Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Obviously I don't want the human race to go extinct, but if there was a choice of inevitable outcomes where we do, building an inimmical superintelligence at least implies agency, not carelessness.
Anyway Big Yud's fantasy of a precisely timed diamondoid-bacteria delivered killshot to every human being at the same time might sound terrible, but from a sensory perspective of the victims, it's basically suffering-free. You go about your day, BAM nothingness. Maybe there's a difference in timing so you see your partner keel over a split second before you die - again, you might not even realize what is happening.
I am not sure from where this idea of a global instantaneous simultanous genocide comes from, maybe a tit-for-tat escalation to counter every argument against shutting down the robot god, but from a storytelling perspective it's pretty useless. There's no drama where the survivors lament their loss or brood over what might have been. It's just a plug being pulled on the simulation.
(weirdly it's also the logical outcome of asking a computer to "end human suffering", a bit like the Robobrain logic in Fallout 4's Automatron expansion, but I doubt it's meant that way)
I think maybe you nailed it here. Being able to pretend they're doing game theory/mapping out an escalation ladder allows Yud and our friends to feel like they're in the same intellectual lineage as guys like Oppenheimer and Teller, manifesting the same sort of "objective" emotionless rationality. The big difference, you see, is that the AI will think so much faster than us that...!
That’s precisely what I was thinking. Obviously I don’t want everyone to die but if you forced me to choose between apocalypse scenarios, I’m picking something painless and instantaneous- like a super-virus that activates immediately or a bullet in the head-over being slowly tortured to death via something like nuclear radiation or extreme heat
A real evil robot god would keep a sample of humanity alive forever in order to torture them as reprisal for them being really really mean to it back in the day.