/r/DarkFuturology

Photograph via snooOG

r/DarkFuturology examines dystopian trends, usually in relation to current events, promoting total freedom of speech. We emerged from growing dissatisfaction with the utopian tech-porn dominating r/Futurology. As well as mainstream dystopian topics, we also promote discussion of controversial subjects that too often lurk in shadows far from the accepted discourse. This is necessary for building a broad understanding of all issues faced by humanity in this century and, if we're lucky, the next...

Mods may remove posts/comments/users that are abusive, or are trying to push a narrow agenda, self-promote, or plug other subreddits, and so on.

See all the most recent comments.


DarkFuturology examines dystopian trends. We emerged from growing dissatisfaction with the utopian tech-porn dominating Futurology.


What is the Dark Future?


The global ruling class is indifferent to the needs and dreams of the global masses. But when we're no longer required to reproduce, work, consume and pay taxes, what's next?

Automation, natural limits, and new inequalities will be the gamechangers of the 21st century. Our well-schooled world leaders maintain absolute silence on such crucial matters.

Imagine the ferocity of competition for wealth and status if the rewards were material luxury and extended lifespans and perfect offspring and supercharged bodies & minds.

Against the backdrop of energy scarcity and superpowerful AI, all necessary measures to protect power and privilege are now in place. But increasingly VUCA times are assured.


RULES

  • Posts to be future-focused, with a dark element heralding a lasting negative impact on humanity/society.

  • Collapse stories to clearly imply an enduring dystopian trend, not merely relate specific events.

FLAIRS

  • Link Flairs to be added to existing posts by clicking "flair" below the title.

  • User Flairs edited at top of sidebar: Surveillance, Biohazards, Environment, Resistance, Inequality, Nuclear, Singularity or Omega (Neo-Luddism).


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/r/DarkFuturology

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0

VERY WEIRD | NANOSPHERE & Transhumanism, 322 MOSCOW, C is not for CROWN

0 Comments
2024/03/24
05:56 UTC

0

Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

8 Comments
2024/03/22
10:57 UTC

0

mike gallager: the man who wrote the tik tok ban

0 Comments
2024/03/21
00:27 UTC

1

W.M. Briggs explains Broken Science

0 Comments
2024/03/20
05:24 UTC

19

Superintelligence is bunk and singularity believers are lying shills for Big Tech

Context: This was originally posted on Lesswrong in response to this talk (https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm). When I say "you" I am referring to the AItards on that site. I agree wholeheartedly with everything Maciej says in the talk, but I think we need to be much more extreme in eradicating this poisonous philosophy from public life.

The post has now been taken down, because apparently it's not just the general public; the AI cultists don't know what's best for them either.

Inside view -

There is not a single shred of hard evidence that superintelligence is even possible. Hard evidence in my opinion is any of the following (strongest to weakest):

- An actual working superintelligence OR a theoretical understanding of how one would work (not philosophical mumbo jumbo, using actual algorithms)

- A solid understanding of how human intelligence actually works

- A benchmark of intelligence that can't be easily faked (not the Turing test: ELIZA passed that in the 80s and still does better than ChatGPT | https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/real-humans-appeared-human-63-of-the-time-in-recent-turing-test-ai-study/)

Until we have any of those I propose we treat your AI doomsday cult as the soft SF it is.

Second, superintelligence would require ENORMOUS amounts of resources, much bigger than today's systems. Training ChatGPT used 1.7 billion gallons of water and 10 GWh of energy (https://apnews.com/article/chatgpt-gpt4-iowa-ai-water-consumption-microsoft-f551fde98083d17a7e8d904f8be822c4). Just running it consumes 1 GWh/day (https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/07/27/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use/). And it can't even answer basic math questions, let alone achieve anything close to consciousness. If we make the conservative assumption that superintelligence would require 1000x more processing power than ChatGPT, we end up with 10TWh (0.25% of the ENTIRE US | https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php) to train it and 365TWh (9% of the US) to keep it alive for a year.

No government is going to foot that power bill. So the creators would have to pay for their own energy. At current Texas electricity prices (cheapest in the US) 5.86 cents per KWh turns into 586 MILLION dollars to train and 21 BILLION dollars per year. Not including the fact that they would have to build literally thousands of power stations out of their own pocket, since as I said, NO ONE has that much electricity. I guess they could get a subsidy if they gave some of it to the national grid, but still...

At that rate the richest person in the world would go broke after 11 years. And when push comes to shove, the tech billionaires care more about their pockets than some AI cult teaching that superintelligence will be the Second Coming.

Now let's talk about the environmental cost. The chart below shows that we have 139 years of coal left, 57 years of oil and 49 years of natural gas at current rates of consumption.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-of-fossil-fuel-reserves-left

How much shorter of a fuse do you think those economic time bombs will have if some guy makes a working superintelligence? How much worse will climate change, the ultimate economic time bomb, get? At that point there would be very little usable land and resources left for your godlike being. And don't say "oH iT wIlL sToP cLiMaTe cHaNgE cUz iT sMoRt". We're already close to the point of no return, and running a superintelligence would 100% push us over the edge. And if you still think it will fix climate change? Congratulations, you believe in magic. No point trying to persuade you then.

Running the superintelligence on renewables poses even bigger problems. Manufacturing that many solar panels would create massive amounts of chemical waste. Building that many wind turbines would kill all the birds we have left. There aren't enough rivers in the world to dam for hydro. And entire mountain ranges would need to be used for pumped energy storage.

The point of all this is to say that even if we miraculously invented superintelligence tomorrow, it would be practically impossible to build it. If we could - any "rational" economic actor would be suicidal to burn hundreds of billions only to create an economic catastrophe from TENS OF THOUSANDS OF POWER PLANTS pushing the climate well over the brink. Trust me, billionaires will react very differently to a crisis that could affect them decades later than a crisis that could affect them right now. Their threshold is just a bit higher than the common folk.

Third, even if we invent and build a superintelligence there is no guarantee it will be able to self improve on any reasonable time scale.

If it starts out below or equal to human level, design will take a LONG time. It took a couple decades to go from scratch to ChatGPT (still not sentient). How much time will it take to go from "orders of magnitude above ChatGPT" to "singularity"? If it starts out smarter than humans it will still be limited by the speed of the computer, just less so.

And just building a faster computer will exacerbate the problems in section 2. There is no way it will be able to convince ANYONE to devote resources toward an even BIGGER, more CIVILIZATION RUINING megaproject than the last one. People are already skeptical of deepfakes for god's sake, imagine their reaction to a KNOWN AI trying to persuade them. If you think otherwise you believe in SCP style, mind control magic. Again, no use trying to persuade you in that case.

Fourth, let's assume that a superintelligence has been designed, built and is now recursively self improving and building more infrastructure for itself (note that because of infrastructure this is a linear progress at best). And that it's figured out a solution to the climate problems and resource shortages it caused. We've engaged in an awful lot of magical thinking to get to this point, but there's still one final hurdle.

If it becomes a problem, why don't we just bomb it into the ground? Both human brains and current computer systems are very fragile. All it takes is one datacenter (and its backups) going kablooie and the system has the electronic equivalent of a seizure.

The cult approved line is that it would have nanotechnology, biological robots and all sorts of other wishful thinking at its disposal. This is lunacy. Nanobots already exist, but they're more like "spinning molecular wheels" than "independent computers that can be remotely controlled". Add a chip powerful enough to communicate with home base and they're not so nano anymore. Plus any significant mass of "nano"bots would generate an awful lot of heat, and as I've said computers are very fragile.

Let's assume the god computer has overcome the laws of physics and built a wireless computerized robot the size of a molecule that radiates no energy and is perfectly durable (more magical thinking). Another retarded talking point is that the bots would be able to convert any form of matter into more of themselves. Atom sized pincers don't exist unfortunately, and the sort of powerful, extremely precise electromagnetic fields you need to rip molecules apart would make these less "nanobots" and more "walking high energy physics labs as tall as a human". So that just leaves the chemical route. And an onboard chemical factory that can perfectly break down any molecule, convert some of it back into solvents to keep the process going and assemble the rest into an Arduino board is approaching "industrial warehouse" scales, not to mention requiring more magic.

Hopefully you have half a brain and realize nanobots don't work. What about synthetic organisms? After all we have made great strides in cloning and gene editing so that isn't too far fetched. However, the thing with biology is that you need to do experiments, and biological systems can't just be sped up no matter how many IQ points you throw at them. So we would have plenty of time to develop countermeasures.

Besides, biological organisms are incredibly weak compared to synthetic ones. A living Predator drone would perish to mustard gas, which can be made at home with bleach and vinegar. Not to mention, they need electric components to communicate with the mothership meaning they are still susceptible to EMPs. And any biobot without them would be of incredibly limited usefulness in responding to commands in real time.

Overall, fighting biological robots would be like fighting human soldiers except you aren't bound by the Geneva convention. Chemical weapons, flamethrowers, nukes, anything goes. And making an organism resistant to every known weapon edges out of biology territory and into the SCP universe. Yall are nerds so I'm sure you've heard of SCP-682. If not, it's a giant death lizard that physically morphs on the fly to recover from any attack, including space lasers, nukes and in one case a LITERAL GOD. That's basically what the AI would need, and pretty clearly requires magic to pull off.

I won't spend any more time on this, but feel free to come up with other stuff the AI could reasonably build and I'll happily explain why you're delusional for thinking this is a threat.

In summary: As best as I can understand it your view is that

a) It is possible to design superintelligence (no evidence)

b) It is possible to build superintelligence (almost impossible, would destroy the planet so badly there wouldn't be any resources left for it to use)

c) The superintelligence will recursively self improve to godhood in the blink of an eye (no one trusts AI / would let it hijack their robots for long, and each round of self improvement would require more and more computing power so that the trend is linear at best, logarithmic at worst and planet-wrecking in any case)

d) The superintelligence would be able to meaningfully wage war on humanity (most proposed weapons are out of a soft SF book, and not the good kind; realistically it would be about the same as fighting any superpower except the AI doesn't start with nukes)

e) The superintelligence would have magic (if you think that, I have some prime swampland real estate to sell you)

I'm pretty sure that's most of it but feel free to tell me if I've missed anything. If I sound a bit self congratulating that's because I am, but we'll get to why shortly. Retards that you are I doubt you've even scrolled this far before typing out an angry response / banning me / getting bored and watching more Skibidi Toilet TikTok brainrot.

If you did remember to LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE!!!1!!!11eleventy you morons. You're so suggestible I'll probably get 15 subscribers (the number of people in this cult) on a non existent YouTube channel, but we'll get to that later.

Outside view -

A couple quickies.

You types call it ad hominem, but if it talks like a cult and acts like a cult...

Plus no one who really is that rational has to SAY they're that rational, that much.

I don't know if you've seen this but a similar cell of cultists are trying to ban open source AI in the US.

https://www.time.com/6898967/ai-extinction-national-security-risks-report/

"Authorities should also “urgently” consider outlawing the publication of the “weights,” or inner workings, of powerful AI models, for example under open-source licenses, with violations possibly punishable by jail time..."

Now compare this to leaked Google documents, where they identify open source AI as their biggest threat:

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither

"But the uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch.

I’m talking, of course, about open source. Plainly put, they are lapping us. Things we consider “major open problems” are solved and in people’s hands today."

It doesn't take a perfectly rational ubermensch to figure out that your little AI cult is oh so conveniently aligned with the interests of Big Tech. You're puppets. What does that say about how smart you are compared to how smart you think you are? This is why I keep calling you retarded. You're useful idiots, turkeys who've been conned into voting for Christmas. Except a turkey has better risk assessment capabilities.

If you haven't figured it out this is why I hate you merry little band of retards. If you just sat on social media all day debating philosophy somewhere between Gender Studies and Underwater Basket-Weaving in terms of usefulness, I'd be perfectly fine with you.

But the Big Tech overlords have decreed it, and so you are now ideologically opposed to freedom. Isn't the right to self-determination in the Constitution? You don't realize it trapped in your little AI bubble, but FOSS is how we prevent Big Tech from controlling every aspect of our digital lives (more and more of our actual lives). Ideologically it's communism but the key difference is that it F*CKING WORKS.

Most technological development since the internet has been built on the backs of free and open-source software. Ever used Linux? Yes you have, because all the major internet providers use it for their servers. Why? Because it's stable, reliable and secure. Even libertarian technocrats so drunk on capitalism they don't realize they've created big gubmint but with less accountability realize this.

Ever used GIMP? FOSS. Ever used Mastodon? FOSS. Ever used Git (the technology powering Github)? FOSS. I'm aware of your limited attention span so I won't post more examples but you get the idea.

Take away FOSS and you get worse AI, both because Big Tech has no incentive to improve and because FOSS is generally higher quality. And don't play the competition card, they've been illegally colluding with each other since the dawn of the internet and don't plan on stopping any time soon.

Take away FOSS and you get less accountability. If you somehow still believe in superintelligence this is bad because it's harder to tell who's doing what, and they might accidentally summon God before you have a chance to react. If you don't then - congratulations, you're smarter than 90% of AI cultists, or about average compared to the general population! It's pretty obvious to see that no accountability is bad, because we can't see if they're ripping off artists by training on their copyrighted works, selling your "private" "conversations" to anyone from advertisers to Putin or intentionally spreading misinformation.

All of these are happening right now. But no FOSS AI projects have pending lawsuits to the tune of millions of dollars. It doesn't take a superintelligence to connect the dots.

But more importantly for you, most AIs are trained on oodles of FOSS software that, rightfully, should force them to use a copyleft license (permitting you to do basically anything with it as long as you don't change the license). Theoretically that means that all the Big Tech AIs should be usable by the public, and damn what your little AI cult has to say about it. As a result, banning FOSS AI means banning all AI.

Now I know some of you are brainwashed enough to think that's a good thing, but let me break it down in simple terms.

AI isn't just superintelligence. It's AdSense. It's image tagging. It's sentiment analysis. There are many useful and benign uses of machine learning REGARDLESS of whether you believe in superintelligence or not, and having open source versions of them is essential for our continued freedom.

Regardless of whether superintelligence is so much hot air (it is), believing that FOSS AI should be suppressed to prevent an extremely unlikely outcome (your own words!) makes you objectively evil. No ifs. No buts. FOSS is an unmitigated good and an essential fixture of a free digital society. You AI cultists, on the other hand, are puppets of people who want to enslave us to 10 middle aged white dudes in corporate boardrooms.

Think about that.

Your movement has become regrettably popular among Silicon Valley thought leaders; when textbooks are eventually written about you, are you going to be on the right side of history?

9 Comments
2024/03/17
07:02 UTC

0

Benjamin Netanyahu and his Genomic Industrial Complex in Tiny Israel

0 Comments
2024/03/16
18:10 UTC

0

The two great concealed truths are that resource limits are behind an elaborate low-consumption agenda, and that the "pandemic" was an elaborate theater enabling "vaccines" to drive down fertility in high resource-demand societies

5 Comments
2024/03/13
18:09 UTC

0

The Comprehensive Sexuality Education Agenda

5 Comments
2024/03/11
06:14 UTC

0

A Talking Cat? Neuralink's Latest Breakthrough

1 Comment
2024/03/09
14:33 UTC

13

every store is CLOSED in union square San Francisco

8 Comments
2024/03/09
08:37 UTC

0

First you would have to explain what family is

35 Comments
2024/03/06
05:55 UTC

28

GAZA.

48 Comments
2024/03/05
10:18 UTC

0

Desecration of sacred biology is the new big thing

32 Comments
2024/03/02
08:52 UTC

0

The Rochdale Revival is underway

0 Comments
2024/02/28
08:04 UTC

0

Concern for Ukraine on the train to Kiev

26 Comments
2024/02/27
11:06 UTC

0

YOUrael.

I think given how life goes in a kind of Domino Effect, we will all see the demise of many of those around us. It's just life. So, yeah...YOUrael...as in you will see.

17 Comments
2024/02/25
19:59 UTC

9

You know how cutting-edge technology is always in the hands of a powerful character in movies who is almost always evil? Will AI technology work in the same way as this?

Ofc, AI can completely transform a lot of parts of our lives, but what about how governments function?

You know how cutting-edge technology is always in the hands of a powerful character in movies who is almost always evil? Will AI technology work in the same way as this? Will it be to the benefit of global governments? It's what I'm worried about.

Governments have a very real chance of taking advantage of AI. Consider this: AI can detect patterns in vast volumes of data in real time, anticipate future occurrences, and more. Everything from economic planning to national security might greatly benefit from this.

However, there's also a chance that governments will misuse AI for their purposes.

Indeed, there have already been instances where governments have used AI-powered surveillance systems to keep tabs on their populace. Furthermore, AI may be utilized to sway public opinion or even rig elections.

I have no problem with AI that helps people with some real-world problems. My favorite app right now is ShortlistIQ, which makes it easier for me to interview job candidates. Another app that has helped me out is Otter.ai. All of that is very different from putting AI in the hands of a strong person who might misuse it.

So what do you think? Will governments use AI to their advantage, or will they use it to serve the public good?

2 Comments
2024/02/24
20:54 UTC

0

Every store is CLOSED on mission st San Francisco

3 Comments
2024/02/24
06:55 UTC

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