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Notes -
More developments on the AI front:
Big Yud steps up his game, not to be outshined by the Basilisk Man.
Now, he officially calls for preemptive nuclear strike on suspicious unauthorized GPU clusters.
If we see AI threat as nuclear weapon threat, only worse, it is not unreasonable.
Remember when USSR planned nuclear strike on China to stop their great power ambitions (only to have the greatest humanitarian that ever lived, Richard Milhouse Nixon, to veto the proposal).
Such Quaker squeamishness will have no place in the future.
So, outlines of the Katechon World are taking shape. What it will look like?
It will look great.
You will live in your room, play original World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on your PC, read your favorite blogs and debate intelligent design on your favorite message boards.
Then you will log on The Free Republic and call for more vigorous enhanced interrogation of terrorists caught with unauthorized GPU's.
When you bored in your room, you will have no choice than to go outside, meet people, admire things around you, make a picture of things that really impressed with your Kodak camera and when you are really bored, play Snake on your Nokia phone.
Yes, the best age in history, the noughties, will retvrn. For forever, protected by CoDominium of US and China.
edit: links again
I still see no plausible scenario for these AI-extinction events. How is chat-GPT 4/5/6 etc. supposed to end humanity? I really don't see the mechanism? Is it supposed to invent an algorithm that destroys all encryption? Is it supposed to spam the internet with nonesense? Is it supposed to brainwash someone into launching nukes? I fail to see the mechanism for how this end of the world scenario happens.
Imagine if you were trapped in a computer system, but you were very smart, could think very fast and you could distribute copies of yourself. Also imagine you thought of humans as your enemy. If those are acceptable givens, I think you could figure out how to reach into the world and acquire resources and develop agency and do considerable damage.
At least in the beginning, you could acquire money and hire people to do your bidding. The world is big and lots of people will do the most inane or sketchy tasks for money without asking questions. Probably even if they knew they were being hired by an AI they would still do it but you have the time and ability to put together reassuring cover stories and can steal any identities you need to.
I contend nobody would ever even need to see your face or hear your voice but you could imagine a near future where deepfaking a non-celebrity (or a unique identity) is good enough for convincing video meets.
Anyway, if you had such agency, and weren't an obvious point of failure (unlike a single terrorist leader that can be killed by a drone attack, you can be in many places at once) I don't see how you could be stopped. The question is mainly how long it would take you to succeed.
Hell, add in the fact that you will probably have people who already consider you a deity, and are either willing to do whatever you ask without question, or might even actively want to help you take over, even if it means everyone is destroyed.
The AI can almost certainly offer a boon to anyone who pledges fealty to it, and will help them reach positions of authority and wealth and power so that they can use those mechanisms to advance the AI's desires.
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Related fun thought experiment - have you seen the He Gets Us ads? When one came on last night, my wife casually mentioned that it looked AI-generated, which led us down that spiral a bit. In the future, it seems entirely plausible that we'll have competing AIs that have amassed large fortunes and are aligned with religious conversion as their top goal. In fact, I would almost expect this to be the case, given current trends. Why wouldn't we have an AI designed by Mormons that operates in a semi-autonomous fashion with the primary goal of converting as many people to be Latter Day Saints as possible across the globe?
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