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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

• ceejayoz 10mo ago
  > AI cannot run if society collapses. That doesn’t mean some idiot billionaires huffing each others’ farts can’t think it can.
• ademup 10mo 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 10mo ago
    I think this is a very common opinion here. I'd say at least 15% people believe that.
  • mtlmtlmtlmtl 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
      Is there any particular element of the supply chain that you feel make “robots” hand-wavy?
      • mariusor 10mo ago
        The length and breadth of it mostly.
      • nosianu 10mo 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).
        • malwrar 10mo ago
          Thanks for providing the archive link! > Pointing to any single part really makes no sense, the point is the complexity and interconnectedness of everything Doesn’t it though? The bauxite mine owners in Pincarra could purchase hypothetical robotic mining & smelting equipment. The mill owners in Downey, the cocoa leaf processor in New Jersey, the syrup factory in Atlanta, and others could purchase similar equipment. Maybe they all just buy humanoid robots and surveil their works for awhile to train the robots and replace the workers. If all of those events happen, Coca Cola supply chain has been automated. Also, since e.g. the aluminum mill probably handles more orders beyond just coke cans, other supply chains for other products will now be that much more automated. Thereby the same mechanism that built these deep supply chains will (I bet) also automate them. > Biological systems don't have that problem, they are self-assembling no matter how you slice and dice them. If the machines used to implement manufacturing processes are also built in an automated way, the system is effectively self-healing as you describe for biological systems. > 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. Perhaps the centralized AI “Gaia” becomes an orchestrator in this scheme, rather than the sole intelligence in all of manufacturing? Not too familiar with this franchise to make a more direct comparison, but my larger point is that the complexity of the system doesn’t need to be focused on one single greenfield entity.
• mariusor 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
    And the industrial base that maintains it? Chips have a limited lifespan.
    • febusravenga 10mo 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.