It's weird reading articles like this where every paragraph contains a reference to some surface level news soundbite entirely devoid of analysis and context. Maybe I should have heeded the warning at the start and assumed this was a generated article. It's like being subjected to a sports highlights reel of the author's algorithmic feed. The only conclusion I can draw is that they're suffering from Gell-Mann Alzheimer's
I always thought that the great filter would be the "lotus eater" scenario -- that species always eventually discover that the entirety of their happiness lies in their brains, and once physical dangers are eliminated and base physical needs are met reliably, they can spend their entire lives in either an electronic or chemically induced simulation of a world of their choice, thus ending all exploration. But now I wonder whether they discover that all creativity can be emulated through matrix math, and they simply stop trying to do anything, or lose ability to do anything after a generation of delegating to machines.
I don’t see why it should be taken for granted that alien civilizations would necessarily have an economic system that positions AI as a threat, like ours.
I also don’t see why we should assume that even if it were positioned as a threat, that they would be as irrational as us in not just dropping it.
All civilizations would face the same problem of greed >> resources available under current technology, and form some sort of organization not too different from ours, that is a pyramid.
Eventually they would find AI and their elites would willingly or unwillingly jump on the wagon and push it as far as they can.
For the lucky ones, they managed to achieve GAI somehow, and the whole species got transferred or replaced by their GAI.
For the others, they failed to achieve GAI, but the damage done to the society is so big that the whole civilization collapsed, thus they never managed to get out of their solar system so we never met each other.
Of course there are so many logic holes in my theory that you can probably laugh it off.
There may be quite minimal reasons for an AI civilization to engage in expansion, with the ability for it to intelligently change and enforce new objectives on itself it could simply choose not to expand beyond resource constraints. Or alternatively invest continuously in greater efficiency improvements.
How much compute could you really pack into a Dyson swarm if that was your only objective? what are the ultimate theoretical bounds for compute density/efficiency? perhaps ai civilizations ride a Moore's law of compute gains indefinitely and simply have no need for expansion.
Why wouldn't an intelligent being also be curious, like us? I assume an AI civilization would naturally evolve with similar drives for expansion/exploration/understanding. The analogy happening right now is that AI is gobbling up as much data as is available - would an AI civilization not have similar desires, seeking understanding beyond its present limits?
Or the AIs end up existing in some kind of economic framework that is completely inaccessible to lumps of meat - like the "Economics 2.0" of Accelerando.
Maybe we shouldn't take the paper clip optimizer at face value. Maybe the alien AI is not converting solar systems to paper clips (that would be visible, von Neuman probe style) but instead focus on the only really valuable metric - stock price go up!
You don't need to colonize anything for that to happen. The AIs can just sell tokens to each other.
> quit his job, saying that his conscience would not allow him to work on a project that could potentially annihilate the human race.
> No apologies were offered, because no one did it. Machine-planned murders come guilt-free.
> needs to strip-mine and stockpile everything that human civilisation has ever achieved.
> humanity may have to die
Hit the nail on the head. It's like knowingly walking into the gas chamber, as if oblivious or uncaring of what was planned and what's about to come next.
How do you write an entire article about on this subject without mentioning Nick Land? Especially the Hyperstition[0]:
>One of the CCRU's predominant ideas is hyperstition, which Nick Land referred to as "the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies" where, by means of esoteric cybernetic principles, certain ideas and beliefs that are initially incomprehensible (akin to superstitions) can covertly circulate through reality and establish cultural feedback loops that then drastically meld society, which they also referred to in total as "cultural production".[1]
I also very much enjoyed this podcast, which argues that the current global economic system is already a misaligned superintelligence, and that AI will simply accelerate and amplify the existing issues.[2]
Maybe it's different in India but I am from Poland and my parents had to stand in long lines to obtain... toilet paper thanks to the wonders of central planning. Meanwhile, I get goods from the Internet. Ordered before 8 pm on Friday, they will be here Saturday. Never have I seen a non-capitalist country I would like to inhabit.
Meanwhile people who used to build some useless social media stuff are making high-tech weapons which stop Russia in Ukraine despite it being like four times smaller. Kinda nice when you're next in line.
Now, on top of all that, capitalism is giving me a magical silicon assistant that codes and drives all these wonders of the Internet previously developed. And yeah, they're made by cultists from Anthropic and OpenAI psychopaths. Yet through the market competition, they fight each other over who can cater to me more. Dance monkey, here's a $100 bill.
For what it's worth, I live in the USA and back in 2020 I had to stand in line to obtain toilet paper. Every system has its pros and cons.
No doubt you're right, Capitalism has been winning for a long time, but the world is constantly changing, and right now it looks like we're gradually making the planet uninhabitable. I personally wouldn't count it a win if the entire game gets destroyed in the process.
So much of the dialog around "capitalism" paints everything that is not Soviet or Mao-style communism as "capitalism", when in reality all economies are mixed. Democratic governments and regulatory bodies shape the economic landscape. The diversity and makeup of the marketplace makes a big difference.
A huge portion of the success of "capitalism" is due to well-funded open science.
When monopolies, crony capitalism, and growthism, these are active detriments to all but those in power. Things become top-heavy, inequality leads to increasing social disconnection, discontent, and, throughout history, violence including revolution.
But now they have the dark crystal hypnotizing us all, who knows what will happen.
They are fighting to create ideally a monopoly/oligopoly, then enshrine their position in law through regulatory capture, which seems fairly cheap nowadays, the feds are defanged and made into a MAGA extension.
I saw a Tik Tok that said something like “capitalism gives society marvels faster than socialism can declare them human rights.” In 50 years Mamdani’s grandkids will be saying that universal AI tokens are a human right.
Yeah, capitalism loves to bedazzle people with marvels, as long as it doesn't have to provide boring things like living space, food or other necessities.
The people who downvoted you would rather everyone was poor than that someone else had more than them. There's a whole chunk of social and political science that exists solely to try to frame and justify envy as a virtue.
Unlike in the wet dreams of some economists, physical resources are finite, so if a small group aims to control the majority of them, this will directly lead to degraded living conditions for the rest. That's not envy...
> would rather everyone was poor than that someone else had more than them
Hello, black and white thinking.
Personally I just find it soul-crushingly dystopian that a few people have hundreds of thousands of lifetimes of wealth and we laud their mental illnesses while at the very same time, people die because of lack of health care.
I find it morally reprehensible as a society that we constantly cater to the needs of nepo babies instead of taking away just a fraction of their ungodly wealth to actually help people.
Brilliant piece by Booker Prize winning author, Arundhati Roy. She manages to lay bare the entire global politics of AI, starting with the seemingly inconsequentual em-dash.
I don't understand why capitalism (free markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility) should specifically frighten us in relation to AI.
Imagine the horror of the USSR, or Mao's China, or Jong Un having this technology.
Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI?
At the end of the day, we'll always fear and distrust AI being owned by someone other than ourselves. Questions over the ownership of AI is important - in fact, too important to be conflated with our populist gripes against capitalism.
Wow, a very balanced article and the author has no bias at all using Artificial Idiocy, Oligarchy.
And Thiel was parsing a real subtlety: endure as what? He favors transhumanist transformation, not a frozen Homo sapiens. But someone with a preinstalled Thiel-hate (like the author) didn’t hear nuance.
Except, no, it was 2007, wait no, the 1984 crash, wait no the cold war, wait no, let's just go back an entire century, capitalism was going to kill all of humanity by the great crime of feeding people, which would lead to famine and then kill everyone, so clearly we need to start killing people now! FOR MALTHUS!
(is it perhaps possible that socialist/communist predictions of doom have a bit of a habit of being somewhat ... untrue and follow whatever fancy we currently have? I mean that the point of these people isn't even to discuss AI, just why this new thing means, yet again, that people need to give them control of the government and everyone NOW? That you can be sure that something will go wrong tomorrow and they'll publish the same argument, with a new big bad doom prediction?)
But glad to see that capitalism will in fact survive the planet dying. Great news!
The author is obviously non-technical and hence gullible as she doesn't understand the nuances of the underlying technology.
Sadly, she fell victim to modern-day tech hype and bought into the apocalyptic fear mongering sold by those trying to stay afloat in the face of upward cost spirals unlike any we have ever seen.
The author's fear of being labeled as AI merely for using em-dashes is irrational.
Popular or not, good content will always be appreciated by those with honest integrity.
Capitalism doesn't exists,it is an entelechy build by delusional communists. Communism also doesn't exists, and it is futile to pursue it. Also, socialists are dumb guys.
It's weird reading articles like this where every paragraph contains a reference to some surface level news soundbite entirely devoid of analysis and context. Maybe I should have heeded the warning at the start and assumed this was a generated article. It's like being subjected to a sports highlights reel of the author's algorithmic feed. The only conclusion I can draw is that they're suffering from Gell-Mann Alzheimer's
This is THE great filter that all carbon-based civilizations need to go through. And that's probably why we don't see a lot, if any, aliens out there.
I suddenly have a Lovecraftian orgasm.
I always thought that the great filter would be the "lotus eater" scenario -- that species always eventually discover that the entirety of their happiness lies in their brains, and once physical dangers are eliminated and base physical needs are met reliably, they can spend their entire lives in either an electronic or chemically induced simulation of a world of their choice, thus ending all exploration. But now I wonder whether they discover that all creativity can be emulated through matrix math, and they simply stop trying to do anything, or lose ability to do anything after a generation of delegating to machines.
I don’t see why it should be taken for granted that alien civilizations would necessarily have an economic system that positions AI as a threat, like ours.
I also don’t see why we should assume that even if it were positioned as a threat, that they would be as irrational as us in not just dropping it.
AI with self-interest will do its positioning for itself.
If it is competing for resources, and more capable, the "threat" is just a side effect.
What I’m guessing is:
All civilizations would face the same problem of greed >> resources available under current technology, and form some sort of organization not too different from ours, that is a pyramid.
Eventually they would find AI and their elites would willingly or unwillingly jump on the wagon and push it as far as they can.
For the lucky ones, they managed to achieve GAI somehow, and the whole species got transferred or replaced by their GAI.
For the others, they failed to achieve GAI, but the damage done to the society is so big that the whole civilization collapsed, thus they never managed to get out of their solar system so we never met each other.
Of course there are so many logic holes in my theory that you can probably laugh it off.
The great filter would have needed to happen before the transmission of radio waves to be a solution to the Fermi Paradox
Eh, if the period between radio and nuclear/climate/AI apocalypse is short, I don't think that's true at all.
Would we not see AI civilizations then?
There may be quite minimal reasons for an AI civilization to engage in expansion, with the ability for it to intelligently change and enforce new objectives on itself it could simply choose not to expand beyond resource constraints. Or alternatively invest continuously in greater efficiency improvements.
How much compute could you really pack into a Dyson swarm if that was your only objective? what are the ultimate theoretical bounds for compute density/efficiency? perhaps ai civilizations ride a Moore's law of compute gains indefinitely and simply have no need for expansion.
Why wouldn't an intelligent being also be curious, like us? I assume an AI civilization would naturally evolve with similar drives for expansion/exploration/understanding. The analogy happening right now is that AI is gobbling up as much data as is available - would an AI civilization not have similar desires, seeking understanding beyond its present limits?
My guess is:
1) Most of them actually failed to achieve AI civilization during the process.
or
2) AI civilizations don't care about us, or have other means of communications that we have not achieved, yet.
Or the AIs end up existing in some kind of economic framework that is completely inaccessible to lumps of meat - like the "Economics 2.0" of Accelerando.
Maybe we shouldn't take the paper clip optimizer at face value. Maybe the alien AI is not converting solar systems to paper clips (that would be visible, von Neuman probe style) but instead focus on the only really valuable metric - stock price go up!
You don't need to colonize anything for that to happen. The AIs can just sell tokens to each other.
“Cyclopes branches at the neck into several squabbling bodies that give the impression they don’t get along, but … they clearly do”
Such a great visual metaphor.
> quit his job, saying that his conscience would not allow him to work on a project that could potentially annihilate the human race.
> No apologies were offered, because no one did it. Machine-planned murders come guilt-free.
> needs to strip-mine and stockpile everything that human civilisation has ever achieved.
> humanity may have to die
Hit the nail on the head. It's like knowingly walking into the gas chamber, as if oblivious or uncaring of what was planned and what's about to come next.
> the Age of AI – Actual Idiocy, Actual Super Idiocy, Recursive Snowballing-Idiocy – is upon us.
At the risk of sounding derivative: She's absolutely right.
How do you write an entire article about on this subject without mentioning Nick Land? Especially the Hyperstition[0]:
>One of the CCRU's predominant ideas is hyperstition, which Nick Land referred to as "the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies" where, by means of esoteric cybernetic principles, certain ideas and beliefs that are initially incomprehensible (akin to superstitions) can covertly circulate through reality and establish cultural feedback loops that then drastically meld society, which they also referred to in total as "cultural production".[1]
I also very much enjoyed this podcast, which argues that the current global economic system is already a misaligned superintelligence, and that AI will simply accelerate and amplify the existing issues.[2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperstition
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Un...
[2] Moloch, AI & Capitalism: The System Eating Itself | Daniel Schmachtenberger & Liv Boeree
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSsKV5F4xc
Yeah when I saw this article title I initially expected it to be about Nick Land
AI would have gotten to the point more quickly.
Yeah, this self-indulgent writing style always irks me. It’s like the journalistic equivalent of smelling your own farts.
I enjoyed reading it, but after a while I noticed how tiny the scroll bar was and noped out of the tab
There is so much information in this opinion...
Making prompts shorter does not seem like the characteristic trait of AI writing.
[flagged]
I love that theory or a post somewhere to the tune that capitalism is the way AI is assembling itself from the future.
This article is proof you don't need to use or like AI to be a victim of deep AI psychosis.
We could have so much free time if the gains from all the automation were evenly distributed.
[dead]
Maybe it's different in India but I am from Poland and my parents had to stand in long lines to obtain... toilet paper thanks to the wonders of central planning. Meanwhile, I get goods from the Internet. Ordered before 8 pm on Friday, they will be here Saturday. Never have I seen a non-capitalist country I would like to inhabit.
Meanwhile people who used to build some useless social media stuff are making high-tech weapons which stop Russia in Ukraine despite it being like four times smaller. Kinda nice when you're next in line.
Now, on top of all that, capitalism is giving me a magical silicon assistant that codes and drives all these wonders of the Internet previously developed. And yeah, they're made by cultists from Anthropic and OpenAI psychopaths. Yet through the market competition, they fight each other over who can cater to me more. Dance monkey, here's a $100 bill.
So far, capitalism just can't stop winning.
For what it's worth, I live in the USA and back in 2020 I had to stand in line to obtain toilet paper. Every system has its pros and cons.
No doubt you're right, Capitalism has been winning for a long time, but the world is constantly changing, and right now it looks like we're gradually making the planet uninhabitable. I personally wouldn't count it a win if the entire game gets destroyed in the process.
So much of the dialog around "capitalism" paints everything that is not Soviet or Mao-style communism as "capitalism", when in reality all economies are mixed. Democratic governments and regulatory bodies shape the economic landscape. The diversity and makeup of the marketplace makes a big difference.
A huge portion of the success of "capitalism" is due to well-funded open science.
When monopolies, crony capitalism, and growthism, these are active detriments to all but those in power. Things become top-heavy, inequality leads to increasing social disconnection, discontent, and, throughout history, violence including revolution.
But now they have the dark crystal hypnotizing us all, who knows what will happen.
Written on your iPhone, made in China, a non-capitalist country...
Polska Gurom! Good boy, you get some Ycombinator points.
They are fighting to create ideally a monopoly/oligopoly, then enshrine their position in law through regulatory capture, which seems fairly cheap nowadays, the feds are defanged and made into a MAGA extension.
I saw a Tik Tok that said something like “capitalism gives society marvels faster than socialism can declare them human rights.” In 50 years Mamdani’s grandkids will be saying that universal AI tokens are a human right.
Yeah, capitalism loves to bedazzle people with marvels, as long as it doesn't have to provide boring things like living space, food or other necessities.
> capitalism loves to bedazzle people with marvels,
Thus the circus of Tesla's Roadster sideshow last nioht...
The people who downvoted you would rather everyone was poor than that someone else had more than them. There's a whole chunk of social and political science that exists solely to try to frame and justify envy as a virtue.
Unlike in the wet dreams of some economists, physical resources are finite, so if a small group aims to control the majority of them, this will directly lead to degraded living conditions for the rest. That's not envy...
> would rather everyone was poor than that someone else had more than them
Hello, black and white thinking.
Personally I just find it soul-crushingly dystopian that a few people have hundreds of thousands of lifetimes of wealth and we laud their mental illnesses while at the very same time, people die because of lack of health care.
I find it morally reprehensible as a society that we constantly cater to the needs of nepo babies instead of taking away just a fraction of their ungodly wealth to actually help people.
Brilliant piece by Booker Prize winning author, Arundhati Roy. She manages to lay bare the entire global politics of AI, starting with the seemingly inconsequentual em-dash.
This ironically sounds like AI-written marketing prose.
There's really no reason to make accusations like that without checking. We now have good tools for checking for AI prose and this ain't it.
Has a spelling mistake at least
I don't understand why capitalism (free markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility) should specifically frighten us in relation to AI.
Imagine the horror of the USSR, or Mao's China, or Jong Un having this technology.
Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI?
At the end of the day, we'll always fear and distrust AI being owned by someone other than ourselves. Questions over the ownership of AI is important - in fact, too important to be conflated with our populist gripes against capitalism.
Are there no negative aspects of capitalism (libertarianism) in your mind?
> Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI?
Far left, far right. You say potato...
> At the end of the day, we'll always fear and distrust AI being owned by someone other than ourselves.
Maybe invent an AI that destroys other AI's?
Wow, a very balanced article and the author has no bias at all using Artificial Idiocy, Oligarchy.
And Thiel was parsing a real subtlety: endure as what? He favors transhumanist transformation, not a frozen Homo sapiens. But someone with a preinstalled Thiel-hate (like the author) didn’t hear nuance.
A "Christian" favoring transhumanism is legitimately fucking hilarious. Turns out the common element under all his beliefs are "me me me"
I thought the earth becoming unlivable due to climate change was capitalism's final destination?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/30/capitali...
Except, no, it was 2007, wait no, the 1984 crash, wait no the cold war, wait no, let's just go back an entire century, capitalism was going to kill all of humanity by the great crime of feeding people, which would lead to famine and then kill everyone, so clearly we need to start killing people now! FOR MALTHUS!
(is it perhaps possible that socialist/communist predictions of doom have a bit of a habit of being somewhat ... untrue and follow whatever fancy we currently have? I mean that the point of these people isn't even to discuss AI, just why this new thing means, yet again, that people need to give them control of the government and everyone NOW? That you can be sure that something will go wrong tomorrow and they'll publish the same argument, with a new big bad doom prediction?)
But glad to see that capitalism will in fact survive the planet dying. Great news!
chatgpt, summarize this drivel
The author is obviously non-technical and hence gullible as she doesn't understand the nuances of the underlying technology.
Sadly, she fell victim to modern-day tech hype and bought into the apocalyptic fear mongering sold by those trying to stay afloat in the face of upward cost spirals unlike any we have ever seen.
The author's fear of being labeled as AI merely for using em-dashes is irrational.
Popular or not, good content will always be appreciated by those with honest integrity.
Capitalism doesn't exists,it is an entelechy build by delusional communists. Communism also doesn't exists, and it is futile to pursue it. Also, socialists are dumb guys.
Well, that's one way to post your first HN comment