30 points

AGI is going to be really pissed at us shoveling the problem onto it. “You humans could have started so many solutions decades ago, wtf?”

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19 points

It’s the parable of the drowning man turning away all help because god will save him, all over again (except it’s floods and mudslides and forest fires)

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8 points

And when he dies, god tells him “I sent you two boats and a helicopter”.

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4 points

Except in this case “god” would say “As a large language model, my purpose is to regurgitate a statistically passable stream of lexical tokens, not to rescue drowning people. Not exactly sure how you expected me to be capable of helping and that’s really on you.”

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96 points

Right, so the plan is to spend 20 years and 40 petawatt hours building a machine to answer the Great ℚuestion of what we should do about climate change. If it works, the answer will be “you should’ve stopped burning fossil fuels twenty years ago.”

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35 points

“Oh no what do about all this waste heat?”

“Generate more waste heat”

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23 points

Repeat until a machine that can create God is built. Then it’s God’s problem.

But it must be a US God, otherwise China wins.

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11 points

The US god will team up with the Chinese god and the Russian god to beat the crap out of us.

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21 points

The model will just go “42” on and on and it’ll be the first decent joke a neural network produces. It’ll be worth it in a way.

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13 points

I could absolutely see an LLM telling us that 6 times 9 is 42 unless there’s special tinkering to prevent it.

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9 points

“The answer is 34. Now here’s the schematics to build an even better computer to ask the right question.”

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82 points

This is the inevitable evolution of climate change denialism - accept it’s real and happening, just that it’s too late / too expensive to do anything about it.

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49 points

musn’t make the eight guys who own everything sad!

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23 points

this “view” (of schmidt’s) is probably the kind of shit that Really Expensive Analysts espouse at davos and in Private Advisory sessions to the kinds of people who go in for that; I’ve also heard it about GRT and “the collapse” and more

would be nice if we could know who all those dipshits are, and who they’ve preached to

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14 points

it’s clear this was a well rehearsed pitch - the twitter video linked is the two minute version of the same pitch

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7 points
*

Ford was walking north. He thought he was probably on his way to the spaceport, but he had thought that before. He knew he was going through that part of the city where people’s plans often changed quite abruptly.

“Do you want to have a good time?” said a voice from a doorway.

“As far as I can tell,” said Ford. “I’m having one. Thanks.”

“Are you rich?” said another.

This made Ford laugh.

He turned and opened his arms in a wide gesture.

“Do I look rich?” he said.

“Don’t know,” said the girl. “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you’ll get rich. I have a very special service for rich people…”

“Oh yes,” said Ford, intrigued but careful, “and what’s that?”

“I tell them it’s okay to be rich.”

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9 points

I’m quite surprised that religious fundamentalists haven’t pivoted to calling it punishment from god yet.

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3 points

It would be a sign of the End Times. Problem is that if it is then they’ve been Left Behind.

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19 points

Delay tactics to avoid the inevitability that we need to abandon capitalism.

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40 points

This will grant us “the arrival of an alien intelligence.” Those are Schmidt’s literal words.

Speaking of alien intelligences, my new Silicon Valley blood magic startup has come up with the idea of ritually sacrificing virgins in the hope of summoning Great Cthulhu or Azathoth, as they might have some ideas of solving the climate crisis.

Not a cult btw.

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9 points

This is basically the plot of Charles Stross’ The Jennifer Morgue.

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3 points

The plot? Im more and more worried this is going to turn out to be real. Reality tends to outpace his fiction at times after all. ;)

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