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FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
41m ago
I think they could've made a better Snow White film than the original, it's just that they didn't want to. They wanted to make a bad film and did so.
I'm pretty sure no one involved in the process actually said "Our goal is to make a bad film". I'm pretty sure a lot of people involved in the process were trying as hard as they possibly could to make a blockbuster. Maybe all of them. And again, they had orders of magnitude more technology than Walt Disney had, but the technology didn't actually solve the problem of making a good movie even a little bit.
Mastery isn't the problem, it's bad people using great resources to achieve bad goals.
Just so. Humans inevitably human, for good or ill. They'll human with sticks and rocks, and they'll human just as hard with nanocircuitry and orbital launch vehicles and nuclear fusion.
Even if there's a full nuclear exchange induced by destabilizing technology, would the survivors really give up on securing more wealth, more power, more security through technological superiority?
Are you familiar with Bostrom's Vulnerable World Hypothesis? If not, I'd recommend it. The standard assumption is that tech advancements proceed in a stable fashion, that the increase in individual/breaking power is balanced by an increase in communal/binding power. I don't think that assumption is valid, not only for future tech, but very likely for tech that already exists. What we have available to us at this moment is probably enough to crash society as we know it; all that is required is for the dice to come up snake-eyes. Adding more tech just means we roll more dice. Maybe, as you say, some future development jacks the binding power up, and we get stable dystopia, but honestly I'd prefer collapse.
You're correct that we bounced back from the black death and so on. But consider something like Bostrom's "easy nukes" example. There, the threat is baked into tech itself. There's no practical way to defend against it. There's no practical way to live with it. You can suppress the knowledge, likely at grievous cost, but the longer you have it suppressed, the more likely someone rediscovers it independently. Bostrom's example is of course a parable about AI, because he's a Rationalist and AI parables are what Rationalists do. It seems to me, though, that their Kurzweilian origins deny them the perspective needed to see the other ways the shining future might be dismayed.
functor
38m ago
They have effectively beaten NATO in a conventional land war. They are fighting an enemy in which every operation is run by NATO, the equptment is NATO, thousands of NATO mercs are running things on the ground.
While Israel and the US can't take an area the size of a municipality in Gaza against enemies with no resources Russia took the area the size of Denmark in a week against an enemy with 3x larger force.
While a very nice scifi story, there's very little reason to think that reality will pan out that way.
It suffers from the same failure of imagination as Hanson's Age of Em. We don't live in a universe where it looks like it makes economic sense to have mind uploads doing cognitive or physical labor. We've got LLMs, and will likely have other kinds of nonhuman AI. They can be far more finely tuned and optimized than any human upload (while keeping the latter recognizably human), while costing far less in terms of resources to run. While compute estimates for human brain emulation are all over the place, varying in multiple OOMs, almost all such guesses are far, far larger than a single instance of even the most unwieldy LLM around.
I sincerely doubt that even a stripped down human emulation can run on the same hardware as a SOTA LLM.
If there's no industrial or economic demand for Em slaves, who is the customer for mind-uploading technology?
The answer is obvious: the person being uploaded. You and me. People who don't want to die. This completely flips the market dynamic. We are not the product; we are the clients. The service being sold goes from "cognitive labor" to "secure digital immortality." In this market, companies would compete not on how efficiently they can exploit Ems, but on how robustly they can protect them.
There is no profit motive behind enslaving and torturing them. Without profit, you go from industrial-scale atrocities to bespoke custom nightmares. Which aren't really worth worrying about. You might as well refuse to have children or other descendants, because someone can hypothetically torture them to get back at you. If nobody is making money off enslaving human uploads, then just about nobody but psychopaths will seek to go through the expense of torturing them.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
21m ago
thousands of NATO mercs are running things on the ground.
The omnipresent slur (is this even a proper context for the word "slur"?) "mercs" in situations like this interests me. If they're mercenaries, does this mean that they'd instantly switch on the Russian side if they received a better offer?
Otherwise, it should go without saying that they haven't effectively beaten NATO in a conventional land war, since they haven't even beaten Ukraine (=forced it into an unadvantageous peace treaty or even an unadvantagenous frozen conflict situation), and they certainly aren't fighting the full force of NATO.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
19m ago
Took a quick look at a few of those it's pretty much what I expected. A lot less "the facts his basing his case on are objectively false" and a lot more "I don't like his framing". Though to be fair GGS isn't that good about making a facts-based case, and tries to make up for it with storytelling, so... fair enough I guess?
While Israel and the US can't take an area the size of a municipality in Gaza against enemies with no resources Russia took the area the size of Denmark in a week against an enemy with 3x larger force.
“The world” is shrieking about modest civilian casualties in Gaza’s dense urban landscape, if the gloves were off the Star of David could be flying off (the remains) of every building in Gaza in a month. The key to that would be a more ‘biblical’ kind of warfare where you go in and kill every single male above the age of 12, which Israel and the US are clearly militarily capable of doing. That they aren’t doing it isn’t a question of capability. (Note, of course, that I am certainly not advocating this.)
Ukrainians in the occupied territories are, as pro-Russians often remind us, just unwilling to resist Russia to the degree that Gazans are Israel.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6m ago
While a very nice scifi story, there's very little reason to think that reality will pan out that way.
I wouldn't call the history of every invention to be "very little reason".
The answer is obvious: the person being uploaded. You and me. People who don't want to die. This completely flips the market dynamic. We are not the product; we are the clients. The service being sold goes from "cognitive labor" to "secure digital immortality." In this market, companies would compete not on how efficiently they can exploit Ems, but on how robustly they can protect them.
How do these emulations get the resources to pay the companies for the service of protection? Presumably they work, no? How does a company make money? By getting more clients? If yes, why compete for the limited amount of clients, when you can just copy-paste them? We're already seeing a similar dynamic with meatsack humans and immigration, it strikes me as extremely naive to think it would happen less if we make it easier and cheaper.
There is no profit motive behind enslaving and torturing them.
Slavery ensures profit, torture ensures compliance.
FistfullOfCrows
2m ago
You joke, yet one of my oldest dreams is our geneediting capabilities to reach the state where we can produce a human/plant hybrid where basking in the sun actually feeds you.
Bentham (the author) countered that Argument by saying he is not eating Almonds.
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