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John 1513's avatar

From the CA article

"To engage in Alt-Right thinking is to turn oneself into a vacuous skinsuit animated by raw stupidity. There is literally not a single shred of non-stupidity in the entire thing. Mencius Moldbug, stupid."

it's pretty impressive that your blog posts can make these people need to have group therapy sessions (circling, maybe?) and then just twitch and writhe in pure seething anger. the only evidence they could level against your cathedral hypothesis is that Elon is buying Twitter. lmao. Twitter's not a real place

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irrelevantdrivel's avatar

I do mostly agree with you, but I just have a couple of comments. Firstly, while in theory GET requests are read-only, there are many systems out there on the internet that allow GET requests to perform non-trivial work that is not idempotent. Yes, this is really awful, and they should probably be POST requests. But they aren't. I'm sure that with a bit of searching you could find some awfully designed web server somewhere that will send emails based on GET requests.

Secondly, and a little more abstractly, perhaps we're already being manipulated by AI? There's much said about "bots" in places like Twitter and Facebook: people being manipulated by procedurally generated "fake news" articles, millions of tweets being made by bots, etc. Given that these bots are already manipulating normies into believing total nonsense, is it not conceivable that some hypothetical general AI could do an even better job of manipulating people into doings its "bidding"? It might not be "the AI will send an email asking for a particular mixture of proteins" but more along the lines of "the AI will manipulate society through social media into funding nanotechnology research 100x what it receives now" until such a time that it _can_ just send an email asking for a particular mixture of proteins.

Personally, I think that it's all exceedingly unlikely. It would require a general artificial intelligence with planning and strategic facilities orders of magnitude better than we have now. As you say, current "AI" can't even remember the beginning of a sentence by the time it gets to the end of it, or multiply 3-digit numbers. However, nor can most humans, probably, without pen and paper, and it doesn't seem to stop us going about our daily lives. If we need to multiply big numbers we can delegate it to simpler machines. The biggest problem with current "AI"/deep learning research is that it is very bad at certain things that traditional programming finds trivial, like remembering things and consulting its memory, sorting, maths, etc. So it stands to reason that a lot of current AI research is going into trying to work out how to marry "AI" with fixed function units that can do stuff like multiply, or consult a database, where necessary: AI that can delegate to fixed function units might be that leap that lets "AI" become much more powerful... But I'm still skeptical.

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