GolfPopper

I think breaking the social contract is a symptom. One that produces destructive effects, but not a root cause. It's been a couple decades since I read Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, but my recollection of his thesis is societies collapse because the cost of continuing to operate (resolve challenges, keep the various internal processes going) is too high; i.e. either you pay (in resources) more than you get back/save, or the cost of fixing systems it impossible to avoid collapse.

Obligatory xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1979:_History

That out of the way, I'm close to 50, and things over the last year definitely seem different in a more precarious way than anything before them. It feels closer to my memories of August 1991, or the days immediately after 9/11 or January 6th, only all the time, where I've gotten a little numb to the dissonance, but not nearly enough for it to feel close to normal. It feels like what I imagine the run-up to WWII might have felt like to those living then.

That's my perspective.

>his mass hysteria around AI will soon be forgotten. Nobody will care whether something was written by an LLM or a human. People will just move on to other topics.

Just like they've forgotten about tulip bulbs?

Even if LLMs deliver a fraction of what their advocates promise, their impact entry into society will be relevant for centuries, much as with piracy, industrialization, and abolition.

Like the Constitution, it is just a suggestion, nothing but writing, unless the people who have sworn those oaths choose to act on them.

I don't think we should paper over "the largest theft of labor in human history.”[1]

1. https://www.computerworld.com/article/4234688/microsoft-know...

Which is good is you're developing a tool to turn natural language into functional code. But it's bad if you need a trillion dollars because you promised everyone a magic wishing genie.

Maybe the previous poster was referring to the Kuiper Belt and/or the Oort Cloud? There's certainly plenty of water ice out there, with no particularly deep gravity wells to worry about.

Collecting it while usefully en route to another star system seems like it would be tricky from a delta-v perspective, but maybe the solution is to:

1) build a small worldship from an appropriate asteroid 2) fill your internal ocean in the outer solar system over the course of a generation or three 3) dive back down the gravity well for a gravitational assist from the Sun as you head to your interstellar destination 4) en route, slowly use part of your ocean as propellant, while living inside the rest of it as shielding

Trump has certainly taken corruption and malfeasance to new levels of blatancy, but Obama's AG Eric Holder declining to prosecute the banks his firm used to represent, escaping punishment for Contempt of Congress because his own DoJ declined to prosecute him (on a different matter), and then returning to that same firm is part of how we got to where we are now.

Techo-nobles benefit as well. Just ask Eric Holder and centi-millionaire Obama. If you can reach the latter in his mansion on the exclusive island for the wealthy, that is.

Nixon resigned, and was pardoned. Many of the conspirators were convicted and served prison time.

With Reagan and Iran-Contra, Reagan was never charged, most officials were pardoned, and only one person served any jail time.

With Bush (43) there were no consequences for any of it. Not he war under false pretenses, not the domestic spying, not the torture.

And with Donald Trump (45) a single judge recently appointed by Donald Trump held up legal proceedings until he was elected President, again.

>Machines with superior cognition to humans is completely unchartered territory and fundamentally changes everything.

So, how superior does machine cognition need to get before it can figure out how many p's are in raspberry?

Krupp says, "Hallo!" (And so does Vickers.)

How do your users feel about the code?

Which, in my experience, means they sometimes cannot fix the bugs they've introduced.

For anyone who hasn't seen Mitchell and Webb's "Are We the Baddies?"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h242eDB84zY&pp=ygUSYXJlIHdlIHR...

>I suspect you don't hold other news stories to the same standards

And I suspect you're engaging in ad hominems. :-)

Trustworthy sources and actual evidence are two things I like before even considering things at face value. This has neither.

"It was the Iranians, trust us" is not proof. The pretense that it is, is itself deeply offensive.

The United States government is at war with Iran. Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos both have significant interests in pleasing the U.S. government. It would be shocking if they weren't pushing propaganda for the U.S. government.

This isn't news. It's "Iran bad" snarling, badly disguised as journalism.

I don't need propaganda to know Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and Donald Trump aren't my friends, either. And they're in a much better position to do me harm.

To quote Marine Major General Smedley Butler, War Is A Racket. [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

>You first need to show that this article is lying or incorrect.

Jeff Bezos quotes Sam Altman. No, no one needs to show anything. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. One billionaire says another billionaire said is not proof and not evidence.

Perhaps they performed appropriate groveling and flattery before the naked emperor, but he forgot.

As the variably attributed proverb goes, "The sun never sets on the British Empire, because God doesn't trust the English in the dark"

My own guess is that a fair number of them just buried themselves. While I don't have all the relevant facts at hand, per the US Naval Institute, a 550 lb bomb dropped form 20,000 feet would hit the ground at 880 feet per second [1]. If my rusty mind is correct, that would be around 9 megajoules, while feels like it ought to be enough to bury a bomb pretty well in any sort of yielding soil.

1. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1941/december/how...

Generations ago, we idolized war heroes and astronauts (and, for the nerds, the people working to get the astronauts there). I won't try to argue that was perfect, but for decades now we've idolized power and wealth without regard to cost or honesty. I don't know if that's stuff rolling downhill, just looking in a mirror, or something more complex. But it seems to me we've lost our civilizational self-respect. And I've no real idea how to get it back. The sorts of people who I would think ought to be at the forefront of any sort of positive reactionary movement seem to be bent on making sure that any sort of traditionalism is utterly and rightfully discredited.

Or they decided not-so-subtly introducing us to infohazards like social media and LLMs would be more effective at neutralizing us.

What Microsoft's Director of Applied Science called the, "largest theft of labor in human history".[1]

1. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.64...

Alternatively, that's just an excuse, and he's waging a war because the existential threat to his autocratic kleptocracy by even a modestly successful, somewhat democratic neighboring state with significant inter-country exchange of people and ideas.

Early consoles (except Nintendo cartridges), cassette players, VCRs, CD players, cable TV boxes, fax machines, photocopier, computer-controlled telescopes... While sometimes figuring out how to get them to do something in the pre-internet era was difficult, they would pretty reliably do it. The only glitches or crashes I remember on my C64 were from disk corruption (or my own coding errors).

I'm not a drone hobbyist, but it doesn't seem like it would be that difficult for motivated residents to do significant damage to an unwanted data center via drones.

With the increasing development of capable drones, I keep wondering how long it's going to be before we start seeing people who have given up on law and regulation resorting to drone-enacted vigilantism.

The AI executives are the psychopaths.