mountainriver

joined 11 months ago
[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 8 points 4 months ago

Oh yes, very much so.

The British Empire had its colonial administrators curriculum consisting of Latin and history and such. A rich 19th century heir that went into physics or mathematics were considered to be wasting the chance of a political career.

It made their colonial administrators write about their crimes in a nice prose, but it didn't stop the genocides. If anything it made them aware of what paper trails to burn after the fact, in order to obfuscate the crimes when future historians came looking.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 13 points 4 months ago (8 children)

Gates also mentioned that AI will be a good force in providing better health care and tackling climate change, in particular by calling nuclear fusion energy a clean alternative to fossil fuels.

Ah yes, fusion. With the wealth of data we have from - checks notes - stars and bombs, the applied statistics machines will surely be able to extrapolate working fusion reactors.

Don't know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 12 points 4 months ago

I think it's a good one to hand people who just vaguely has picked up something about existential threat. Short, funny, and gets to the point of the existential threat stuff being a smoke screen for crapification and redirection from climate change.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago

I have not followed any current debate, so this is just my own thoughts. I expect any battle between Disney and Microsoft to end with a deal where consumers and independent producers are worse off.

Similar to how YouTube often hands out copyright strikes for musicians uploading their own music, in a possible future you might need an AI license to upload any work to any platform of size. I mean, you don't technically have to, it is just that that the AI driven filter will otherwise strike you faster than Tumblr hiding images of trans women. Oh, and when you fold and get the AI license, you notice that it includes signing away your rights to not have your uploaded work be part of the AI training materials.

Maybe I am just jaded. But until AI crashes and burns the in my opinion most likely outcome of legal proceedings is splitting the loot in proportion to the power of the interested parties. On the other hand I don't expect anything good to come out of letting AI companies run wild. So I dearly hope they destroy each other, but I expect them to embrace.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 6 points 4 months ago

As long as line goes up nobody knows how rich the perps will be.

And if you don't know how rich the perps will be, how will you know if and how hard they should be punished?

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Georgia is 70-82% absolute certain that god exists.

Which one? Both of them.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 15 points 4 months ago

I have noted two AI companies going belly up with earnings in a year matching costs per month. So I assumed that was around the worse case scenario, and for not yet bankrupt AI companies earnings were probably a bit better, perhaps just losing ten times their earnings.

I now see the flaw of my reasoning. Capital isn't allocated on profits, it's allocated on hype. Having profits draws the company down because it's no longer pure hype, and thus doesn't contribute to the hype bubble the same way.

So existing, not yet bankrupt, AI companies probably has significantly worse cost to income ratio than twelve.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 11 points 4 months ago

But they have worked out how to make it go faster! Now we just need to run it in reverse!

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 8 points 5 months ago

I meant to put something in there about the similarities and differences with planned economies, but I kinda lost track of that.

Anyway, the profit driven capital allocation in theory allocates capital to production of goods people want - and thus presumably need. The hype driven capital allocation does no such thing.

In contrast with a planned economy, the real goals of the hype driven capital allocation are hidden by corporate secrecy and if presented would probably just be to collect tonnes of money for the richest people. In a planned economy at least there are goals like more toilet paper production, if people need more toilet paper.

In short the hype driven capital allocation is worse than planned economy.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 15 points 5 months ago (7 children)

"National socialism" is the term the Nazis invented to describe themselves. "Nazi" is the abbreviation of the term "national socialism". Could be good to know.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The number of rocks in my garden is information. Yet, despite counting them all, I have not found AGI. So I must need more information than that.

Clearly, counting all the rocks in Wales should do it. So much counting.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 11 points 5 months ago

And here I thought it was easy to find high schoolers that are both wrong and sure of themselves.

view more: ‹ prev next ›