Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Lagslayer]

The AI is actually limited by physical laws and energy requirements, by limiting its storage space and allowed power input, it would never achieve godhead.

The problem is that so many people are rushing to give it exactly that.

[Baffler]

If it was just a matter of adding more RAM we would have built such a thing a long time ago.

[Dutchling]

Well it can just download more RAM, so I don't see how that could be an issue.

[Spehss _]

The AI articles were so cool it makes me want to completely change college majors and try to contribute to the AI thing. Also crazy to think it's some possibly huge world changing event which we may actually live to see. Suddenly I'm not jealous of future generations probably getting all the cool space travel and galactic colonization.

So, knowing it could just as easily kill us all, you want to actually make it happen faster?

The sci-fi geek in me gets excited at the thought of it. It's like something straight out of a sci-fi novel, man, it sounds so cool. I'm geeking out. Think of the possibilities. All the cool science shit. Geeeeeeeking out.

[hops]

What if we are already ruled by an AI?

The ancient people sacrifice rams to their gods, after all.

(Yes I know they're actually lambs shut up)

[SirQuiamus]

The odds of there being other sentient lifeforms in the universe: Pretty close to 100%
The odds of humanity ever making contact with them*: Pretty damn close to 0%
*assuming that FTL travel/communication is impractical.

You do not need FTL. You can spread around entire galaxy with speed << c in hundred milions of years. Considering galaxy is almost as old as universe - about 13 bilion years - this is a lot of time to be literally everywhere. So Fermi Paradox still stand. Why they aren't here?

My personal idea is variant of zoo hypothesis. We are in area that fulfills two conditions:
1. "Owner" of this space is pretty anal about respecting borders of his ownership.
2. "Owner" does not care very much for maintaining at least some parts of owned territory. And by "maintaining" I mean periodical genocide of anything that could potentially or actually be intelligent.

So owner will not interfere (at least not yet) and others will not dare to enter. And here we are.

That's also plausible. FTL or no FTL, it's questionable whether a civilization advanced enough to travel across the galaxy (!) would ever want to communicate with humans, or even give us the slightest hint of their existence. What could they possibly want from us? Humanity would neither be an asset, nor a threat to them; we would rather be like a tiny, distant anthill to a retired entomologist: interesting if examined closely, but generally quite unremarkable. There's no need for genocidal maintenance either, since humanity will almost certainly do away with itself before this millenium is over.   

[Graknorke]

Humanity won't do away with itself. It'll just severely cripple itself due to lack of long term planning.

[SirQuiamus]

Humanity won't do away with itself. It'll just severely cripple itself due to lack of long term planning.

I sincerely hope that humanity will eventually cripple itself into a state of sustainable development and carbon neutrality. I just don't consider it very likely.

[Orange Wizard]

The ancient people sacrifice rams to their gods, after all.

i c what u did thar

[Professor Lemur]

But one of the reasons why we won't actually have a rogue AI gaining sentience and laying waste to the human race is because nobody will actually want to make one like that.
I think the most we'll do is have an extremely advanced chatterbot - nothing more.

[ggamer]

I sincerely hope that humanity will eventually cripple itself into a state of sustainable development and carbon neutrality. I just don't consider it very likely.

I hope that one day, after the technology has been developed to the point that we can travel among the stars in big colony ships, the Earth is left behind stripped bare of resources and a workable atmosphere. Then there will be two camps: one will say "look at the evidence of our mistakes, we should ground ourselves and go back to Stone Age hunter-gatherer societies," whereas the other will say "who the hell cares, there's plenty of planets for us to fuck in the galaxy." Then we realize that, somewhere along the line, we were so focused on the long view that we forgot to find a middle ground, and we realize that the only people left are extremists, who will never agree with each other and will most likely drive the rest of human society into the ground with conflict.

tl;dr holy shit there's a middle ground here between the salt-the-earth and murder-society-to-hobble-growth parties, and it's not all that hard to find

[Eric Blank]

tl;dr holy shit there's a middle ground here between the salt-the-earth and murder-society-to-hobble-growth parties, and it's not all that hard to find

This. Always and forever this, and yet forever a dream.

[Graknorke]

Not really. Anything other than tearing up everything to get what you want immediately will result in growth decreasing from what we have now.

[Baffler]

I think the most we'll do is have an extremely advanced chatterbot - nothing more.

This is pretty much how I feel about it.

[Lagslayer]

But one of the reasons why we won't actually have a rogue AI gaining sentience and laying waste to the human race is because nobody will actually want to make one like that.
I think the most we'll do is have an extremely advanced chatterbot - nothing more.

In a world with billions of people, millions of which are psychopaths, and a good number that are omnicidal, there's always gonna be someone. And these sorts of people are also more likely to to claw their way into positions of power. It only takes one guy who rolls a critical success, and pushing society as a whole down that path will only make it easier for that to happen.

If the AI is intelligent, it will eventually start doing unexpected things. That's the entire point of developing a true AI, that it can think for itself. Even if not explicitly told to do something, it has the capacity to learn.