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> a giant brain that is continually self-improving

...nope, does not qualify. If it cannot manage to replicate itself completely (as in: create another separate 'internet' capable of further replication) it is as good as a single human living on Mars. It's a short ride, one small mistake and goodbye Mr. Superintelligence. (I'm not claiming humans will be able to survive that though.)

You are spot on. We are so self-centered that we think an AI superintelligence will be something like a superintelligent-human-mind/person inside a computer, when most likely, it will be nothing like a human and probably completely unrecognizable to us.

In fact, I'd argue it's already here and already taken over.

Most of us are now enslaved by screens and the Internet, we are addicted to them, even if we don't want to admit it. Some might say these things are run by humans, but are humans really in charge? Can any single person turn off the internet or prevent everyone else from using their phones/screens for hours every day? Is even a group of people capable of doing it? And even if they could, would they?

Maybe if humans went extinct, the Internet and screens would disappear, but that just means there's a symbiotic relationship, not that we are by any means in control.

> Can any single person turn off the internet or prevent everyone else from using their phones/screens for hours every day?

Google "ICANN"

https://deadline.com/2020/07/internet-down-outage-cloudflare...

https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/25/21719396/amazon-web-serv...

Are you implying Google did it on purpose to prevent this super-intelligence from taking over?

To me it seems like the opposite, the outage was untintentional and then humans worked really hard to fix it. It's almost as if we were the cells of the body of this super-intelligence.

> Are you implying Google did it on purpose to prevent this super-intelligence from taking over?

Why are you reading that from what I said? I wasn't responding to the superintelligence thing (as I hadn't quoted it), and that seems like the weirdest reading from what I responded to.

The claim was: "Can any single person turn off the internet or prevent everyone else from using their phones/screens for hours every day?"

And I responded with proof that that is marginally possible. Probably not a single person, but a well-trained well-connected group could do it very easily.

I understand. However, what I'm saying is that even if that capability exists, in practice it doesn't matter, as it is something that we will never act on becauae we've already been taken over.

That outage example shows that people will immediately act to restore, preserve and expand the system, never destroy it.

This is a rather spurious assumption, that you have there.

'The system' that you're referring to in most likelyhood is just an aspect of science fiction, as such there is no provable threat from the internet, and it doesn't make any kind of capitalistic sense to turn off the infrastructure upon which rests, for example, the stock market, the banking infrastructure, a small portion of the communications infrastructure.

Now, if there were a provable, tangible threat to these systems remaining, and it was seen to likely be a GH-0 'Dead Greenhouse' scenario[0], then I think it would push people to take action.

But I don't think you can claim that "people will never turn off the internet, ever", simply because as-such they have never done it. With that line of logic the USSR would never have got humanity to space[1].

[0]: http://www.scpwiki.com/k-class-complete-list

[1]: The USSR won "the space race", by getting humans into orbit first (Which is why it's called "the space race" and not "the moon race")

> but a well-trained well-connected group could do it very easily.

Yes, but we would send in armed troops to stop them and reverse their actions.

I guess your point is the Super Intelligence has fully infiltrated our government, military and law enforcement.

It is far more than just the internet.

> I guess your point is the Super Intelligence has fully infiltrated our government, military and law enforcement.

> It is far more than just the internet.

Very well put. I guess we've already lost.

I feel like everyone stating that "the superintelligence is around, and has already won" in this thread is acting based on what they wish to be true, rather than what we can see based on fact.

You have turned a potentiality for which there is as yet no evidence, into a certainty. A rational mindset in general tends to frown on such things.

I feel I should clarify, for the sake of anyone that bothers to browse my profile / lurkers, I don't mean Rationality inasmuch as Jordan Peterson does[0], or any of the alt-right. I mean Rationality in the Humanist sense, i.e. the progressive Rational Wiki's left-wing approach.

[0]: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-d... | skip to "Having safely established Jordan Peterson is an intellectual fraud" for a dissection of his proposed philosophies and why they are suitably shitty.

> I've wondered if the AI superintelligence everyone is watching out for is actually slowly being built from the bottom up, and encompasses evening in the entire world.

every time someone tries this idea of training an AI on "the internet" it comes out badly racist / bigoted.

Garbage in, Garbage out.

1) https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...

2) https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/01/14/lee-luda-ai-chatbot-fa...

I've looked at various political debate subreddits over the past few years. But over time I considered how these spaces could be used nefariously. If I were a propagandist, I'd throw all of this content into some deep learning doohickey and let it generate sample responses for my army of trolls, and let them quickly edit the best samples to create more complicated arguments more quickly, until the bots are consistent enough to run amok as truly convincing persons.

Kinda like when after Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, there was a thought for a while that chess tournaments would include humans working with a computer model to help them make decisions. For some time a human working together with a computer to make decisions was superior against a human or computer alone -- this hasn't been the case for a while now as chess models advanced.

Apparently it's not running anymore, but https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/ is sort of apropos. It's an entirely bot-generated subreddit. You can still read through the old posts.

It got replaced by https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/, which is significantly more coherent.

maybe so, but I don't think this particular program does anything like AI. glancing at the code, it looks like it just pastes the full text of a reddit comment into a video template, using a different template for each unique commenter in the thread. it no more "does what a human might otherwise do" than how a sorting algorithm might emulate how I sort my socks.

It uses a neural network for sentiment analysis, so it can be classified as "using AI".