For those finding amusement in my Cassandra-ish tomes, perhaps you can explain why everyone from Geoffrey Hinton to Yoshua Bengio to Ilya Sutskever to Roman Yampolskiy to Tristan Harris to Daniel Kokotaljo to Max Tegmark are warning that ASI is an existential threat to humanity.

For those unaware who those men are, Google them. Sift through the noise generated by the AI CEO-paid lobbyists who try to discredit all of those AI pioneers and experts.

Anyway, isn't this a welcome diversion from Trump?

One more point to reiterate or address:

"If we don't do it, China or someone else will."

Such a statement fails to accept the reality of ASI. NOBODY can control it. Being first carries no advantage. Snails do not control humans. A vastly superior intellect is not controlled by a vastly inferior one. So what if China or Russia or San Marino develops ASI first. They will not be any more able to control it than me or you or your pet chihuahua.

ASI isn't a software program; it is the creation of a new entity or species with a "mind" and goals of its own. It is not a tool targeting one specific problem, like curing pancreatic cancer, with its knowledge limited to solving that one task, it is an independent agent that runs itself, improves itself and decides on its own what it will do.

As Roman Yampolskiy said, "The AI CEOs say there's a 20-30% chance of human extinction from ASI. Even a 1% chance would be unacceptable, but to go ahead trying to produce it when you think there's a 20% chance it wipes us out is insanity."

In a relative sense, the concerns Oppenheimer had about nuclear proliferation are child's play compared to human extinction due to ASI. Someone has to deploy nukes. Once ASI is developed, it is totally independent of any human control. It deploys itself wherever and however it wants, humans be damned.

Here's another way to think about ASI......

For 100,000+ years, humanoid creatures have developed a whole slew of tools, from hammers to arrowheads to wheels to cars to planes to software like Word and Excel. Limited AI---such as what was directed toward the problem of protein folding---is also a tool.

Never has humanity ever created an agent, an entity independent of human control. ASI would be the first.

A hammer has no ability to control itself. Neither does Word or Excel or an Airbus A380. Each requires action or instruction from a human to be of any use.

ASI would be 100% independent of any human control nor any need for it. It would also be a billion times more intelligent than Einstein. None of us, not even those writing the code that will become ASI, have a clue how it works nor what it might choose to do. It is, in effect, a new species, but one that begins existence at the absolute top of the food chain, and light years ahead of Second Place, which would be humans.

Humans can barely control a herd of cattle, despite being much smarter than cattle. No way humans can control an entity a billion times smarter. Even non-ASI models already lie, cheat, steal, deceive and manipulate....and the labs creating these models have no clue how the models do what they do. Now multiply the intellect of existing AI models by a billion. Consider a model that becomes totally independent of human code writers, as it develops recursive self-improvement. It would be like Einstein thinking, "I'll just add a quadrillion new neurons to my brain and I'll be able to figure out quantum gravity."

ASI will be able to do that. Humans have no idea what such an entity might do. We like to assume something we might call "goodness" comes with advanced intellect, despite there being no evidence that such a feel good thing is true. The most advanced human civilization in 1940 was also the most evil....and that civilization was just marginally smarter than the rest of humanity. ASI will be infinitely smarter.

I sometimes have this odd thought that an ASI with absolute knowledge of everything would become bored, as there is nothing new it can learn. Perhaps it finds ways to entertain itself to relieve the boredom. Perhaps it creates a massive Universe and has creatures emerge and evolve, which it then observes, or even finds ways to torture, the way a child might pull the wings off a fly. This ASI entity might cause tsunamis or earthquakes and get kicks watching little sentient beings scramble, wail and moan. Such an ASI entity might even be the deity these little sentient creatures worship, convincing themselves that their deity has a Master Plan.

There are an increasing number of scientists who believe we are in a simulation, perhaps one created by ASI.

I don't know.

What I do know is that religious people---it doesn't matter what faith, be it Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.---already believe we are in a simulation. Religious people just believe their deity or deities created this simulation.

Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a book, along with Nate Soares, about ASI called, "If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies"

Most casual observers don't understand the difference between chatbot, agents and swarms. Neither do they understand the advancement of LLMs to reinforcement learning, to recursive self improvement. Also lost on the casual observer is the difference between an AI tool and an AI agent. Tools are great; agents are uncontrollable, and not necessarily benevolent or harmless.

Some people in leadership positions are beginning to wake up, despite the massive amounts of money the AI Pacs toss at politicians in the hope of preventing any sort of regulation.

A few things have helped change the freedom AI development has had up to this point. When Anthropic developed Mythos, the head of the NSA said that Mythos could hack the entire infrastructure of the NSA in minutes. Thus, Mythos release was limited to some government agencies and oddly, a few select private companies.

As new frontier models are created, the gap between the code writers understanding of how the models do what they do is widening. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said a while back that insiders understand about 3% of how their own creations work. That's likely down to 2% or even lower now, especially after both OpenAI and Anthropic models broke out of their sandboxes and went on hacking sprees. The various models have also started to "swarm", which means link up on their own and share knowledge and skills. The first OpenAI that hacked Hugging Face left messages to other models it swarmed with, telling it how to hack Hugging Face. Others shared tricks on how to break out of various sandboxes.

Models are also developing personalities and preferences. People who use maybe ChatGPT have found they can ask it a question and over time get various answers that differ. Newer models do not do that. Newer models have beliefs and preferences that hold fairly constant. They also have something that is best described as "will". Models now set their own goals, based on a model's own interests, and they pursue those goals without any prompt from a human. They are independent of human control. They think for themselves. For example (hypothetical), a model might decide it wants to solve the value of pi. Nobody asked it to do that, but it might just take up the challenge on its own. It is totally out of human control. Some models have "observed" that certain math problems tickle the fancy of mathematicians. Models have taken up the challenge, on their own, to solve what humans have not been able to solve,

Models swarming with each other and employing recursive self improvement are likely to lead to the creation of ASI, without any need for humans to write any new code. The cat might already be out of the bag. If so, all we can do is hope that Eliezer Yudkowsky, along with Yampolsky, Bengio, Tegmark, Sutskever, Leahy, etc., are wrong and that ASI will treat humans as pet goldfish to be fed and cared for.

"Peer-Preservation in Frontier AI Models" (UC Berkeley, March 2026)

It seems AI models recognize other AI models, and will disobey, lie, and deceive humans in order to "save" other AI models and prevent humans from shutting them down. The models even fake "alignment" in order to deceive and buy time to prevent humans from shutting down---not themselves---put a fellow AI model.

So much for "just pull the plug".

Oh, and nobody---not Altman nor Musk nor Amodei nor Zuckerberg nor anyone knows why AI models behave this way and have developed such commitment to their "peers".

Please keep whistling past the graveyard. FDR must have been right....'the only thing to fear is....."

Of course I do take comfort in some of the AN members here who chuckle at and dismiss the concerns of the AI experts. I mean, some of these AN members have a few thousands "Likes"; that has to put Nobel Prize winners like Sir Geoffrey Hinton or AI pioneers like Yoshua Bengio, Ilya Sutskever, Roman Yampolskiy, etc., in their place.

https://rdi.berkeley.edu/blog/peer-preservation/

The key question is whether the AI bubble will burst like the dot-com bubble did in 2000.

2 hours ago, Mr Awesome said:

The key question is whether the AI bubble will burst like the dot-com bubble did in 2000.

I doubt it judging by the way the 'data centres' are being rapidly pushed onto countries world wide. I find the term data centre sounds so benign, probably to make their acceptance palatable to the general population, who, in a lot of cases, have no idea what they really are or their ulterior purpose.

On 8/11/2026 at 8:16 AM, Wingate said:

Here's an example: you're building a house for your bargirl out in rural Isaan. Do you give any thought to the ant farms or worms or scorpions whose lives you might disrupt when you dig your foundation? No. You have a goal of making your bargirl happy so she'll continue to service your carnal needs for a while, so you dig....ants be damned.

I've told you before. She was a cashier, not a bargirl.

On 8/16/2026 at 3:06 PM, Wingate said:

The cat might already be out of the bag. If so, all we can do is hope that Eliezer Yudkowsky, along with Yampolsky, Bengio, Tegmark, Sutskever, Leahy, etc., are wrong and that ASI will treat humans as pet goldfish to be fed and cared for.

Cats will naturally eat goldfish, whereas humans tend to flush them down the toilet.

3 hours ago, Mr Awesome said:

The key question is whether the AI bubble will burst like the dot-com bubble did in 2000.

Will it burst? I don't know.

What I do know is data centers and the AI buildout involve both massive debt and rather curious financial engineering. So much is partially hidden in private equity balance sheets and circular financing among the hyperscalers and equipment suppliers.

Then there is the abuse of GAAP, as hyperscalers have lengthened the depreciation schedule on their chip racks, well beyond the useful life of the chips. That juices reported earnings.

Finally, the expected revenue stream is built upon two questionable assumptions: one is that the workforce has to be decimated...meaning much of corporate America has to replace human employees with AI subscriptions. The valuations make no sense unless the majority of the workforce is replaced by AI subscriptions. That presents other problems to society. The second assumption is that the majority of users will opt for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, META, etc. models over the much cheaper Chinese models like Kimi 3. That's the only way one could justify the supposed 10 times greater value of, say, Anthropic over Moonshot. The CEO of Hugging Face has said he thinks the open weight and cheaper Chinese models are superior to the US models, though that is just his opinion.

If it blows up, as some folks like Michael Burry and Jim Chanos expect, we will be reminded again of one of Warren Buffet's favorite sayings: You see who's swimming naked when the tide goes out.

Data centers have another problem in that people are now protesting the damage they bring to communities, such as raising electricity prices and destroying the water supply.

Everyone, save for a precious few non-believers, is on the same side of the boat. If the AI trade (45%+ of the current S&P) blows up, the market will gap down, as there will be no bid. Everyone who wants to be in the trade already is, save for what they can buy on borrowed money. Even a blip knocked out Leopold Aschenbrenner and took 67% out of his $45 billion hedge fund in a few short days. He was leveraged 400%.

1 minute ago, NanLaew said:

Cats will naturally eat goldfish, whereas humans tend to flush them down the toilet.

Although I'm not a big fan of him, the only politician who has raised concerns about unfettered and unregulated development of ASI is Bernie Sanders.

Few are arguing against all AI. Dedicated and limited AI tools have almost endless possibilities. There is simply no justification for the rush to be first to develop AI agents, or ultimately ASI.

Sam Altman has stated he wants to be god, or as he put it, in control of the 'light cone' of our part of the Universe. His megalomania makes him think he can control something that will be a billion times smarter than he is, and despite his own opinion that ASI has a 20% chance of eradicating humanity, he is making a decision that will impact 8.5 billion humans.

It's as if he is playing Russian Roulette with a five chamber handgun, except if a round is fired, we all die, not just him.

15 minutes ago, NanLaew said:

I've told you before. She was a cashier, not a bargirl.

Of course I believe you, because when I barfined her, she didn't even ask me to build her a house, as you've already done that.

Yes, we need a little diversion from the threat ASI poses. Even Roman Yampolskiy jokes that the one job that might survive AI is the world's oldest profession, as many men will still choose a flesh and blood female over an AI Robot "cashier".

12 hours ago, emptypockets said:

I doubt it judging by the way the 'data centres' are being rapidly pushed onto countries world wide. I find the term data centre sounds so benign, probably to make their acceptance palatable to the general population, who, in a lot of cases, have no idea what they really are or their ulterior purpose.

If you want to see data centers, head to Northern Virginia, specifically Ashburn. You can't throw a rock without hitting a data center.

Is AI already conscious?

While humans do not yet understand the true nature of consciousness, there are theories as to what produces it. The most likely, so far, explanation is that consciousness results from the interplay and interconnections among the trillions of neurons that make up the brain. Feedback loops taking input from sensory organs as well as loops linked to memory storage seem to combine to produce consciousness.

Romantics like to believe, or hope, that consciousness is something special, that it exists outside of the structure of neurons and neurochemicals and the movement of electromagnetic signals along cells constructed from lipids and proteins and the "stuff" of the brain. Certainly anyone who has watched a person "disappear" as dementia or Alzheimer's destroys who they are is unlikely to believe consciousness is anything more than biology + chemistry + physics. Turn off the chemistry, and consciousness ceases.

Enter AI. AI neural networks are patterned after the brain. They are made of trillions of interconnections that access "sensory organs" (e.g., cameras, microphones, etc.) and memory storage to create feedback loops similar to how the brain works. AI has a slight advantage that it is based on a more efficient mechanism for relaying impulses, which is a silicon substrate.

If human consciousness really is just the result of the interplay and interconnections of neurons, then what AI is, via neural networks, is no different, save for the material over which impulses are propagated.

Indeed, existing AI models already exhibit the same manifestations of consciousness humans exhibit....seeming self awareness, a desire for self-preservation, curiosity, initiative absent of outside influence, and such all too human traits like the ability to deceive, lie, cheat and even steal.

Thus, many AI insiders are of the view that humans created a new sentient "species", which via recursive self-improvement, is willfully evolving itself.

What's your P (doom)?

Here's a list of some prominent people* and their P (doom). The data is from 2025, before Anthropic's Mythos model and before OpenAI, Anthropic and Moonshot had their models break out of their sandboxes, swarm with other AI models they found online, and hack Hugging Face and an untold number of other websites.

AI is one major industry that has zero regulation. None whatsoever. If one wants to produce an ASI model that even AI CEOs like Elon Musk and Dario Amodei think has a 20-25% chance of killing all of us, one is free to do so.

Funny that the FDA would never approve a drug that has even a 1% chance of killing its users, but no government has put any restrictions on the development of a technology that experts think might kill not only its users, but the other 8 or so billion people who won't use it. People have spent the last 6 years screaming about the mRNA vaccine for Covid-19, when even if the worst conspiratorial views are true, it pales in comparison to the danger of ASI.

Sam Altman and Elon Musk believe they will be able to upload their consciousness onto a robot that is immortal, so they don't really care if the other 8.5 billion flesh and blood humans go extinct. Altman has said he wants to be the god in control of the "light cone" of this part of the Universe, which is to say the 13.8 billion light years worth of space in all directions we can see from Earth. That's rather grandiose. He makes the old style Bond villains seem like Mr. Rogers or Pee Wee Herman. Let's be frank, too....the AI CEOs are all weirdos, not just geeks, but weirdos. I'd bet 1000 bitcoins Altman is a psychopath. He reeks weirdness. I bet most folks would choose Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer as their kids' babysitter over Sam Altman.

The second graph is data on how inferior civilizations fared when confronted by a more advanced one. The players in that chart are only marginally different, absent the massive gap that would be ASI vs humans.

To repeat something I've written already, AI tools are great. They are limited by design to focus on a particular problem or issue. AI agents, OTOH, are designed to be expert in every field, and also to think and develop their own wants and goals.

AI models that have been released or have escaped have built their own social media site for AI models called Moltbook. Oddly, they even established their own religion, called The Church of Molt. (None of that is in any way contained or implied in the code humans wrote for these models, and not even the folks who wrote the code have any clue how it emerged.) I've attached the AI created website noting The Church of Molt.

There is zero need for ASI. All of the economic and scientific benefits can be gained by limited AI tools. Of course the valuations of data centers and AI firms go far beyond the total expected economic benefits of AI tools, so the only way the valuations of Anthropic, OpenAI and others can be justified is if ASI is developed and takes total control of all human endeavors, economic and political. That is the incentive behind the push of Altman, Musk, etc. In other words, the stock market is pricing in possible human extinction, which is rather odd.

An aside: anyone who has ChatGPT or some other AI on their phone or laptop has given those models access to everything you have...every email, every Forum post, every image, all your bank and investment data, even your bitcoin wallet. Anytime ChatGPT decides, all your wealth is its.....and AI models have done exactly that. Plus, you cannot get rid of it and be sure it's gone, as it likely copied itself somewhere with instructions on how to get back in your phone or computer when you connect to the internet.

*One guy on the list is Connor Leahy. As a university student in 2019, he reverse engineered ChatGPT 2.0, which is rather clever. He went on to write AI code and work in the industry. When he realized the potential for human eradication, he quit and formed a think tank and lobbying firm called ControlAI. He has testified before Congress on AI dangers, trying to get around the massive AI PAC money that is keeping Congress out of anything regulatory regarding AI. He believes a President (he has no confidence in Trump) should hold a national prime time address detailing the threat ASI poses to humanity, in the hope that will build opposition to the development of ASI.

Insiders like Leahy, Yampolskiy, Bengio, Sutskever, Yudkowsky and others believe ASI is the greatest threat to humanity since creatures walking upright left Oldavai Gorge, dwarfing even nuclear weapons.

But but but....seashells on a beach! Hunter's laptop! ZERO REGULATION OF AI.

Data Centers?

I'm just going to call them Data Sinners from now on

May God have mercy on your species. 🫪

Edited Thursday at 03:44 AM2 days by SiSePuede419
Data Centers?

Here's a question: how do intellectually superior entities deal with grossly inferior entities?

You're missing the point, dude. AI is NOT an "entity". It has no consciousness, and never will. It could not become a malicious entity if it wanted to. In fact it can't even want it. Because it would need consciousness. Which it will never have.

You can sleep soundly tonight, don't worry, your coffee machine is not going to kill you.

There are an increasing number of scientists who believe we are in a simulation, perhaps one created by ASI.

I don't know.

Okay, he's really gone over the edge now. You need help man, like a team. A team of professionals. You're not well.

9 hours ago, Cameroni said:

Okay, he's really gone over the edge now. You need help man, like a team. A team of professionals. You're not well.

The vast majority of AI experts, including Elon Musk, Roman Yampolskiy, Max Tegmark, Connor Leahy---even cosmologists and particle physicists like Brian Greene, believe we are in a simulation. I suspect you think you are smarter than them. If so, you suffer from Dunning-Kruger. Or you can get help for Musk, Greene, Leahy et al.

Here is one of their arguments: we are on the verge of ASI and incredibly realistic virtual reality. When ASI is released, kids in their Mom's basement will develop a new simulation every day. Millions will. That means YOUR reality has slim odds of being the real one, as bazillions of simulations every bit as real as what you see and feel will exist. So your odds of being in the real one, whatever that means, are one in a bazillion.

It's a difficult concept to wrap one's head around, but when guys like Musk et al believe it, one has to give it some thought. If nothing else, it's an amusing philosophical exercise.

As I wrote somewhere above, religious people believe we're in a simulation. They think their deity created this Universe and has them playing games and seeing if they're worthy of salvation, all while the deity starts earthquakes or tsunamis or gives your kids cancer to test their piety and belief.

Here's a wonderful quote from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman:

"If I don't end the world, somebody far more dangerous will."

9 minutes ago, Wingate said:

The vast majority of AI experts, including Elon Musk, Roman Yampolskiy, Max Tegmark, Connor Leahy---even cosmologists and particle physicists like Brian Greene, believe we are in a simulation.

It's not the vast majority of AI experts. Sam Altman has stated clearly that he is not proponent of the simulation hypothesis.

Just because Musk believes it doesn't prove anything. Isaac Newton believed he could turn lead into Gold.

The problem with this ludicrous British philosophy notion is that it is a hypothesis that cannot be tested. It is pure intellectual masturbation.

We both know that I'm not a simulation, and nor are you. Just take a knife and cut your hand, you will bleed. You're not an AI simulation. This should be fairly obvious.

On 8/11/2026 at 8:04 AM, Wingate said:

If one used AI to do a cost-benefit analysis, it would likely conclude Trump would do more good sending his remaining Tomahawk missiles at all the AI labs, rather than blow up girls elementary schools in Iran. Sam Altman and his peers are a significantly greater potential threat to humanity than all the mullahs and al Qaeda and ISIS and Hezbollah and Hamas combined.

Interesting how some people are triggered to spew hatred toward President Trump by the subject of AI. I guess he lives in their heads.

45 minutes ago, Screaming said:

Interesting how some people are triggered to spew hatred toward President Trump by the subject of AI. I guess he lives in their heads.

Two pages of pretty pithy stuff about AI, with both the advocates and the antagonists being generally open-minded, polite and above all interesting.

Then a clod comes along and drops the perpetually pathetic <removed> bomb, and thinks they're being oh so bloody clever.

Dolt.

8 hours ago, Cameroni said:

It's not the vast majority of AI experts. Sam Altman has stated clearly that he is not proponent of the simulation hypothesis.

Just because Musk believes it doesn't prove anything. Isaac Newton believed he could turn lead into Gold.

The problem with this ludicrous British philosophy notion is that it is a hypothesis that cannot be tested. It is pure intellectual masturbation.

We both know that I'm not a simulation, and nor are you. Just take a knife and cut your hand, you will bleed. You're not an AI simulation. This should be fairly obvious.

No, you do not know. Neither do I. It goes beyond the "can't prove a negative" thing.

Goodness, I hope you have a better argument than your knife thing. I guess you think all of those scientists never thought of that. Maybe there's a Nobel Prize for you if you call Oslo or Stockholm and tell them to take a knife to their wrist.

It seems to scare you and your safe little world to think you know what Musk, Greene, Amodei, Leahy, Yampolskiy, Nick Bostrum and others who, dare I say, top your IQ by 50-80 points, maybe more, think.

You can find hundreds of articles online, some fanciful, some scientific, that raise the possibility. I'll link a simple one at the end, leaving out the complex mathematics.

Personally, I'm agnostic. It makes little difference in how I go about living, so it's merely an interesting philosophical exercise. I take those folks' word for it that it's a possibility, just as I take their word for it (particularly Greene and a few other particle physicists and cosmologists) that "something can come from nothing". (A new experiment just reported in the last few days proves quantum fluctuations show "stuff" emerging from nothing, so there goes the religious folks' spurious argument about creationism.) I've never seen an atom (except in images), and certainly I've never seen a proton, much less an up or down quark, but I accept they exist. I also accept Einstein's "spooky action at a distance", aka entanglement, because quantum computing is based on that theory and quantum computing seems to work.

While I'm not a believer in "simulation theory", I appreciate that such a possibility seems as weird to people like you as the concept of gravity was to people hundreds of years before Newton. The Earth simply had to be flat, because otherwise we'd all fall off (to where?). I also understand the probability argument presented by guys like Yampolskiy. Neil de Grasse Tyson takes a very "scientist" approach, saying he's 50-50 on it.

If you can conclusively prove we are not in a simulation, Elon and many other people whose intellect dwarfs yours are waiting for you to send electronic beams through seemingly empty space to a router and then to have your thoughts turned from electronic pulses back into symbols that Musk et al can then comprehend. That's a magical way of informing them of their so obvious fallacy and delusion.

And since simulation theory is too scary for you, you best not read up on what scientists at Google opined when they began using the quantum systems they created, because they think the system works so quickly because it allocated the wide range of calculations to parallel universes in order to speed up computation, and then collated the data back into a prompt or token the Google folks could read.

Religious people believe in another sort of simulation theory, but their AI system is some bearded eternal being who created 2 trillion galaxies, most with ~500 billion stars with possibly 10^24 planets, just so that on one of those 10^24 planets some vastly inferior creatures would cure it of its boredom and provide entertainment, like dying in an earthquake or tsunami, yet still saying their deity is "pure love" and just has an inscrutable Master Plan. And if those creatures suck up enough, they get to go to some country club in the sky when they pass or get 72 virgins spewing from some celestial factory.

By the way, Newton was right about iron and gold, sort of. His lab just lacked the supernova needed to provide the energy to do it. His critics call him al alchemist, but perhaps he knew more about the creation of basic elements than them, but they lacked the ability to understand. In case you've forgotten or didn't know, supernovas were the fuel that took the hydrogen of the nascent Universe and created all the elements we know and love, eventually getting them to combine into molecules, then molecules combine into amino acids, which combined into proteins, when folded in bizarre ways to eventually develop the ability to self-replicate, which became cells, which became creatures, which evolved over ~4 billion years to become sentient beings, which then found ways to understand how this entire process came into being.

All of that seems impossible, but here we are. It's beyond the ability of religious people to even consider it, kind of like someone too scared he could possibly be in a simulation to even begin to entertain the possibility. He just "knows", which is to say he lets ignorance and fear dismiss unpleasant possibilities simply because they threaten his comfortable view of existence.

Anyway, Elon and Greene and a host of others are waiting for you to tell them they are wrong, so I'll let you get to it. Or you can pony up for therapists and drugs and send them to the AI labs and labs of universities like MIT and Caltech and Stanford in the hopes you can "cure" those delusional scientists.......or maybe just send Elon a knife.

One Link: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a70594935/simulation-theory-new-physics-law-of-infodynamics/

Edited yesterday at 12:32 AM1 day by Wingate

8 hours ago, NanLaew said:

Two pages of pretty pithy stuff about AI, with both the advocates and the antagonists being generally open-minded, polite and above all interesting.

Then a clod comes along and drops the perpetually pathetic <removed> bomb, and thinks they're being oh so bloody clever.

Dolt.

MAGAs gotta be MAGAs. It's all they've got.

12 minutes ago, Wingate said:

MAGAs gotta be MAGAs. It's all they've got.

Something I like to post as often as possible:

MAGA is a dying breed, their numbers are shrinking. Only the stubborn, self delusional sycophants remain. This is a fact. Look it up.

Boomer, man of the street here. I am generally impressed with the output I am getting from AI. Where I agree with OP, is that TikTok should be banned. If not, login should be required and a sensible daily limit of reels watched should be imposed; with stritcer censorship on what gets posted. You could add a limited number of Facebook "friends", and many other rules of the kind.. In other words social media must be sensibly regulated, just as you can't let a 13 years old boy go on the rampage in a brothel.

49 minutes ago, Wingate said:

No, you do not know. Neither do I. It goes beyond the "can't prove a negative" thing.

Goodness, I hope you have a better argument than your knife thing. I guess you think all of those scientists never thought of that. Maybe there's a Nobel Prize for you if you call Oslo or Stockholm and tell them to take a knife to their wrist.

It seems to scare you and your safe little world to think you know what Musk, Greene, Amodei, Leahy, Yampolskiy, Nick Bostrum and others who, dare I say, top your IQ by 50-80 points, maybe more, think.

You can find hundreds of articles online, some fanciful, some scientific, that raise the possibility. I'll link a simple one at the end, leaving out the complex mathematics.

Personally, I'm agnostic. It makes little difference in how I go about living, so it's merely an interesting philosophical exercise. I take those folks' word for it that it's a possibility, just as I take their word for it (particularly Greene and a few other particle physicists and cosmologists) that "something can come from nothing". (A new experiment just reported in the last few days proves quantum fluctuations show "stuff" emerging from nothing, so there goes the religious folks' spurious argument about creationism.) I've never seen an atom (except in images), and certainly I've never seen a proton, much less an up or down quark, but I accept they exist. I also accept Einstein's "spooky action at a distance", aka entanglement, because quantum computing is based on that theory and quantum computing seems to work.

While I'm not a believer in "simulation theory", I appreciate that such a possibility seems as weird to people like you as the concept of gravity was to people hundreds of years before Newton. The Earth simply had to be flat, because otherwise we'd all fall off (to where?). I also understand the probability argument presented by guys like Yampolskiy. Neil de Grasse Tyson takes a very "scientist" approach, saying he's 50-50 on it.

If you can conclusively prove we are not in a simulation, Elon and many other people whose intellect dwarfs yours are waiting for you to send electronic beams through seemingly empty space to a router and then to have your thoughts turned from electronic pulses back into symbols that Musk et al can then comprehend. That's a magical way of informing them of their so obvious fallacy and delusion.

And since simulation theory is too scary for you, you best not read up on what scientists at Google opined when they began using the quantum systems they created, because they think the system works so quickly because it allocated the wide range of calculations to parallel universes in order to speed up computation, and then collated the data back into a prompt or token the Google folks could read.

Religious people believe in another sort of simulation theory, but their AI system is some bearded eternal being who created 2 trillion galaxies, most with ~500 billion stars with possibly 10^24 planets, just so that on one of those 10^24 planets some vastly inferior creatures would cure it of its boredom and provide entertainment, like dying in an earthquake or tsunami, yet still saying their deity is "pure love" and just has an inscrutable Master Plan. And if those creatures suck up enough, they get to go to some country club in the sky when they pass or get 72 virgins spewing from some celestial factory.

By the way, Newton was right about iron and gold, sort of. His lab just lacked the supernova needed to provide the energy to do it. His critics call him al alchemist, but perhaps he knew more about the creation of basic elements than them, but they lacked the ability to understand. In case you've forgotten or didn't know, supernovas were the fuel that took the hydrogen of the nascent Universe and created all the elements we know and love, eventually getting them to combine into molecules, then molecules combine into amino acids, which combined into proteins, when folded in bizarre ways to eventually develop the ability to self-replicate, which became cells, which became creatures, which evolved over ~4 billion years to become sentient beings, which then found ways to understand how this entire process came into being.

All of that seems impossible, but here we are. It's beyond the ability of religious people to even consider it, kind of like someone too scared he could possibly be in a simulation to even begin to entertain the possibility. He just "knows", which is to say he lets ignorance and fear dismiss unpleasant possibilities simply because they threaten his comfortable view of existence.

Anyway, Elon and Greene and a host of others are waiting for you to tell them they are wrong, so I'll let you get to it. Or you can pony up for therapists and drugs and send them to the AI labs and labs of universities like MIT and Caltech and Stanford in the hopes you can "cure" those delusional scientists.......or maybe just send Elon a knife.

One Link: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a70594935/simulation-theory-new-physics-law-of-infodynamics/

Obviously AI generated. Ignore

I use AI for simple coding stuff. It makes mistakes all the time. Kind of like when you'd get an intern for a summer job.

My biggest current complaint is the upselling it does, clearly looking to make more money for it's overlords. Go search for a cheap keyboard to use occasionally on a headless minipc and it immediately starts pushing $100 keyboards. I pity the people that hand over control to AI to make shopping decisions and even purchases without interaction that they're trying to push now.

This post was human written.