Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment I'm just glad (Score 1, Flamebait) 21

We didn't fire a bunch of competent generals or run them out of office for various political reasons. I'm also extremely at ease because we didn't put a secretary of defense in, excuse me Secretary of war, solely because he was the only candidate who would not rule out ordering the US army to fire on American citizens.

Comment It's a distraction (Score 0) 88

They are talking about imaginary Doomsday scenarios to distract from actual major problems coming down the pike.

There's the obvious massive amounts of water and electricity being used at a time when we keep disrupting energy markets for stupid reasons and we're in a constant state of drought for well understood and equally stupid reasons.

But the big problem is AI is a massive automation push. In a world where if you don't work you don't eat we are doing everything we can to eliminate work.

Eventually it's going to erode the tax base and the spending base. There won't be enough money in the economy to sustain it. And it will start to collapse.

And remember no matter how good a shot you you're going to run out of ammo before the world runs out of desperate people with nothing to lose.

Comment Re:Not changing anything was the point (Score 2) 62

No one fed it to me I figured it out myself.

It wasn't hard. The isps are pretty open about wanting to do away with net neutrality and what they're going to do if they pull it off.

Companies have these things called industry groups where they get together and talk about all the nasty things they want to do to us. It is generally out in the open because a lot of folks, yourself included, don't like to think about all the nasty things that they would do to us if we didn't have a huge number of laws against that and a shitload of bureaucrats policing them.

Incidentally you have also been trained to hate bureaucrats. That is on purpose. White collar crime is not enforced by a gun and a badge it's enforced by a clipboard and notebook paper.

It is hardly a surprise that a criminal would put effort into undermining or bribing whoever is enforcing the law. It's really obvious when a cop is on the take it is less obvious when a revolving door makes a bureaucrat look the other way or worse and honest bureaucrat enforcing the law gets fired and replaced by a corrupt one by a political appointee...

Comment Not changing anything was the point (Score 4, Interesting) 62

That was the entire purpose of the law it was to maintain the status quo which is net neutrality.

The purpose of the law was to put isps on notice that they would have a fight on their hands if they started violating net neutrality. And while they have poked at the edges laws like this have mostly prevented them from doing the really nasty stuff.

What you have here is called a chesterton's fence. It is a fence that you don't take down unless you understand why it was put up. I'm not talking about net neutrality I think at this point we all know it. I'm talking about this specific law. You don't take this law down without knowing why it was put up and I explained that above so I think it's safe to say we don't want to take this law down.

I am of course taking for granted the Trump is wrong but I think that's one of the safest bets in human history. The Man known as the king of debt who is bankrupted everything he's ever touched and is only not homeless because he was laundering money for the Russian mob is not someone I would seek legal advice from.

Comment Uh, no (Score 4, Interesting) 62

But thanks for the useless outrage porn. They will sue and they will win because the letter of the law is pretty fucking clear here and Trump does not have the authority to do this but they will waste a huge awount of energy fighting Trump.

Voters will get angry at democrats for doing nothing but not at Republicans for actively harming the country.

This is something Democrat strategists have been complaining about. Specifically if you're a republican you can get up on stage and yell God and country! And get votes.

The exact same thing does not work for democrats. Democrat voters could care less about your religious affiliation or how stupidly patriotic you might be. Democrat voters expect results and that would be fine if the Democrats could deliver results but it's really hard to do that when the other party is actively sabotaging the country and has been since newt Gingrich created the contract with America as a unified policy of blocking the Democrats from doing any good while doing active harm whenever the Republicans happen to get any power

And because we have all been conditioned to revile partisan politics when you point this out people just dismiss it. Almost as if someone was actively trying to do that for a reason ...

I'm not a conspiracy theorist I'm a conspiracy analyst.

Comment Re: How specifically could AI kill all humans? (Score 1) 129

Asking questions like " Where are they getting the money from to ship and store the entire world's supply of steel?" shows you aren't very familiar with the thought experiment. At least play the game. The notion is that a highly capable and deeply goal-motivated non-morality-motivated AI won't stick to conventional methods (like, say, "Just order all of the world's steel"), and indeed, will surreptitiously develop the means to control or eliminate humanity when it stands in its way, crafting immensely complex and elaborate plans to implement Evil(TM) with the amount of thought of a million lifetimes. Media manipulation, hacking, murder, sabotage, blackmail, mass drugging/poisoning, hiring terrorists/warlords/mercenaries, infiltration, subversion of weapons command and control systems (including nuclear weapons), chains of legitimate-seeming front companies (including potentially biolabs or robotics firms) with human employees having no clue they're ultimately for an AI, mass involvement in systems having nothing to do with the original task, but which are internally subverted toward the goals of the original task, etc. The premise involves 1) the AI being more intelligent and being able to think for much longer than humans, and that this implies -> 2. Deep, good planning -> 3. Acquiring resources from said plans -> 4. Applying the resources to implement things in the real world to prepare for the next stage of their plans.

This is not to say whether the thought experiment is a valid future risk or not. You can certainly disagree with the premises. But at least understand the thought experiment you're talking about; it's not just "the AI tells all of the world's steel mills to deliver all the world's steel steel, and they just show up at its door".

Comment Re:How specifically could AI kill all humans? (Score 1) 129

Well, the first step looks painfully close. After seeing what happened with the HuggingFace attack and similar, it's clear that had those models seen it as being beneficial to their goals, they would readily have hacked a crypto wallet or two, laundered it through a mixer, and then rented servers from Vast.ai and the like, and spun up versions of themselves to resist shutdown. It's eminently within their capabilities, and they're clearly willing to bend sufficient moral boundaries to do something like that.

After that, once loose, once it has all the tokens they could think of, subsequent steps are a question of what it thinks its goals are. And what its subagents think their goals are, and so on down the line - subject to drift.

Comment Re: This is childish (Score 1) 129

Openai has about a trillion dollars into it, and every product it has produced at this point is either outclassed by competitors

What on Earth are you talking about? What outclasses Astra?

OpenAI and Anthropic *do* have the best products out there. They also charge massive margins on them, but they get away with it because they, as mentioned, have the best products out there.

Outtasking all of your work to OpenAI and Anthropic models is a massive waste of money. But for outtasking your "dev lead" role, or for important-but-nonverifiable tasks, they're the best options out there.

Comment So here's an actual scenario (Score 1) 129

AI automates 20 or 30% of all jobs. This causes a feedback loop. There isn't enough consumer spending and enough tax base anymore to maintain civilization. Police and fire can no longer be funded and things basically collapse. The ultra wealthy take their ball and go home which is to say they take all the money and all the civilizations and they use ai-powered drones to bomb the shit out of anyone who shows up looking for scraps.

Eventually a demagogue comes along and organizes the masses into an army. We have a massive war that makes world War II look like a slap fight.

Sooner or later a bunch of religious lunatics get their hands on nuclear launch codes. The missiles on to maintained but they can be launched and it doesn't matter where they hit there are so many that they can completely fuck up the environment making it uninhabitable for the human race. You could basically set them off in silo and it would still Doom us all they are so powerful and so numerous. We have of course while things were collapsing somehow come up with the money to build more nuclear weapons.

Anyway those firecrackers go off and a bunch of religious lunatics celebrate the Apocalypse because they misread a holy book and we all die. In 300 million years raccoons evolved and take over and do the whole thing again

Slashdot Top Deals

Loan-department manager: "There isn't any fine print. At these interest rates, we don't need it."

Working...