literally that shit is causing the internet to have a massive break with observable reality, it is an energy hungry monster, *and* it sucks wholeass rivers dry. AI is destroying us in ways completely unlike the adrenaline-fueled fantasies of sci-fi horror.
It’s so irritating that the conversation on AI in the media centres on the apocalyptic fantasies of nerds who have watched The Terminator a hundred times, and not on the actual real damage it’s doing right now by plagiarising people, contributing to misinformation, etc.
I think this is a good half of why people like Altman keep pumping the sci-fi horror stories when they are in the best position to know better. Keep people focused on the imaginary danger *and* make their (horrifically costly) toys seem more powerful and important, to justify the cost.
They're basically commercializing Roko's Basilisk. "Look, one day this chatbot is going to be an all-powerful super intelligence... do you want to be in its way, or do you want to own a piece of it?"
i mean, other than calling it by name, they're already explicitly saying that. just TIRING and ANNOYING.
the era of the techbro must end so that humanity may live.
I know people are (half)joking about Mentats and Butlerian Jihads, but at some point it’s going to be a case of people calling up equivalents of the book people from Fahrenheit 451. Someone is going to make money offering a version of WolframAlpha that has real humans at the other end.
Ah sorry, that wasn’t meant that to be a link. BlueSky has this thing where sometimes having a full stop/period too close to a word turns it into a url.
i mean, i'm already at the point where i'd be willing to fund hard-copy archives of pretty much everything we've relied on the internet for for the last 20-40 years. news; history, basic human anatomy, actually extant architecture...
A while back, I was working on a newsletter/podcast idea that never got off the ground (due to family matters), that was going to be about the five books etc you’d want to bring over and share after an apocalypse. I had war or earthquakes in mind, not a nonsense algorithm haunting the net…
