Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigbuppo | Hacker News Reader

This is how AI will destroy humanity. People that should know better attributing magical powers to a content respinner that has no understanding of what it's regurgitating. Then again, they have billions of dollars at stake, so it's easy to understand why it would be so difficult for them to see reality. The normies have no hope, they just nod and follow along that Google told them it's okay to jump into the canyon without a parachute.

View on HN

I dunno, I'm pretty sure AI will destroy a lot of things but people have been basing life and death decisions on astrology, numerology, etc. since time immemorial and we're still here. An AI with actual malice could totally clean up in this space, but we haven't reached the point of actual intelligence with intent. And, given that it's just regurgitating advice tropes found on the internet, so it's probably a tiny bit better than chance.

Fair point, just let's not forget that nobody connected an Ouija board to the nuclear button. I'm not saying the button is connected now to AI, but pessimistic me sees it as a definite possibility.

> pessimistic me sees it as a definite possibility

I'd like to think that will be after everyone who was alive for Wargames, Terminator, and Matrix has kicked the bucket.

In my opinion, ai tools followed blindly are far worse than astrology and numerology. The latter deal in archetypes and almost never give concrete answers like "do exactly $THING". There is widespread understanding that they are not scientific and most people who engage with them do not try to use them as though they are scientific and they know they would be ridiculed and marginalized if they did.

By contrast, ai tools give a veneer of scientific authority and will happily give specific advice. Because they are being propped up by the tech sector and a largely credulous media, I believe there are far more people who would be willing to use ai to justify their decision making.

Now historically it may be the case that authorities used astrology and numerology to manipulate people in the way that ai can today. At the same time, even if the type of danger posed by ai and astrology is related, the risk is far higher today because of our hugely amplified capacity for damage. A Chinese emperor consulting the I Ching was not capable of damaging the earth in the way a US president consulting ai would be today.

I dunno, no surveillance, military and police institutes had ever used astrology, numerology or horoscopes to define or track their targets but AI is constantly added to these things. General people using AI to do things can range from minor inconvenience to major foolishness, but the powers that be constantly using AI or being pushed to do so are not apples to apples comparison really.

> I dunno, no surveillance, military and police institutes had ever used astrology, numerology or horoscopes to define or track their targets

Phrenology was a thing for some time.

I used to waste tons of time checking man pages for Linux utilities and programs. I always wondered why I had to memorize all those flags, especially when the chances of recalling them correctly were slim.

Not anymore! My brother created this amazing tool: Option-K. https://github.com/zerocorebeta/Option-K

Now, ofc there are people are my office who do not know how i remember all the commands, i don't.

Without AI, this wouldn't be possible. Just imagine asking AI to instantly deliver the exact command you need. As a result, I'm now able to create all the scripts I need 10x faster.

I still remember those stupid bash completion scripts, and trowing through bash history.

Dragging my feet each time i need to use rsync, ffmpeg, or even tar.

> Just imagine asking AI to instantly deliver the exact command you need.

How do you know that it delivered the "exact" command you needed without reading the documentation and understanding what the commands do? This has all the same dangers as copy/pasting someone's snippet from StackOverflow.

If you are using ffmpeg, you can glance at the command, see if it has a chance of working, then run it on a video file and open the resulting file in a video player, see if it matches your expectation.

It has made using ffmpeg and similar complex cli tools amazingly simple.

I'd even say that copying from StackOverflow is safer than using AI, because on most questions you've got peer review (upvotes, downvotes, and comments).

Religion didn't kill humanity and is responsible for the biggest wars in history.

> Religion didn't kill humanity

There's still time.

> and is responsible for the biggest wars in history.

Not really. WWII, the biggest war in history, wasn't primarily about religion. Neither, at least as a primary factor, were the various Chinese civil wars and wars of succession, the Mongolian campaign of conquest, WW1, the Second Sino-Japanese War, or the Russian Civil War, which together make up at least the next 10 biggest wars.

In the tier below that, there's some wars that at least superficially have religion as a more significant factor, like the various Spanish wars of imperial conquest, but even then, well, "imperial conquest" is its own motivation.

I upvoted you but to be fair in 2 of the 3 Abrahamic religions either church or holy text actually promote(d) violence which famously resulted in first Islamic conquests and then Christian crusades

Lots of victims, but they are not called wars. Probably because they are too long and consist of many smaller events that are actually called wars.

Of course the scale of injury is not comparable to what's possible with weapons of mass destruction in 20 century, so I suppose WWII tops the above, but if adjusted for capability... Just imagine

> so I suppose WWII tops the above

So do a bunch of pre-modern Chinese internal wars that weren't principally religious conflicts.

Heck, the Crusades taken together aren't even the biggest Christian-Muslim medieval conflict (that's the Reconquista).

WW 2

Didn't the propaganda start with deporting Jews as an excuse? ...

Not sure how you define "biggest" but WWII killed the most people and WWI is probably a close second and neither of those were primarily motivated by religion, but rather nationalism.

I'd suggest you check out Tom Holland's "Dominion" if you'd like a well-researched and nuanced take on the effect of (Judeo-Christian) religion on Western civilization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com