Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Harm (Score 1) 109

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

Comment Re:Good (Score 3, Insightful) 147

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

Comment Re:Unbelievable what people will publish (Score 2) 16

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

Comment It's hogwash -- they survived comets and worse (Score 0) 19

Corals have been around for several hundred million years. They survived the comet which killed off the dinosaurs. They survived ice ages and glaciations, the most recent being a 400-500 foot sea level rise just 10-15,000 years ago. They routinely bleach themselves while shifting populations of the critters which give them color.

We puny humans are no threat to corals.

Comment Re:Well above the ocean [Re:Uh HUH] (Score 1) 84

Let me be perfectly clear about this: I am insulting you. I am calling you out as either being such a plonk that you keep old copies of People magazine around just in case ... or you are such a plonk that you google and select the answer you want.

Either way, you are a plonk. Your memory is reliable and truthful, mine is full of lies.

Comment Re:Well above the ocean [Re:Uh HUH] (Score 1) 84

That's not how it was reported at the time, and I have no reason to trust People magazine.

If you were an anti-alarmist, you'd be crowing this shows sea levels dropping.

For another indication of how sloppy sea level rise claims are, the alarmists published a list of sea level changes along the US Atlantic coast, and funny thing, they differed considerably, as if the ocean were rising more in some places than others. The alternative explanation of sinking land levels was pooh poohed as climate denialism. But another funny thing: California's central valley was once reported as having sunk 22 feet since the gold rush days 150 years earlier, due to pumping out so much underground water. Gosh, could the same thing be happening along the Atlantic coast?

Slashdot Top Deals

You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all alike.

Working...