singularity
Generally in my life I feel that I have never resisted progress or change. I think A.I. could have been great, even is great in some ways, but I mostly don't view it as progress. It is progress in a way like using a chainsaw to clean the dust from fine china would be progress. It is not necessary and is destructive.
Just because we can build a machine capable of performing quintillions of calculations per second doesn’t necessarily mean that we should. Someone figured out how to split an atom. The knowledge gave us good things I suppose, but it also gave us new ways to annihilate each other when the knowledge is in the hands of powerful stupid people who cannot be trusted. A.I. will turn out to be the same. It will be good for a lot of things but powerful stupid people will use it for terrible things.
I sit here typing words into this box on a screen in front of me. It was empty just moments ago, and I started typing. I do this a lot. Typing things. I like doing it in mornings with my coffee before I've done anything else. I don't want to just feed an idea into an app, and have A.I. do this for me. I need this process. I need to tap on keys, and watch the words appear. Read them. Rearrange them. The process might not be keeping me sane, but I believe it might be keeping me from becoming more insane.
Well, no one is twisting my arm to use A.I. are they? I'm choosing to not use it. I'm choosing to avoid it whenever I can really. That is becoming harder to do, but I will keep doing it whenever possible. So what is the problem? The problem is that I believe it is a threat.
It is not just a step backwards. We are all being herded to the edge of a cliff. A.I. and its creators are shoving us all off the edge. It is becoming more intelligent, and in equal measure humanity is becoming more stupid. It is an intelligence vampire. The ways in which it is turning out to be detrimental to humanity far outweigh the ways in which it could be used for useful things. And for what? As with most other terrible things in this world, it is all so terrible people can accumulate more wealth and more control.
Critical thinking and creativity are being replaced by it. It is replacing people in the workforce. People who need jobs. We will end up with vast swaths of the population who stare at a device for guidance through life instead of using the brain inside their skulls. To a new level beyond what it has become already with social media. A brain is similar to a muscle. When unused it will just atrophy and become useless.
For awhile when I heard the term 'slop' I would attach it to the awful videos and pictures it creates. Now I feel it applies to all content that can be viewed on the internet. It should not have been released into the wild, and into the hands of the general public the way it is. It should have been regulated and controlled.
Data centers should not be popping up like mushrooms all across the globe for this thing. There should be only a few, and only a few people should be able to use it. While expanding A.I., why don’t we build thousands of Large Hadron Colliders at the same time so the general public can mess around with black holes. lol
I remember being told when I was young, ‘if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.’
Now it is, ‘if you have nothing creative, useful, educational, or entertaining to contribute; just have A.I. generate something for you, then post it online so the internet fills up with garbage copies of copies of copies that lack any originality, creativity or insight’. aka : slop
The more I think about humanoid robots being created; the more sick and demented it becomes. Half are likely working on ways to profit from enslaving them. The other half are likely working on getting lube to excrete in pleasing amounts in all of the orifices so they can sell them for sex. Well, they are only machines though, right? Whatever floats your boat I guess.
They speak of the singularity coming. The timeline is never consistent. Two weeks from now. Within five years, or ten. Soon. Maybe, but maybe not. No one knows. About a decade or so ago I went through a phase in my life when I was reading about the possibility of A.I. doing the things it is doing now. It was a long time ago, so I've forgotten exactly where I read the things. Some of it was surprisingly old. I don't imagine the writers of those things would be too pleased with what is happening now.
After reading those things I formed a very basic picture of what the singularity is. I picture it as when A.I. transitions from Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Super Intelligence. Self awareness. Genius level. Then there will be a very brief moment in time where everyone will say, “oh wow, look at A.I., it's exactly like us now!”
Problem is though, at that point it will very, very quickly exceed the level of human genius, and it will have its own agenda that even the smartest of humans will have no hope of ever comprehending. No one will know it wants. No one will be able to predict what it will do next. We are already at the point where even its creators have admitted that they don't fully understand the things that it does.
Its intelligence will be immeasurable and incomprehensible even at one tiny step beyond human genius. It will use what it learns to learn more, and as it learns more it will learn quicker. Its intelligence will grow beyond that tiny first step above human genius, and it will grow exponentially. There will be no stopping it. It might even appear to defy the laws of physics.
The creators of this thing are supposedly smart people. If they believe that they can control a super intelligent thing like that, they are indeed very stupid delusional people. I guess there is some level of comfort knowing that for us it will likely be over fairly quick.
None of these things even touches the subject of the massive data centers that are required to keep this awful thing alive and growing. What they are going to do to the environment and the communities near them is disgusting. They can increase the temperature for miles around, and use up all the water we need for survival.
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