An AI Company Just Fired Someone for Endorsing Human Extinction | Hacker News Reader

An AI Company Just Fired Someone for Endorsing Human Extinction

realtimetechpocalypse.com

What people often get wrong (this was xAI), when Musk talks about "humanity" and "Mars" that needs to survive and not go extinct, he means him and his many (dozens? hundreds?) of children, not you and me. Many people seem to misunderstand Mr. Musk there.

I'm not so sure. He's smart enough not to risk his life on a certainly doomed mission. He's already realized that a realistic Mars colony isn't going to happen in his lifetime, which is probably what triggered him to start spiraling. Depending on how things unfold, he might try to con some of his children into going, though.

Without major breakthroughs, a Mars colony isn’t going to happen, period.

And these breakthroughs are by no means guaranteed. Remember, we still don’t have flying skateboards, despite all the technological progress since Back to the Future came out.

What’s stopping us is physics itself, not lack of sufficiently complex technology.

What is the key major breakthrough (vs incremental technology refinement) needed in your opinion? Serious question.

1) Orders of magnitude cheaper, faster and more reliable travel in both directions.

2) Ability to recreate Earth-like conditions including gravity, atmosphere, sunshine, farming and raising livestock on a massive scale (hundreds of square kilometers) on Mars.

3) Ability to create adequate conditions for the transport phase.

4) Ability to justify the investment (most issues on earth solved, remember opportunity cost).

Take a look at "A City on Mars" https://www.acityonmars.com/ for a detailed analysis and a pretty entertaining book!

I agree, I was just being cowardly and insulating myself from "you can't be sure it'll never happen" comments.

In the far enough future, and assuming we escape a technological collapse due to climate change or world war, something like a large base housing hundreds of people at a time seems possible. It could be built autonomously by reasonably intelligent robots, which isn't that much of a stretch from the tech we're converging on today.

But a true colony, with long term residents having and raising children, is essentially a fantasy at this point.

Source?

I’ve met tons of people who are pro-extinction even if they don’t acknowledge it that way. The “global warming means I can’t have kids” people I’ve met numerous times. I guess we just need to all die so a planet full of unfeeling matter can decrease a few degrees (?)

I'm always surprised by this attitude - just because one person doesn't want children, doesn't mean that the world population isn't at its peak and growing.

Extinction of the species while the species has 8.2 billion specimen seems like the most illogical thing to be woried about. If you have a full fridge of food and don't want to go grocery shoping, it doesn't make you pro-starvation.

If the population drops, and there's suddenly more space and resources available, people will want children again.

That is one way to apply the most extreme label to something that may not fit the mold.

We can see the beginning of the end of humans now. "Peak baby" worldwide was in 2013. Essentially all of the developed world has a birth rate below replacement rate.[1] This could just be a slow phaseout of humans over the next century as AIs take over.

Milton Friedman's position that the sole purpose of the corporation is to maximize shareholder value is now accepted economic wisdom in the US.[1] So, once AIs get better at running businesses than humans, investment decisions will put AIs in charge. It's the free market in action.

Next big milestone to watch for: first big company with an AI in charge and outperforming competitors. This outcome is inherent in capitalism.

[1] https://desapublications.un.org/publications/world-populatio...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

100% concur

Thats what we’re doing

Conways law always wins

How would you know that human population will go down to zero rather than stabilise at a lower point or start to grow back after a period of decline? All projections into the future are, of course, just hypotheses but "people will have children as the vast majority of them are biologically hardwired to do" strikes me as a lot more likely than all of humanity just deciding not to keep having children.

I thought of A-GI as a motivation-free program that can turn paperclip-maximizer. Should an AGI necessarily "want" something?

So the "worthy successor" of people are basically cucks for AI?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com