EDIT: I know that most people think it's unlikely and I can't give any direct evidence for it. Does that mean it's not welcome to say on hacker news?
Few days ago I came across this bone chilling AI generated Metal Gear Solid 2 meme with Hideo Kojima characters talking about how the purpose of this technology is to make it impossible to tell what's real or fake, leading directly to regulation of information networks with identity verification so that all information and thought can be traced to their sources, with the government of course becoming the sole arbiter of truth. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this turned into reality.
Wait, wasn't this just the thesis statement of Metal Gear Solid 2?
Death Stranding also explores ideas of what it means to find connection in a disconnected world that I think are relevant today (case in point, an article about social disconnection[1] is on the front page of HN as I write this comment)
I think those games are underrated works of speculative fiction relative to how much airtime books like The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Ready Player One get in conversations about nascent technology.
You don't have to speculate much. Facebook and Twitter's recommendation algorithms are doing that fairly well already.
My TLDR is, this AI character says the line "Perhaps the day will come when conversing with AIs, too, is considered perfectly normal."
>Blade Wolf: I may analyze orders, but I may not disobey them. Should I disobey a direct order, my memory would be wiped. I must destroy you.
>Raiden: What would an AI know about freedom…
Later on, after you've freed him, there's a lot more. Really, I think it's worth replaying these games at this moment in time to see the commentary firsthand.
>Raiden: Let me ask you something: What do you think you're doing here? I mean, why are you working with me?
>Blade Wolf: Because I choose to. I owe a debt, and I wish to repay it.
>Raiden: A debt, huh...? How...human of you.
>Wolf: I contest that statement. Many humans possess little or no sense of obligation at all. And many are entirely willing to trample their fellow man for personal gain.
That conversation probably comments more on the nature of humanity than of AI, but some of the others rhyme with the present in a rather intriguing way. Like when Raiden asks Wolf if he recognizes someone, and Wolf is unsure.
>Wolf: I have no "database," Raiden. The symbol grounding capabilities or my neuro-AI allow me to identify faces in only the vaguest of terms. I can judge whether "I think I may have seen him before," but I do not have the accuracy of a database.
>Raiden: That's ridiculous. You're an AI...
>Wolf: An AI modeled after the human brain, and thus as flexible and occasionally vague as any human's. Of this man, however, I have no recollection. I do not believe I have encountered him before...Most likely.
That conversation felt like the complaints people on this board voice about GPT!
> I still have relatively little communication experience with humans. My ability to read emotions not explicitly expressed by speech is lacking.
>An AI never lies....I have yet to see evidence to the contrary...But indeed, perhaps "never lies" would be an overstatement.
>An optical neuro-AI is fundamentally similar to an actual human brain. Whether they lie or not is another question, but certainly they are capable of incorrect statements.
Or the discussion about LLM...er, I mean neuro-AI driven synthetic pets, which sound like Replika in a robot dog:
>Wolf: Other AIs as conversant as I are a possibility, yes. Robotic pets with neuro-AIs are already on the market. And I understand research and development are underway to create a model capable of conversation. Do not be surprised if such a pet becomes available before too long.
>Raiden: (Hmm) If that becomes commonplace...Hard to imagine.
>Wolf: Is it? The human race has willingly embraced all of its other inventions so far. Steam engines, electricity, the Internet, cyborgs...Perhaps the day will come when conversing with AIs, too, is considered perfectly normal.
Preach it!
It will be a continuation though.
The uppermost echelons of society have waged information warfare since the dawn of modern PR in the beginning of the 20'th century. Lots of theory on this have apparently been memoryholed, but it's easy to just start with the genealogy around Edward Bernais and the plutocracy and robber baron families still existing in the interwar period.
The masses don't really think about or realise that manufactured circus and foreverwars have been going on for a hundred years while a microscopic elite that controls the media and various organs in the state have been siphoning most wealth towards themselves in a increasingly dense cloud of smoke, while promoting rebranded ideologies for the genpop and systems of control that has become advanced cybernetic systems that steer the flow of information 100% from top to bottom.
The sad thing is that you could deduce this in the noise if you visited the last remnants of actual research journalism on the internet, but that will end now.
So where is one going to get to know the powerstructures of the world? Old physical libraries only, some dude on the corner, some "crazy guy" with a harddisk from before AI took over.
From my middle-of-the-road perspective, everyone is trying to change how everyone else thinks, from the small insignificant details to a cult-like brainwash. Even here and now both you and I are trying to change each others and everyone who reads this's mind.
I see so much calling out of "elites" with a negative connotation, yet anyone can post anything, and everyone can ignore it. Is it general paranoia? Do you know who these people are? How are they special/different, and why should we be scared of them?
It's a testament to the absurd amount of philanthropic whitewashing, PR and media control these billionaries hold.
"Elites" have conspired to exploit the masses throughout 5000 years of civilisation, it's simply a fact of history.
It's almost physically impossible to comprehend the power a group of billionaires has to pull and push issues, narratives, law, war and discourse in general, especially when the masses have zero organisation as a counterweight, and when numbers like "trillion" just doesn't register in any meaningful way in regular people.
Actual American billionaires lose half their fortunes in divorces (Gates and Bezos), are retired and don't need to care about controlling any media (…Gates and Bezos), or spend all day posting on Twitter (Musk, who is currently under the Rasputin-like hold of a retired postal worker named "catturd2".) They only have 24 hours a day and few of them seem to be secretly manipulating the media.
I mean, Murdoch does manipulate the media, but not secretly. It's completely obvious he's doing it! And nobody is tricked by it, they happily participate.
Elites compete with each other. They don’t sing kumbaya and cooperatively share the keys to power.
There is very little social mobility, wealth transfers very solidly between generations at the absolute top and organisation around PR and Politics is tightly integrated in this class.
Off course you can always fall from grace, but that does not in any way diminish the collective power of this class. That's why it's called a class and not a "person" or one singular family or group of people that clownish conspiracy theories would have you believe.
A good primer to the historical context could be this new book from Cambridge: "The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity".
Elites have always formed tightly knit clubs that most couldn't get into.
This is not a reductive theory, it's based on solid academic research on wealth transfer and academic books like the one above.
It's a almost like a biological or physical property of advanced civilizations - like social patterns seen emerging in larger groups of monkeys, or a precursor to the labour divisions seen in ant hives - there's clear distinctions set fourth for an individual at birth or because of location or family, and no amount of ideology is able to change this unless very, very lucky - this is mirrored in the social mobility data.
I see a direct mirroring in today's corporations. If you join a big company, it's because you don't want to risk branching out on your own. You exchange lots of potential money for a steady paycheck, and you don't have to worry about things like finding customers, figuring out taxes, etc.
It's clear that humans need some sort of hierarchy, and I just don't see why we should be frightened of the people whose skill is organization/mediation between people. I surely don't want to play the power game with them, and I don't think it's because of their brainwashing?
Why did you pick that as your starting point? To make things seem like a linear worsening? But even wealth inequality, which you talk about at length, got better before getting worse again during that time frame in the US... so I'm having trouble following the claim.
The New Deal along with social democracy in europe was a bargaining deal against the revolutionary forces existing at the time. After this was stamped out the Gini coefficient started to rise when the masses had no alternatives and global trade and outsourcing increasingly obscurred the falling realwages.
I don't believe anyone needed a conspiracy to try to make it impossible to tell what's real or fake, people have been trying to use technology to do that for decades (if not centuries) all on their own.
In my country politicians are talking about regulating social media and the internet due to "fake news". They even created a government propaganda agency to "combat misinformation online", basically people paid to defend the government against information warfare. It's way too real.
Conspiracies rely on coordination, and a counterproductive view that makes no difference in how we got to the outcome.
Will Hurd joined the board of OpenAI in May 2021. Mr. Hurd, among other things, was a documented former CIA clandestine officer for nearly nine years. He was a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during his tenure as a U.S. Rep replacing Mike Pompeo.
He is also a Managing Director of Allen & Co. who's Chairman is George Tenent the former director of the CIA. Further, Mr. Hurd is a member of the board of trustees of In-Q-Tel the primary external investment arm of the CIA and the broader US Intelligence Community.
1. https://openai.com/blog/will-hurd-joins
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Hurd
Imagine some visiting this website know the $10,000,000,000 from Microsoft is actually some kind of dark money from the pentagon to fund this new Manhattan project. Project code name Sydney.
Would be interested to see your math and assumptions behind this conclusion.
There’s no way that their plans to monetize this don’t include the defense/natsec industry
Sorry but where's your maths for this?
They are operating just like every other VC-backed startup in history.
Of course I don't necessarily believe any of that but it can be fun to think about.
https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/16405144035935109...
Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO): "Oh yes, regular contact."
Up to you to decide to what extent of government that is.
Since the topic is OpenAI, GPT-4, I'll say that I assume this tech has been around and available to a select few for years before it became mainstream. I believe it has been used to push narratives and ideas across popular internet sites and apps, creating the impression that these ideas are popular and held by the majority (not just political ideas).
The US military has shown time and time again their obsession with weaponized AI, and now OpenAI has been fully consumed by Microsoft, and is now stating how building open source AI tools was a huge mistake. There now seem to be more paths than ever towards a terminator-esque militarized robot apocalypse.
Most players in the space are still doing a lot of great open source work, so I'm still hopeful for a future where technological disparity is kept to a minimum, but it makes me really really nervous seeing how quickly a major player in the space, and a leader in many ways, has suddenly flipped to the dark side and has stopped contributing back to the community.
While I can't know what you say is true for sure, given the military's history with things like the internet, GPS, and encryption, I would not be surprised
I know that most people think it's unlikely and I can't give any direct evidence for it. Does that mean it's not welcome to say on hacker news?
Some commenters here seem to immediately focus on the potential negative effects, abuse by the military industry or the powers that be, manipulation and disinformation.
I’m personally still in awe that we are collectively witnessing the birth of a piece of technology which understands and creates and stand at the dawn of a potentially profoundly different era. I truly believe that this is the printing press once again and we are here, alive. We are living the revolution. Imagine all the positive possibilities: a word where kids have access to infinitely patient and benevolent teachers who can explain the sum of all knowledge, a world where readers can have books infinitely rewritten and modified in a subtle blurring of producing and consuming content, a world where machine can help you turn what you imagine into real shareable pictures. ChatGPT is not yet the best story teller ever but it’s already so fun I feel like a kid. I can’t stop wondering where things are going to be in a decade.
Frighteningly I guess both visions can be equally true.
> Griffith was arrested in 2019, and in 2021 pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate U.S. laws relating to money laundering using cryptocurrency and sanctions related to North Korea.[5] On April 12, 2022, Griffith was sentenced to 63 months imprisonment for assisting North Korea with evading sanctions and is currently in a federal low-security prison in Pennsylvania
Here's the article "He gave a Cryptocurrency talk in North Korea, the US arrested him"
The slides are (or were?) available. None of the content of his talk was secret or beyond what is published on the Bitcoin Wikipedia page.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/nyregion/north-korea-virg...
Edit: it's worth noting that no transaction took place.. he was arrested because the FBI told him not to go and he did anyway.
Is that assistance? It is just a basic statement of fact. Is wikipedia guilty of providing assistance to NK? They provide far more in depth "assistance" to anyone wanting to perform a Bitcoin transaction.
Bringing this back to my original comment, you can see why the federal government would restrict the flow of fundamental technical knowledge by virtue of this extreme case. No source code or application was shared, no secrets or privileged information, merely encyclopedic facts were deemed illegal to share.
Also if you were facing the indefinite assange treatment I imagine you would seek a plea deal as well..
...Yes? The fact that it's basic and they already know how to do it is irrelevant. The law isn't "it's okay to give them advice as long as the advice is sufficiently generic and obvious".
Wikipedia, and the sources where its content comes from, is not intended to help anybody specific. Flying to North Korea and holding a lecture there is firmly beyond the line where the US government starts to care because it demonstrates clear intent. Especially since during the Q&A and other activities other information not available to the public could have been discussed. And even if there was no secret sauce involved, an expert's opinion can still save the North Koreans a lot of time and money when pursuing their goals.
Also North Korea is a strange hill to die on. It's a brutal dictatorship which represses their own people and threatens to reign nuclear hell on their neighbours and the US. There's a very clear moral line that it's wrong to help them to launder money and evade sanctions, even if it weren't illegal.
This is practically the definition of a grey area, not a clear moral line.
> It's a brutal dictatorship which represses their own people and threatens to reign nuclear hell on their neighbours and the US.
No, North Korea is a group of 25 million people, most of whom are just regular people like you and me.
They are led by a brutal dictatorship but sanctions affect everyone in NK, not just the leadership.
Economic warfare is still warfare and not morally clear at all.
And has the US has not repressed its people and threatened its neighbors? Has not been brutal?