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Comment by sshine | Hacker News Reader

Future dystopia:

Our systems are offline, and we don’t know what to do. Typically when we have a problem, we ask the system how to solve it, but it says it’s unavailable. We have tried asking each other, but nobody knows what to ask exactly.

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Hopefully we'll have more than one company who can supply us with AGI. We can just ask another AGI to fix the downed AGI.

That’s one way to define hope.

Or we could trust that the AGI intended for the system to be down.

And now, on to heating our dinner with friction.

Time to rewatch all the TOS episodes where Captain Kirk turns off the AI/mainframe.

Except for the sexy ones, he tries to turn those on.

“Have you any idea how it feels to be a Fembot living in a Manbot's Manputer's world?”

It's a winner-takes-all market.

The winner gets all the computational resources, gets more money, and repeat.

I assume if one company is close, there are many who will also be close to AGI. Computers move fast but humans controlling are slow.

Which is why AGI will likely be the end of us.

It kind of already happens to devs when Jira or GitHub goes down. These tools are part of the core process of software delivery for many dev teams.

When the forklift breaks, you can't load the truck.

The JIRA example is a funny one. It’s like a workshop with a broken clipboard. Imagine not ordering a replacement one because there’s no task (written on said clipboard) to order a replacement.

I can easily imagine this.

I have to have a piece of paper on my desk in front of my computer.

I write my priorities there. If I don't, I find it extremely hard to concentrate on or prioritise anything.

What's problematic about depending on Jira this way is:

When Jira is down, you can't go to your supplies stash and get another Jira.

Programmers can work when the office Internet or GitHub is down, because git is decentralised.

Managers don't seem to factor in that kind of risk when they subscribe to a critical tool into the cloud.

Because how often is the internet down?

If you’re in an office you’re absolutely supposed to be getting multiple upstream connections.

The local internet connection is a necessary but not sufficient part of accessing any hosted service. More importantly, the service itself has to be online.

Most of these SaaS services have enough availability to practically not be a problem.

In the last year, if I accumulate all service outages at GitHub and at my office’s ISP, I think GitHub was out of reach for more than a couple of hours five times.

GitHub is an anomaly tbh.

GitHub has a satisfying uptime, compared.

Most incidents were related to local Internet.

Regardless, I didn't take a break until GitHub came back.

I shouldn't have to take a break from planning just because Jira is down.

In the future we'll all just be unreliable sparse caches of the AIs

A variation of this is exposed brilliantly in the South Park episode "You call the handyman". Gave me some solace.

Solution: drink coffee

Your coffee machine uses AI to continually enhance your coffee experience based on the mineral contents of the water, the specific beans being used, your personal tastes and various other dynamic factors.

It also doesn't work if you're offline.

Works every time!

Edit: apparently not based on the sibling comment.

I mean, that's akin to proposing a situation where a power plant is it's own backup power plant. I or any human can't personally generate electricity when the system fails, but if I fail to design the system in such a way that something else will be capable of handling the failure with reasonably high reliability, I probably should not be designing systems.

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