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Comment by ctoth | Hacker News Reader

Anybody else get the sense that we're just totally frickin doomed? Even if Yudkowsky is off about AGI (which is a big maybe!) in what possible world will this technology be used to make our individual lives better (assuming you're not a FAIR researcher?)

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In theory, this could be used to create AI agents that can process visual/audio information in a way that's more similar to humans. It could lead to household robots or advanced conversational interfaces. or whatever the hell the metaverse is.

It's just bunch of GPUs. It could be used for anything people can imagine, good or bad

Go back in time and tell people about the technical power we have in 2022. Then tell them to imagine what we do with it. And finally explain to them that the vast majority of it is used to sell us goods and services we mostly don't need.

> It could lead to household robots or advanced conversational interfaces.

Yes, but anything that could do that, will be used for military robots and context-aware ubiquitous comms surveillance.

> It's just bunch of GPUs. It could be used for anything people can imagine, good or bad

And nuclear power can be used for good or ill, too. But when the ills grow big enough, it's still fair to worry about proliferation and possible end-of-civilization events. It's unhelpful to reassure someone building a bomb bunker "Don't worry, nuclear power is just a tool, it can be used for good OR for bad".

> create AI agents that can process visual/audio information in a way that's more similar to humans

Which, of course, is great for accessibility.

Have you ever heard of AlphaFold?

[0]: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-...

Or RosettaFold

https://github.com/RosettaCommons/RoseTTAFold

More people trapped inside on the metaverse = smaller crowds at outdoor recreation areas?

That would be a win-win for everyone.

Why?

VR enjoyers can enjoy VR, reality enjoyers can enjoy reality.

Vienna, where I am living, is completely overrun by people. Public spaces and transport at peak hours have become a mess in the last years. The first lockdown showed how beautiful the city can be if everyone stays home.

I think the real world will become populated with android avatars which are controlled by people from their VR headsets.

So you’ll have small human crowds but loads of anonymous avatar androids taking all the good fishing spots, riding the trails backwards, etc.

I’m joking hopefully

Yep, this will be used for precision tracking and context categorization. And of course, to more deeply understand human motivators and make platforms even more addictive to us. This will have minimal benefits to the working class and all the benefit to Meta and their clients.

I fear the ammount of human information this AI is going to be free to analyze from Facebook and what it will deduce about us and then how Meta will use it to generate capital.

Yes, I think we're in trouble. Walked over to friends' house over the weekend. It was a very nice, sunny weekend. Saw them through the window with their goggles on, rang the doorbell. They came to the door and I said, look how nice and sunny it it, we should go for a walk and they were like "oh, we had no idea it was so nice out because we were in Meta with our goggles on".

I don't see how this is a bad thing. What's wrong with preferring the metaverse to their sunny neighborhood? Honestly the matrix seems like the end game here and I'm all for it. Then it can be a sunny day in the neighborhood every day. The doom comes from the matrix being built by people who either don't have our best interests in mind, or aren't competent enough to build the system to correctly act in our best interests.

vitamin d deficiency

> The doom comes from the matrix being built by people who either don't have our best interests in mind ...

You mean like Zuckerberg and FB?

What makes you believe that Mark "I can't believe those dumb fucks trust me" Zuckerberg doesn't have our best interests in mind?

Just a hunch...

Probably. I'm going to set up all my data so that, anytime it's parsed by Facebook, there'll be a middle-finger waiting for their supercomputer with just two words: "Process this".

biology is hard, perhaps too complex for human brains to make a decent model of it. AI can solve it and try to explain it to us (if it pleases her)

We're not all doomed, just the NPC's who embrace it.

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