dr_rat posted:

Why are all the people working in AI terrified of the AI apocalypses, something that's not going to happen, and don't give a drat about AI replacing jobs, and creating a great wealth gap, something that is currently happening!!!

Like what the hell!

smarxist posted:

this article headline is radioactive

https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1726661142444163515

dr_rat posted:

Why are all the people working in AI terrified of the AI apocalypses, something that's not going to happen, and don't give a drat about AI replacing jobs, and creating a great wealth gap, something that is currently happening!!!

Like what the hell!

dr_rat posted:

Why are all the people working in AI terrified of the AI apocalypses, something that's not going to happen, and don't give a drat about AI replacing jobs, and creating a great wealth gap, something that is currently happening!!!

Like what the hell!

Tulip posted:

People are generally more afraid of unlikely events than likely events. People are more scared of serial killers than intimate partner violence, more scared of plane crashes than car accidents, more scared of sharks than drowning.

Platystemon posted:

It’s a fanfic that is longer than War and Peace, like literally, in word count, not hyperbole.

Ruffian Price posted:

I am absolutely afraid of capitalists killing everyone and "it was the master computer. nothing we could do" becoming the prevailing narrative

Ruffian Price posted:

I am absolutely afraid of capitalists killing everyone and "it was the master computer. nothing we could do" becoming the prevailing narrative

tokin opposition posted:

float profit = 0
while True do {
profit = profit + (profit * .25)
crime++
}

tokin opposition posted:

code:

int profit = 1
while True do {
profit = profit + (profit * .25)
crime.add(mostRecentCrime)
}

quote:

Invaders from Mars
By Charlie Stross

"Voting doesn't change anything — the politicians always win." 'Twas not always so, but I'm hearing variations on that theme a lot these days, and not just in the UK.

Why do we feel so politically powerless? Why is the world so obviously going to hell in a handbasket? Why can't anyone fix it?

Here's my (admittedly whimsical) working hypothesis ...

The rot set in back in the 19th century, when the US legal system began recognizing corporations as de facto people. Fast forward past the collapse of the ancien regime, and into modern second-wave colonialism: once the USA grabbed the mantle of global hegemon from the bankrupt British empire in 1945, they naturally exported their corporate model worldwide, as US diplomatic (and military) muscle was used to promote access to markets on behalf of US corporations.

Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)

Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.

Collectively, corporate groups lobby international trade treaty negotiations for operating conditions more conducive to pursuing their three goals. They bully individual lawmakers through overt channels (with the ever-present threat of unfavourable news coverage) and covert channels (political campaign donations). The general agreements on tariffs and trade, and subsequent treaties defining new propertarian realms, once implemented in law, define the macroeconomic climate: national level politicians thus no longer control their domestic economies.

Corporations, not being human, lack patriotic loyalty; with a free trade regime in place they are free to move wherever taxes and wages are low and profits are high. We have seen this recently in Ireland where, despite a brutal austerity budget, corporation tax is not to be raised lest multinationals desert for warmer climes.

For a while the Communist system held this at bay by offering a rival paradigm, however faulty, for how we might live: but with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 — and the adoption of state corporatism by China as an engine for development — large scale opposition to the corporate system withered.

We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don't bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.

In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.

uber_stoat posted:

uber_stoat posted:

smarxist posted:

this article headline is radioactive

https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1726661142444163515

Pitch posted:

I hate that learning about all this LessWrong bullshit in 2013 became relevant to the news in 2023.

Pitch posted:

I hate that learning about all this LessWrong bullshit in 2013 became relevant to the news in 2023.

FFT posted:

HPMOR was fun at first, I appreciated the "if you give Frodo a lightsaber you have to give Sauron a Death Star" approach of the story. But oof on all the rest over time.

rko posted:

That’s being too charitable, doesn’t it start with several chapters of Harry lecturing McGonagal about statistics and the scientific method? He has a huge moral panic about sentient magical objects or wizarding racism or whatever?

quote:

"You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can't just visualise a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?"

Professor McGonagall's lips were twitching harder now. "Magic."

FFT posted:

Sort of? He definitely freaks out about how her turning into a cat breaks light cones or whatever

i knew this happened in chapter two :/

Arivia posted:

in a better story, that quote would be the introduction to the protag learning to chill and love magic and be cool. but it's not, i'm guessing. it's just stupid stuff about magic and science laws.

DACK FAYDEN posted:

yep

but it's ok in the end he creates a factory farm for unicorn blood and the philosopher's stone to make everyone immortal and cuts the bad guy's head off with nanofilament wire before giving him amnesia to try to rehabilitate him

clearly this means he's a good guy