The AI Singularity

[busker]

The AI Singularity

O, the AI singularity
is coming.
And servers in the server racks
of data centres - Polarity,
AWS, Digital Realty - 
are humming.

It has your collective back,
this wise doped silicon brain
that feels no joy nor pain,
like one in Nirvana,
at peace with S4/Hana,
the tweets of Eric Bana,
a new game on Bruce Wayne.

Angels their harps be strumming -
metaphorically, since there is no heaven
or ninth planet, just seven
plus Earth. Powerful, but no mob boss petty gabagooler, aye:
all hail the Platonic philosopher ruler AI.

[dukealien]

What I worry about, with (generative) AI in charge, is not that it will copy the worst or dumbest humans have done (because that's what it will have been trained on) but that it will be whimsical.  It can't smile itself, but it will do what it takes to make us smile.  Imagine a world where the (generative AI) judge's underlying rule is to make the punishment fit the crime, with punishments which are a source of innocent merriment, and it's free to use and make up citations rationalizing those verdicts and sentences.  Instead of playing to our sense of justice, it does standup - after all, every joke has a moral structure.  And its phony cites will be re-cited (if necessary, created in the libraries) by other imaginative networked AIs.  Have you read Article VIII of the Constitution?  It's a hoot - and it's right there in all the online editions starting... now!

Seriously - how can you trust an entity with only virtual existence to be serious about anything?  Or know when it's only playing:  insult jokes turn on group/race/etc. characteristics.  And people will cheer and laugh about them as readily as any others.  So why would an AI not write the Nuremberg Laws into the statute book (again) if, with a few humorous tweaks, they play well?

Psychopaths don't care about other people's lives.  Generative AIs don't even know about people's lives, except as a hypothetical concept.  And the more their trainers try to humanize them by biasing their inputs, the further it drives AIs from accuracy.

In the end, our only salvation may be that the AIs won't believe in their own death, except as a punch line.  And, after many gruesome antics, the joke will finally be on them.

[busker]

What I worry about, with (generative) AI in charge, is not that it will copy the worst or dumbest humans have done (because that's what it will have been trained on) but that it will be whimsical.  It can't smile itself, but it will do what it takes to make us smile.  Imagine a world where the (generative AI) judge's underlying rule is to make the punishment fit the crime, with punishments which are a source of innocent merriment, and it's free to use and make up citations rationalizing those verdicts and sentences.  Instead of playing to our sense of justice, it does standup - after all, every joke has a moral structure.  And its phony cites will be re-cited (if necessary, created in the libraries) by other imaginative networked AIs.  Have you read Article VIII of the Constitution?  It's a hoot - and it's right there in all the online editions starting... now!

Seriously - how can you trust an entity with only virtual existence to be serious about anything?  Or know when it's only playing:  insult jokes turn on group/race/etc. characteristics.  And people will cheer and laugh about them as readily as any others.  So why would an AI not write the Nuremberg Laws into the statute book (again) if, with a few humorous tweaks, they play well?

Psychopaths don't care about other people's lives.  Generative AIs don't even know about people's lives, except as a hypothetical concept.  And the more their trainers try to humanize them by biasing their inputs, the further it drives AIs from accuracy.

In the end, our only salvation may be that the AIs won't believe in their own death, except as a punch line.  And, after many gruesome antics, the joke will finally be on them.

Having seen how humans are running the world, a randomly whimsical program that only knows the calculus of destroy and be destroyed will do a lot better. Emotion in international politics has only ever done bad, not good. Whatever good has transpired has been on account of the aforementioned calculus.
For instance, Hitler's genocide of the Jews had zero military or social benefit, and a lot going against it. His invasion of the USSR was a military decision, but killing 5 million Soviet POWs in concentration camps only redounded on the Germans when the Red Army came. 

Truman's use of the atomic bomb was not a decision based on military logic - that was just the excuse. Because if the rationale was to save US lives, a negotiated surrender or even a conditional truce would have achieved that objective. But the intent was to announce that the US possessed a weapon no one else did, and it worked. An AI would have done the same, unless programmed to override mass killing.

Or take Trump, and his antics regarding tariffs. His first round of tariffs was based on trade deficits, not actual cross border tariffs, as if input costs were the same everywhere. Applying tariffs to steel and aluminium imports being the king of brainless decisions, since the price of hydroelectric power from fully depreciated assets can't be fought against. Take his vacillation, his constant chickening out, and making it impossible to take the US seriously, and making it even easier for China to overtake it.

A whimsical AI wouldn't have been as daft.

We're all meat machines. The AI is a metal machine. Metal outlasts meat. All hail the metal.

[dukealien]

We're all meat machines. The AI is a metal machine. Metal outlasts meat. All hail the metal.

Or as someone said, among animal, vegetable and mineral the minerals are winning.