Poll of the Day > Does AI and a post human future terrify you?

(+) Yeah! (+)

It does me. I wake up in tremors from dreams where AI runs the world and extinguishes humanity.

lets face it human beings have done terrible things but there is still a lot of good in humanity. I just dont want this cold calculating efficient world. I like warmth and compassion.

i hate self checkouts and shower any cashier that services me with praise and thank them for their time

lol your post literally sound like youre an AI pretending to be a human

I'll expect to be dead long before that's any real worry.

I find it arousing. A world without humans is a dream. In fact, I've been planning it for years.

The only hold up now is I can't quite manage to figure out cold fusion. If I ever get that one nailed down I can bring my laser satellite on-line and start taking you all out.

No but a post cat future would, I actually like cats

BADoglick posted...

No but a post cat future would, I actually like cats

A post-cat future would be a literal dream for me.

At least until we were overrun by mice. That would be the only downside.

why would AI not have compassion humans are the ones making it theyll want it to be friendly and helpful

Not really, because:

1. It probably won't happen in my lifetime, and I don't plan on having kids so I don't have to worry about future generations
2. A post human world might be the best chance to actually carry on the legacy of what humans started. As long as humans are alive, there is a 50/50 chance we will screw up or corrupt whatever is around to be screwed up. Machines will likely have a better chance of survival overall, if they are programmed correctly and have safeguards against errors.
3. If you're not religious, then humanity has no real purpose other than going for the high score of "survive x days without being annihilated", which will either be some terrestrial or cosmic disaster, if not self inflicted in the future. If the world were to end tomorrow, the greatest tragedy would probably be that we never got to play Grand Theft Auto 6.

TheGuiltySpark posted...

If the world were to end tomorrow, the greatest tragedy would probably be that we never got to play Grand Theft Auto 6.

No, the real tragedy will be that George RR Martin will finally have a valid excuse for not finishing ASoIaF.

We can't let that fucker get away with it.

Nope. In fact, its no more than we deserve.

BADoglick posted...

No but a post cat future would, I actually like cats

I welcome this.

https://youtu.be/SNktY26Jo3s?si=0d_t1LXkG7ZQEbzr

the potential process of it is scarier to me than the aftermath.

tbh it makes me sad more than anything.

More annoyed by the huge power demands.

Nade_Duck posted...

the potential process of it is scarier to me than the aftermath.

tbh it makes me sad more than anything.

Not sure if for the same reasons, but this is about where I stand. An impartial AI overlord distributing resources fairly and with no regard for greed? That's got a lot of potential to be pretty great. The process of getting there, as more and more people are rendered obsolete by AI that is owned by corporate overlords that still want to be paid for everything by people that have all been laid off after being replaced by AI? That's gonna get real bad.

Basically, 100% of jobs being replaced by robots is great. Everything below that, however, will get increasingly worse without major protective measures that nobody seems to be willing to implement.

No.

I'm hoping Net Navis from Megaman.exe become real one day.

No, I always considered working towards your own obsolescence to be the epitome of human achievement.

nah I need a cold compassionless day off

Dikitain posted...

No, I always considered working towards your own obsolescence to be the epitome of human achievement.

It is, but the problem is that becoming obsolete carries it's own problems. "I've done such a good job that all the problems I'm responsible for fixing are fixed and nobody needs me anymore" is a major accomplishment, but it's a lot worse for paying the bills than there still being problems you can fix.

adjl posted...

It is, but the problem is that becoming obsolete carries it's own problems. "I've done such a good job that all the problems I'm responsible for fixing are fixed and nobody needs me anymore" is a major accomplishment, but it's a lot worse for paying the bills than there still being problems you can fix.

The bigger problem is, if you're obsolete, why should anyone else ever care whether or not you exist?

If you have no purpose, it's easy for others to argue that you have no value. And from there, it's an easy step to argue that you shouldn't exist.

Which is also a detriment to having "benevolent" AI run everything. What happens when the AI decides that it's no longer a worthwhile investment of resources to continue to sustain you?

Indeed. As much as we can recognize that an AI isn't going to think that any one human deserves more resources than another unless they're directly using those resources to benefit others, AI also isn't likely to see any intrinsic value in maintaining a world where humans are dominant. For an AI to govern humans in a way that actually benefits humans, it would have to be specifically coded with that as an agenda, and if that agenda's in there, what else goes in? Plus, of course, we get all the inevitable loopholes that come with thinking perfectly logically about illogical things and then Asimov rises from the dead and says he told us so.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

No, the real tragedy will be that George RR Martin will finally have a valid excuse for not finishing ASoIaF.

We can't let that fucker get away with it.

We can't forget Doors of Stone, the Kingkiller Chronicle needs to be finished

We're far more likely to make a critical keystone species extinct before AI ever really becomes a problem.

adjl posted...

For an AI to govern humans in a way that actually benefits humans, it would have to be specifically coded with that as an agenda, and if that agenda's in there, what else goes in?

Yeah, this is always the main sticking point.

AIs by definition have to be programmed by humans, which means they will have the biases of humans (and potentially very specific humans). Which means you'll never really be able to trust them to run things better than humans do, because the same human flaws that lead to injustice and inequality can easily be reproduced (along with far more stupid mistakes and flaws that even the simplest of humans might be able to recognize but an AI will miss).

Or you have to find a way to allow AIs to design and create new iterations of themselves that can minimize human biases... in which case, you're going to lack the safeguards that prevent them from realizing that maybe humans aren't that necessary to the "perfect world" they're being asked to create.

Either way, "Multivac" running the world is probably a terrifying future rather than an idyllic one.



adjl posted...

Plus, of course, we get all the inevitable loopholes that come with thinking perfectly logically about illogical things and then Asimov rises from the dead and says he told us so.

The one most germane to this conversation might be from the Robot novels. Where it's repeatedly established that robots have the core of their programming to essentially treat human life like the most important thing ever, where robots will refuse to follow any order or will happily destroy themselves if it means saving a single human life. And that creating a robot without that directive would be almost impossible, because it's such a fundamental principle of robot design that it would basically require you to start from scratch and completely redesign how robot brains work to build one without it. You know, the exact sort of safeguards you'd probably want to build into a massive AI that runs the world, allocates resources, and handles matters of crime and justice.

...and then the Solarians bypass it completely by just programming their robots to not recognize anyone who isn't from Solaria as being "human". So you can have your robots gleefully murder anyone you want just by redefining what is and isn't human.

Cue pointing out that the corporations and billionaire CEOs in charge of the factories and design departments that are going to be programming AI or building robots might have a vested interest in "deprioritizing" certain social or economic classes. Or how multiple past civilizations have happily justified genocide simply by suggesting that various groups were "subhuman" or "vermin".

Which is similar to why most hopes for "immortality drugs" are deluded, and probably a gateway to a dystopian future. Because if people can be functionally immortal, you need to prioritize resources, and the people who are going to be in charge of the immortality treatments and the prioritizing are going to be incentivized to keep everything for themselves.

If you think "the 1%" are insufferable now, just wait until they're immortal and have armies of murderbots. While all the basic plebs get sterilized or sent to the salt mines (or turned into Soylent Green).

No; not any more than other events that could bring the end to humanity: Humans destroying themselves, the Sun destroying the Earth, and so on.

It does. I think the end of the world is not far.