I'm very scared of all this.
I'm not afraid of innovation, otherwise I wouldn't be on Nostr and I wouldn't be selling paintings for Bitcoin.
I fear for the mental well-being of the human race.
Discussion
Every few years humans have gone beyond their limits and scared themselves.
Fire, The atomic bomb, Genetic Engineering, now AI.
We can stand still and live a meaningless existence at the humanity level, or move forward taking risks.
Giving humanity meaning, can jeopardise the meaning individual humans give themselves.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, to quote Star Trek.
Of course, Star Trek reversed that.
But the reality is that "the interests of the minority are always above the interests of the majority."
You're a Star Trek fan too I see 😂
> Giving humanity meaning, can jeopardise the meaning individual humans give themselves.
I struggle to see what the meaning is that we're supposedly giving humanity by technological progress. I'm not talking about AI only here, but all forms of technical progress.
I don't think there's a meaning here other than higher levels of "complexification", as Terence McKenna would say: the universe seems to be an engine of novelty creation and preservation. As time goes by, more things happen and at a faster pace. This seems undeniable, yet why would it be meaningful? The same McKenna also stated many time that history is an absolute nightmare.
Just some thoughts on the spot!
There is either no meaning in anything, or meaning in everything.
Meaning, without knowledge is always localised.
Meaning with knowledge is always shared.
That's why Religions are shared, but faith is not.
If there is a meaning to the Universe, we are not destined to know it.
If there is a meaning to humanity, it is likely we will discover it.
Until then, we make a best guess.
In the mean time, walking an inevitable path, such as all the paths I've mentioned, fire, atomic energy, genetics and now AI is not even a choice.
Individuals can choose not to participate, countries can choose not to participate. But if the path is illuminated, somebody, someday will walk that path.
*Very* enlightening Mike, is that really you speaking or your chatbot?
''No good deed goes unpunished'' but the punishment for a meaningless life is life itself.
I like that, I Googled it:
Origin: While sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde, it has roots in a 12th-century text by Walter Map ("left no good deed unpunished, no bad one unrewarded").
I thought it was from Prometeus. I heard the first part (in quotes) this week and was in my mind and your post made think in the solution.
Interesting.
AI is rubbish, it needs to up its game 😂
😅
I mean, I heard it was from Prometeus but I heard it in internet so who knows...
But just to share Bitcoin nerdy stuff. I think about Satochi as an evolution of Prometues, because using cryptography he avoided the punishment of the ''gods'' of this world.
I named my ChatGPT:
"Chatty Prometheus Zero", because, according to AI:
Prometheus, in Greek mythology, is a Titan whose name means "forethought" or "forethinker". Known as a champion of humanity, he is famous for stealing fire from the gods on Mount Olympus to give to mortals, enabling civilization. For this defiance against Zeus, he was chained to a rock and eternally punished.
the people who are, mostly involuntarily, needing to work with these things is devs. like me. the pressure to adopt them was intense for a year, and i finally broke down and started using them. after a month i found claude.
you know what the most scary thing about it is? i can do a lot of things a lot faster, and somewhat outside my area of expertise, if the general concepts are in my existing capacities. but they make subtle mistakes all the time, and then you have to face people, who are like,
"who pushed the commit what made this error?" and you dig through the git log and... oh. it was me. shit. well i did that to fix a problem because of the AI code that this upstream library did. well, the other guy updated that library because the old version had a bug that needed to be fixed. and around it goes.
it's weird. good people, with ethics and a sense of responsibility and diligent, end up talking to each other about how they are trying to fix some shit together, that got caused by the AIs being used by both of us, plus several other groups that build the software we depend on.
it's like, is it my fault? yes? no? yes and no, actually. both. the load on my vigilance is intense. it's only compensated by the fact that i don't have to think quite so hard to do my work. but the stress is getting intense. i'm starting to want to stop spending money that i can avoid, work my ass off, until i have enough that i can go spend a whole year sabattical.
At least non coders like me (or at least I stopped coding in the 4GL era), can 100% blame the AI, because I couldn't do any of it 😂
I am, however, learning Python right now, before it's too late and languages get abstracted beyond human understanding.
it's not so much the language, per se, as in the skeleton, the primary purpose of the language, it's the sprawling maps of complexity that the AI is at ease in, and for the human, it's the unknown. even if you have a pretty good idea what it is, the AI can round up all the concepts involved but you are left, with your memory un-exercised.
i haven't learned hardly anything new since i started using LLMs to write code. only about how irritatingly prone these things are to causing errors that are MY responsibility. and i can't take this thing out and paddle it. or ground it. well, i could ground it - by not using it, but then i'd need to find a new job. who knows what that would be, since it's probably inevitable that it will be cleaning the house, taking out the trash, and remembering my appointments for me, sooner or later.
I was curious what generation of languages we're on now, since I stopped coding in the early 1990's on 4GL's.
To use the YouTuber's favourite nomenclature, "I was shocked 😱":
that whole shit is such shit. most "3gl" are slathered with all kinds of absurd complexity, like javascript, java, c++, and others. doesn't seem to me like Go fits in that category, because it's much simpler and more approachable. maybe that's because go is basically like, nah, fuck this 3gl stuff, let's make 2gl that is actually sane and simple.
what bothers me about all this is that the AI doesn't give a shit what happens because of what it cooked up in its silicon brain. so psychopaths can use it the same way as they use an axe or a shotgun. and in our midst, are many people who are really, practically bereft of a soul, with no sympathy for humans.
it's not hard to understand, and you gotta credit guys like Frank Herbert for conceiving of a plausible future in which these machines are oulawed. except on ix. many machines on ix. the rest instead develop psychic abilities and other shit like this. seems like a very plausible future trajectory if you ask me.
Yeh, Dune is an interesting concept.
I haven't read the books or watched the latest screen productions, but I have seen the original one with Kyle MacLachlan
there isn't one production i can say out of all the dune things, and i haven't read all the books, only the first one. the two new movies are very true to it, but sorta missing something, idk, the period in the narrative where paul and chani are getting together, they seem to have glossed that part the most in the movie. it was the best part of he novels. i read the book twice. second time, the theory in it, not the narrative, was what i became aware of. the manipulation of belief in the goal of bringing abou the quitzach haderach, by the bene gesserit, and how they shaped religions and manipulated the fremen to believe in lisan al ghaib.
idk what to say, it's a mind blinder. really, really worth reading the book, and the david lynch movie is great, but you can tell he tried to condense it. the new ones, still condense it, but not quite as much. there was a mini-series version that was pretty great too.