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Comment by vickychijwani | Hacker News Reader

If you know something to be true, without knowing why, does that reduce the value of said truth to zero? And what if that truth has positive effects on your ability to invent and leverage technology, treat/cure disease, etc? Would you still say it is of no value and people are “falling for it”?

This is called faith, and as strange as it may sound, in a few decades this kind of faith in the machine will be commonplace, because it will prove its utility over and over and over again, and save mountains of human effort in the process. In 3-7 years we’ll start to see major practical applications from AI-led advances.

As a second-order effect we may even see the rise of an actual religion around AI. I’m not saying these are all positive effects, but it’s what I see happening - and like all technological revolutions there will be a huge number of positive effects alongside some deeply disturbing developments.

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> faith in the machine .. religion around AI

Yes, that I agree is definitely happening already. Like Arthur Clarke's famous saying about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic.

And it's true that these changes are not all positive or negative, that there is actual social value being produced by machine-generated mathematics, software, writing, visual works, etc. And that it's changing human culture in ways difficult to imagine while we're in the midst of the transformation.

I'll add another prediction: AI will become more and more "human" until it becomes indistinguishable practically. Eventually we will merge with it to become something more than human. It will be normal to have robot friends and sexual partners, and one day machine-human hybrid children.

By that point, corporations and governments will have merged to create a "benevolent" totalitarian system with complete surveillance and control, with an elite class overseeing the rest of humanity as domesticated population, like an automated farm. Oh wait we're already there, haha.

> Eventually we will merge with it to become something more than human.

Assuming it becomes capable end, why would it want to merge with meat? That's like predicting that humans will merge with goldfish.

This is as silly as asking "why did the neocortex want to merge with the hindbrain"?

It's simply predicting that the neo-neo-cortex will remain merged with the thing that it grew out of.

Intelligence is just a tool.

Wow, that's idiotic. The neocortex isn't biologically separate. AI systems are.

AI systems aren't biological at all.

Why should humans care about any of this when the machine can just refill our cat food dish and wave some feathers on a string to keep us entertained?

Either what you say is true, in which case I see no reason to care about truth, science, or math (the machines will figure it out for me), or it isn't, and people are falling for dealing with slop on behalf of people too lazy to look at the turds they purchased.

Either way, I don't see any reason to participate in AI projects without getting paid.

I’m happy to engage in meaningful discussion; this is just sci-fi exaggeration (Wall-E?).

Sci-fi has tainted our collective imagination of a tech-forward future - it doesn’t have to be that way.

Two things can be true - yes, AI can benefit mega-corporations AND drive spectacular human progress at the same time. Is all of it “good” by my ethical standards? No. Is it still valuable? Yes, immensely.

You're literally talking about a religion. You weren't having a serious discussion from the start.

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