do you think it’s one person or a group of them that meets? design by committee? how are they getting it all done? let’s hear it!

gnarlouse 11mo ago
I don’t know if I believe it’s an active conspiracy. Instead I think it’s more of a very concerning, very plausible eventuality.
- dkdcio 11mo ago
  FWIW I do agree with the operational agency at scale bit and I’m always fascinated by these conspiracy theories, was genuinely hoping to get one (but also happy to see you’re challenging your own position). the idea of people coordinating on these things is very funny to me I think like all tech people will use it for good and bad. those in power have more power etc etc I think it tends to boil down to whether you believe people are, overall, good or bad. over time, that’s what you’ll get with use of tech
  - gnarlouse 11mo ago
    You should go see "Bugonia" by Yorgos Lanthimos, if you haven't yet, then! That movie might be straight up your alley.
exe34 11mo ago
it's very easy to achieve great things without coordination if you can just do what's best for yourself and help your peers achieve their collective goals. but they do meet at davos every now and again, without the democratic shackles.
bryanrasmussen 11mo ago
I guess it's whoever was in that Doug Rushkoff meeting with the whole idea we'll have security forces with those exploding dog collars to keep them in line and to keep revolutionary forces from killing us and taking our food supply! https://english.elpais.com/technology/2023-09-20/writer-douglas-rushkoff-the-tech-elite-are-planning-for-the-apocalypse.html https://english.elpais.com/technology/2023-09-20/writer-doug...

andybak 11mo ago

This makes no sense. It takes a complex industrial society to keep that tech going. The supply chain to make GPUs would not survive even a modest disruption in the world economy. It's probably the most fragile thing we currently manufacture.

ben_w 11mo ago
If you're an AI company and you believe your own hype (like Musk seems to), you'll probably believe that you can automate everything from digging minerals out of the ground all of the way up to making the semiconductors in the robots that dig the minerals. As you may infer from my use of the word "hype", I do not think we are close to such generality at a high enough quality level to actually do this.
- gnarlouse 11mo ago
  While I believe we’re in a slow takeoff, I believe we are in a takeoff. The important question to my mind is whether AGI comes before systemic societal collapse due to climate change. I think it does, and my tin foil hat grows a wider brim with each passing day. I hope I’m wrong!
  - ben_w 11mo ago
    Mm. I don't know. My expectation is that a lot of social breakdown happens with AI that's not quite capable of fully replacing human labour. A lot of angry unemployed people, or a lot of people who suddenly find they're unable to compete with data centres for electricity and can no longer afford to keep their freezer frozen, groups like that may not be able to pull of a Butlerian Jihad, but they're absolutely relevant to the timelines, and I think they happen before fully-automated security bots that are worth bothering to install. Fun failure mode: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marines-ai-paul-scharre/ https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marines-ai-paul-scharre/ Humans that aren't trying to hide are likely easier, so search-and-rescue bots will happen well before security bots are worth bothering with.
- SoftTalker 11mo ago

forinti 11mo ago

If there's an evil plot, it's goal must surely be to accelerate environmental degradation. First we had the blockchain, now AI to consume enormous amounts of resources and distract us from what we should be investing in to make the environment healthier.

barbazoo 11mo ago

Concerted effort among the greediest people in the world all competing with each other? I find that very hard to imagine.