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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18876 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Also one of the things the Yuddites seem incapable of doing is figuring out that superintelligence does not mean omnipotence.

Uh-huh.

Omnipotence is not expected, and also not required to kill all humans.

(NB: while I'm generally a follower of the Rightful Caliph, I'd disagree on one or two of the particulars there; FTL's about the only one where I'm more than a step or two away, though.)

Holy shit, has Yud finally updated to however small an extent? Lemme see...

FTL (faster than light) travel: DEFINITE NO

Alright, that's a start...

Using current human technology, synthesize a normal virus that infects 90% of Earth within an hour: NO

Wow, that's actually more humble of him than I remember...

Starting from current human tech, bootstrap to nanotechnology in a week: YES

...of course, there it fucking is.

Hack a human brain - in the sense of getting the human to carry out any desired course of action, say - given a full neural wiring diagram of that human brain, and full A/V I/O with the human (eg high-resolution VR headset), unsupervised and unimpeded, over the course of a day: DEFINITE YES

Hack a human, given a week of video footage of the human in its natural environment; plus an hour of A/V exposure with the human, unsupervised and unimpeded: YES

...yyeeaahh, business as usual. closes tab

I don't know, "superintelligence, ergo nanobot swarms in your bloodstream" seems pretty close to Yud's sincerely-held beliefs, if not his beliefs verbatim. He absolutely, straightforwardly believes that intelligence is the greatest force in the universe, and since intelligence ≈ power, then trivially superintelligence ≈ omnipotence for all intents and purposes. You can plainly see it even here, in the way the rest of his post gets instantly sidetracked into minutiae of human extinction as soon as it hits his favorite bugbear, nanotechnology. I'm surprised Ctrl+F "nanobot" has no hits here, I remember nanobot swarms getting frequent mentions in his lesswrong posts, has he finally wised up to not scare the hoes?

He didn't mention the word "nanobot" in the second linked article either. Probably has something to do with the fact that when people hear "nanobot" they think a mini-robot made out of metal, and that's not what he's talking about.

(I call the thing he's talking about "Life 2.0", and while I might not be quite as bullish on what can be wrung out of it, "kill the biosphere" with Life 2.0 is a DEFINITE YES because I know the skeleton of one method.)

superintelligence ≈ omnipotence for all intents and purposes

Your "for all intents and purposes" is doing a lot of work. "Omnipotent", to me, means God/simulators; someone who has write access to reality. You can be very powerful without having that.

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