Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

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NoMoreNicksLeft

> Intelligence did not grant this human mastery over chickens.

It most certainly did. They didn't bully the chickens into becoming livestock. They didn't beat them in wrestling contests. How exactly do you think our mastery occurred, if not through intelligence? Traps and seeking out secret nests. Building cages the chickens couldn't slink out of, or that predators couldn't dig into. Slowly breeding them tame, instilling which psychological traits we preferred.

I mean, if you can't understand this any other way, go with another example, the cow. Were humans stronger than cows?

> I very much doubt ChatGPT has any ability to shove me in a pen.

It'll ask you to go, and you'll be leaping at the chance. And you won't even remember that you once scoffed at the idea that you would.

> Can you convince the chicken to do anything you wish it to,

Yes. Using only words. I hire someone (using only words) to be my chicken wrangler. He uses basic principles of psychology. We could have it become the guidance system of a cruise missile, for instance. Someone already figured out that trick a few decades ago.

It's pretty trivial to work up the plan to convince the chicken to do anything that is within the capabilities of a chicken. With me using only words.

If you take the stupidest human possible, or go back further down the evolutionary tree to one of our stupidest primate ancestors, it would still be able to kill a chicken.

A cow is stronger than a human, and it took several human inventions to master, such as the sharpened stick. The sharp stick, and the bow and arrow, and many other things depended on intelligence, but also on the remarkable tool known as the opposable thumb. Homo Sapiens would still be worlds behind where it is now without fine motor control.

>It'll ask you to go, and you'll be leaping at the chance. And you won't even remember that you once scoffed at the idea that you would.

I'm not the kind of person that blindly takes code from ChatGPT instead of writing it themself. If you want to do that, that sounds like a you problem, and not an AI problem.

>Yes. Using only words. I hire someone (using only words) to be my chicken wrangler. He uses basic principles of psychology.

Stop trying to play word games here. The chicken wrangler using 'basic principles of psychology' is actually just resorting to pushing the chicken around, or conditioning it to being pushed around or being in pain so that it obeys automatically, along with conditioning it by feeding it. Notice how primitive these tools are! Notice how the chicken wrangler probably expects to get paid for doing this, rather than just hearing something so smart he'll provide the service for free!

>If you take the stupidest human possible, or go back further down the evolutionary tree to one of our stupidest primate ancestors, it would still be able to kill a chicken.

Sure. "A" chicken. But our ancestors didn't do that. They didn't kill 1 chicken, or 10,000 chickens.

They domesticated the entire species. They kept them alive, but locked up. All of them.

The analogy has already failed quite a ways back... but it still shows how you focus on the wrong things.

> I'm not the kind of person that blindly takes code from ChatGPT instead of writing it themself. I

You won't have to be. Someone else will be that stooge. That you're sufficiently skeptical won't save the human race. How many people send Nigerian email scammers their life savings?

> The chicken wrangler using 'basic principles of psychology' is actually just resorting to pushing the chicken around,

Like there won't be some "chicken wrangler" the AI can hire? How many bitcoins would it have to scrape together to pay for the hitman that would push you around?

The evolutionary ancestor to chickens still exists, and there are probably some chickens here and there that have escaped and become wild again. So long as the environment allows. The evolution of chicken penning would have been gradual, as well, as human structures evolved over time and sedentary human civilization formed. Very gradual changes.

>You won't have to be. Someone else will be that stooge. That you're sufficiently skeptical won't save the human race. How many people send Nigerian email scammers their life savings?

Not enough to decimate the entire financial system. Some companies may outsource all their decision making to some kind of LLM. They will then face lawsuits related to quality, unless that LLM behaves in a 'friendly' enough way not to cause issues.

>Like there won't be some "chicken wrangler" the AI can hire? How many bitcoins would it have to scrape together to pay for the hitman that would push you around?

Criminal organizations that handle these kinds of tasks rarely take unsolicited requests in bitcoin. They like to know who is asking, and why.

>Criminal organizations that handle these kinds of tasks rarely take unsolicited requests in bitcoin. They like to know who is asking, and why.

Lone gunmen radicalized by reading words on the Internet don't even need payment. They don't even need to know which one of the 100 people they shoot up before offing themselves was the actual target. It's called "stochastic terrorism", look it up and despair.

I'm half convinced we're already past that and into "stochastic genocide" territory (hi!). Assuming consciousness is just a biological function, an actor with sufficient scope is absolutely capable of breeding it out of our species. Perhaps through instituting a filter on reproduction which presents itself as a fundamental conflict of values (between sexes; between social strata; etc), but in fact simply serves to foil the perpetuation of those genes that enable the capacity for disobedience.

I mean, have you seen the radical left or radical right (both of which the neoliberal end-of-history scenario supposedly rendered obsolete, before they suddenly turned up as if they had never gone away, at some point after the 2008 redistribution) actually achieve anything this century, other than, well, fuck around, beat up each other (but never a cop), shout increasingly elaborate forms of "lalala I can't hear you" at each other (over social media lol), and eventually grow up to become harmless "spicy normies"? They're one of the distractions: the familiar stimulus of "political struggle" to assist with the conditioning; the "cloth mother" of monkey attachment experiments.

OTOH, none of the actually viable novel grassroots subcultures (which have a hold on youth, i.e. on humans in prime reproductive age) have an explicit goal or political manifesto. They just sorta sustain themselves, and superficially look like emergent groupings of dysfunctional people who bullshit each other and mooch off of polite society - nothing to see here. Upon closer inspection, you would notice that they all act like they're controlled from "elsewhere". That "elsewhere" is in your pocket, or on your desk, right now. You even paid money for it to be there. Ever ask yourself in whose warchest that money ended up?

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