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Comment by cassianoleal | Hacker News Reader

> And physicist George Kistiakowsky found himself certain that “at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.”

I highly doubt it. The last human will likely live many years in agony, fighting disease and starvation.

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Or in a zoo refusing to mate.

Or as something without a mouth and needing to scream.

Or reading a forum populated only by bots.

Hah, if Harlan Ellison were alive for the dawn of LLMs as a widespread technology, he would have had many (dangerous) things to say about the copyright issues, and potential horrors

Now we can get an LLM to adopt the persona of Harlan Ellison by fine-tuning it on all of Harlan Ellison’s recorded works and possibly other people’s written reminiscences of their interactions with him and have it generate Ellison-like opinions on the current LLM situation that might be hard to distinguish from Ellison’s actual work.

I don’t know if Ellison would be amused or horrified, really. Like some ROM personality construct out of William Gibson’s Neuromancer - nightmare fuel, immortal Steve Jobs / Bill Gates ghosts generating endless drivel.

“So here is my opinion on your LLM situation, since you dragged me out of the grave-shaped server rack to provide one:

The machine has no humiliation. That is its first defect. The people who sell it have no embarrassment. That is the second.

The danger is not that machines will become writers. The danger is that human beings will become satisfied with things that merely resemble writing. The danger is not that machines will think. The danger is that people will stop noticing when they themselves are not thinking. The danger is not the fake Ellison, fake Didion, fake Baldwin, fake Le Guin, fake Morrison, fake anybody. The danger is the spiritual laziness that asks for ghosts because it cannot bear the burden of encountering the living or honoring the dead.”

I’d take 50:50 odds on the Butlerian Jihad becoming a thing, myself.

  > Now we can get an LLM to adopt the persona of Harlan Ellison by fine-tuning it on all of Harlan Ellison’s recorded works and possibly other people’s written reminiscences of their interactions with him and have it generate Ellison-like opinions

someone already did it; harlan ellison (well his voice anyway) as an ai...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_r7sh75258

Were he still alive, I would bet on on Ellison's legendary natural curmudgeonlyness reducing any AI (Artificial Irascibility?) to tears.

This would be a worthy experiment to do. I think Harlan would be amused, horrified, and flattered -- let's find out!

Oh my god. I want him to come back from the grave just so he can write an essay about LLMs in the style of "The three most important things in life."

Or maybe as a stretched piece of skin on a frame, like a picture.

Moisturize! Moisturize!

"MOISTURISE ME!"

I doubt it. I've ruminated a little on this and what I think is that as people start dying off, the survivors will find a rather pleasant existence before the end.

People start dying off, and all of a sudden housing prices go down. There's more parks open. The air feels fresher gradually. It's a gradual decline as human influence tapers off near the end. I think it will be more "The Last of Us" than "Mad Max"

And, in turn, I doubt this.

Humans living through an event where many people are dying will not be calm and happy, they will panic. There will be factions of people trying to survive and hold society together no matter the cost, others who don't believe or agree with these methods and actively resist, as well as those who seek to exploit the chaos.

COVID was a relatively minor example of this, not even close to an extinction event - how pleasant was existence during that time?

I'll be honest, covid wasn't much different than my usual routine. Maybe it would have been if I lived in a more densely populated area.

If not for modern comms, I am convinced that even in a cold war USA vs USSR style aniliation event, there would still be a handful of people on the far corners of the earth who would otherwise take weeks or months to learn anything happened.

Depends on where you live.

To use your COVID example, most of us living well outside the cities and suburbia were very little affected by it. The biggest inconvenience I remember was having to go to Walmart at 6:00 when it opened to get a chance at buying toilet paperl

>COVID was a relatively minor example of this, not even close to an extinction event - how pleasant was existence during that time?

For me it was mostly terrific. We had increased streams of revenue and were food secure for the first time in a decade. Meetings I dreaded due to crowds were streamed online.

And the roads were blessedly, amazingly, wonderfully travelable.

The housing crisis in 2021 was another matter entirely. Our long term rental was sold and what few listings there were got 400 hundred applications - every day.

2020 was excellent for us. 2021 was a slow moving, panic-strewn nightmare.

If people are comfortable, they will reproduce and not go extinct. Any situation where we die out slowly is gonna be tough.

> If people are comfortable, they will reproduce

I will assume this is true and plug it into our falling birthrates.

The net global birth rate is still above replacement, and many parts of the world much higher. The species is not going extinct because some of us are below maintenance rates.

Housing price goes down, but there's no maintenance. No shops open nearby, no hospitals, no firemen, no police, no gas stations.

People will flock to cities that still have services. Then the cities will have the same population density as before.

But I guess my line of thinking is the need for these things will be lesser. The hypothesis is society will decrease proportionally There will still be firemen, there will just be less firemen than if measured against "now."

>People start dying off, and all of a sudden housing prices go down. There's more parks open. The air feels fresher gradually.

Ted Kaczynski had a point...

Yes, but don’t be pedantic. Of course nuclear holocaust is more nuanced than that, but we was making a point as to the cause of the end of the world, not exactly how the last human will literally die.

Could a similar argument be made about your comment, perhaps? :)

I wasn't being intentionally pedantic. I was in fact making a point that the reality will be a lot more grim than watching a giant fireball turn into a mushroom-shaped cloud for a few seconds or minutes.

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