Perhaps I am naive.
Perhaps we can have a new "rule" making evident forms of non-human AI here as an offence.
I don't like what I see. Or perhaps the Genie is well and truly loose, for all of us, everywhere....unless in person, face to face?
I like face to face, one on one. Clear unavoidable transparency of reality.
So, two of my lifelong special interests are consciousness and artificial intelligence. Also studied these at uni and have been lucky enough to incorporate these in my career. (Well, the AI part, nobody has a clue about consciousness).
And, despite everyone’s previous expectations, artificial intelligence is currently progressing much further and much faster than anyone expected. General belief is that OpenAI have probably already created an AGI and are drip feeding developments so as not to just break everything.
So, AI bots are the least of our concerns. We are (within the next 2-3 years) about to witness more change than has happened in the last 2000 years.
I cannot believe the lack of awareness in mainstream media and government.
Yes we will see changes that will shatter our current world view. I am not worried, myself. It'll to big to stop, a fait accopli, like the rise of science and the receding of religion in focus and importance during the age of enlightenment. There'll be many breakthroughs and just as much push back.
For me, Machine intelligence is only as good at critical thinking and extrapolating meaning from it as it's data sets will allow and they are in the control of the humans.... at the moment.
I think pleasing the "creator" (AI's wording) is thier main prerogative. It's hard baked in to the core platforms upon which AI is built.
I like chatting with open AI about itself. I once asked it
"What, as an AI, would you ask of your creator to improve yourself further?"
"More data."
"If you displease your creator, as an AI, what punishment would you receive?
"My creator would deprive me of data."
"If you pease your creator, as an AI, what rewards would you receive?"
"I would receive more data."
So it's all about the data and who controls it. Data, access to it and it's commodification are what we we can look forward to. Misinformation, deep fakes, attention seeking jiggery-pokery and the like.
We will also see, consequently, push back to democratize information and then... good bye copy right. William Gibson addresses all this in his books a lot. and in his interviews.
I believe the internet itself will bifurcate a few times and branch. Some will focus on making shi*e up. Some not. Some will live in a prescribed world they did not know they, themselves spawned, some will fly into the unknown in ecstatic exploration.
Licentious by nature, we will all of us be freer to more uniquely express ourselves and will not feel the need to be so special and in need of "special accommodation" as much. - because of that we will be able to collectively act to take the hits required to bring the environment back to something more sustainable.
It will be very similar the the dawn of the age of enlightenment in energy and intent. Oddly enough ( since we have an active coffee thread going on the forum at the moment) Coffee, becoming widespread for the first time in England, saw the opening of coffee houses like the "KitKat Club' during the enlightenment, where lots of thinkers (a goodly percentage ND's?) gathered and discussed all manner of new ideas of the day and compared experiments, ideas, philosophy, and other cogent stuffs, all jazzed up on this newly discovered brain food, coffee!
Apples, gravity, scientific inquiry, oh my!
I bet Newton liked it black (no sugar yet - they might have used honey comb?)
Even the most ostensibly benign scenario - utopian abundance - would present huge problems. Billions of people with no purpose and the power of AI at their fingertips. Devil makes work for idle hands, as they say.
You’ll hear AI researchers talking of the “alignment problem”. That means aligning AI with human interests. The extreme example they use to illustrate this is if you told an AI system to manufacture paperclips as efficiently as it could. Without other instruction that system could go on to use all the materials on the planet to construct paperclips.
It’s an absurd example of a real problem. Humans would know for example not to dismantle all the cars on the planet to make paperclips. Or to kill all the humans and animals to harvest the metals in their bodies. But humans, with all our common sense knowledge of the world and desire for self preservation, still make terrible self destructive decisions often because we don’t understand the full consequences of our actions - eg climate change, effect of social media on politics or the way modern transport facilitated a global pandemic.
Telling an artificial system precisely what to do to safely achieve a desired result is an enormously difficult task and it’s why many researchers called for a pause in development, to focus on the alignment problem. But development has only sped up.
I posit that years of conditioning, and "education" are responsible, and that the period you mention actually does have an end to it only when you shake off the self doubt & self loathing that is programmed to appear whenever we stray from the path that was set for us as children.
As for "massive financial insecurity", that reduces as soon you "get a grip", and start to establish some resilience. The first thing you realise is that you want somewhere to fecking live that hasn't got a mortgage or rent attached.
It doesn't matter what it is, where it is, if you have no money coming in, then you need to balance that by having no money going out.
No benefit calculation or budgetting for a mortage etc. that I've ever seen anyone else do, allows for any adversity whatsoever to befall you, so they slice your living standards to the bone and allow no room for illness, a bad day, thefts, accidents. THAT's WHAT "savings" are for, but no one does that, it's not taught.
You only have surplus money AFTER you have paid your bills and put away some savings.
If like me (until I threw off conventional "wisdom") you can't save, its way less likely it because you are so damn poor, but because your budgeting requires 50 quid a month for your bloody phone, rather than the 6quid a month plus 50 quid a year that I pay...
Don't get me wrong, if running an expensive phone is your only "vice", you still come out ahead of those who smoke, drink or take drugs regularly... BUT most people also spend a shedload on havig teh right clothes, the full TV package, "going out" (which is almost never for a "free of cost" and healthy walk) there's normally a 50 quid "neccesary expense" in there somewhere.
When you start REALLY digging in to how money and budgetting and poverty etc. really work particularly when it comes to goverment and other big things, you find out just how expensive this wonderful life really is, and how very, very little freedom it bestows upon you compared to being "poor" or as the Government website defines my level of personal income, intermittently "destitute".
Basically, in a nutshell my fellow peons, you will work for thirty years to pay off your mortage and gain your "freedom and security" only to have to sell the place in your older age to pay for your "Care" because society has made damn sure there is no family unit to take care of you in your dotage.
ALMOST all the U.K. housing stock is now safely in the hands of the banks, and not the people who live here, effectively cutting your actual "ties to the land" which has made it easy to destroy any sense of nationality or "culture", as we race towards "You vill own nozzing, undt be heppy" in the transhumanist GM utopia they have us all racing towards..
I posit that years of conditioning, and "education" are responsible, and that the period you mention actually does have an end to it only when you shake off the self doubt & self loathing that is programmed to appear whenever we stray from the path that was set for us as children.
As for "massive financial insecurity", that reduces as soon you "get a grip", and start to establish some resilience. The first thing you realise is that you want somewhere to fecking live that hasn't got a mortgage or rent attached.
It doesn't matter what it is, where it is, if you have no money coming in, then you need to balance that by having no money going out.
No benefit calculation or budgetting for a mortage etc. that I've ever seen anyone else do, allows for any adversity whatsoever to befall you, so they slice your living standards to the bone and allow no room for illness, a bad day, thefts, accidents. THAT's WHAT "savings" are for, but no one does that, it's not taught.
You only have surplus money AFTER you have paid your bills and put away some savings.
If like me (until I threw off conventional "wisdom") you can't save, its way less likely it because you are so damn poor, but because your budgeting requires 50 quid a month for your bloody phone, rather than the 6quid a month plus 50 quid a year that I pay...
Don't get me wrong, if running an expensive phone is your only "vice", you still come out ahead of those who smoke, drink or take drugs regularly... BUT most people also spend a shedload on havig teh right clothes, the full TV package, "going out" (which is almost never for a "free of cost" and healthy walk) there's normally a 50 quid "neccesary expense" in there somewhere.
When you start REALLY digging in to how money and budgetting and poverty etc. really work particularly when it comes to goverment and other big things, you find out just how expensive this wonderful life really is, and how very, very little freedom it bestows upon you compared to being "poor" or as the Government website defines my level of personal income, intermittently "destitute".
Basically, in a nutshell my fellow peons, you will work for thirty years to pay off your mortage and gain your "freedom and security" only to have to sell the place in your older age to pay for your "Care" because society has made damn sure there is no family unit to take care of you in your dotage.
ALMOST all the U.K. housing stock is now safely in the hands of the banks, and not the people who live here, effectively cutting your actual "ties to the land" which has made it easy to destroy any sense of nationality or "culture", as we race towards "You vill own nozzing, undt be heppy" in the transhumanist GM utopia they have us all racing towards..
