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Comment by SoStupid | Hacker News Reader

The wording alone is just so Idiocracy.

What our descendants will think when they look back on this time period.

They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living, they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others.

They wondered whether or not a word calculator was the antichrist. They assembled in the highest courts of the day and involved the most brilliant minds to discuss whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon.

They shunned any creative or productive endeavor which dared to automate tedium or build on the works of the public domain (lowercase)…

for any such indulgence had become a great sin in Eden, a forbidden fruit that must never be obtained by the Adam, so that he may not become as we are!

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>whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon.

It's important to make sure it in fact doesn't, otherwise there is nobody to throw a shade on our time capsule having the benefit of hindsight

If we can usually raise a human to be a good person that wouldn't do genocide I'm sure we can raise an AI, especially since we have direct access to its brain and many, many retries.

That's a big if actually.

Do you feel like a significant number of humans would commit genocide if given the tools?

Well, it's not really that hard to imagine, especially if we allow for influence from an insistent and charismatic individual.

It's not about tools, it's about the framing. Given certain events happening (or believed to happen) and being framed in us vs them, genocidal behavior emerges quite often. Then of course people who do it also say they act in self-defence, were provoked, it isn't really a genocide and it was deserved if it was.

With both Christianity and Buddhism explicitly calling this for the last 2k years and people who say they are believers still proudly doing so, no, I don't think we can teach people to not genocide. Charismatic individuals aren't even that important, but they are useful to put the blame on someone personally, otherwise the punishment for genocide would be more genocide.

> whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon

Shockingly little linear algebra is required to manufacture the weapons that will probably bring about Armageddon. We've had them for damn near a century. It would be hilarious if these latest games with linear algebra were the impetus to make us actually use them at scale.

If any alien is picking up the text we are generating they must conclude that people in 2026 spend most of their time at the library reading philosophy and having these salons of enlightened reasoned debate if they are so worried about the atrophy of their thinking by LLMs. They don't send electronic communication at the salons or library and are really concerned when they get out with the loss of the culture and thinking they currently have. That is how they are explaining the hysteria they see in the text.

They certainly would never guess that the text is being generated by people who mostly spend their time sending and receiving text/video of unthinking, brain rotting, bullshit all day and night.

> They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living, they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others.

What are you talking about? Those are absolutely issues that are being worked on right here, right now. This framing is obviously false.

The large scale capital allocation of our society (I.e. the decisions about what will get done) are not putting many resources into those.

But that does not represent "we" nor "humanity". Those decisions are made by rather small group of super rich sociopaths.

I mean masses also do bad decisions. But, they specifically do not get to do capital allocation decisions.

Asking for a friend - how much resources are being spent on data center buildouts vs helping out society at large?

> They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living

The latter is a matter of policy and AI is not needed for that.

I hate this framing. Nickname checks out.

I sort of agree with you... The trouble is your logic is trivially obviously nonsense.

"Word calculator", "linear algebra"... This is just a variation on it's just a stochastic parrot / it's just a next token predictor.

The implication is that because it is "just" this simple-sounding thing, it can't be a complex thing! Except we know empirically that that doesn't hold. What are humans if not "just" next action predictors, "just" a collection of simple atoms, "just" electrical impulses? Yet clearly we are more than the sum of our parts. There no reason to believe dirty water can be more than the sum of its parts but weird sand can't.

> trivially obviously nonsense

I read it in that high pitched British accent that goes up into falsetto

I agree, eventually, but LLMs aren’t there quite yet. There are what, maybe 10 million distinct agents in the wild today? 100 million or a billion if we’re being charitable.

At the time being, the vast vast majority of those agents are all trained on the same or similar training set (the Internet and books). Which makes them mostly all the same. Vastly less diverse than the way one complex lifeform hatches out of the egg vs another.

So 1 billion mostly redundant agents at most. Well there are 40 quadrillion ants on the planet and 5 trillion are born every day. Each one its own “agent” , ingesting different inputs and being its own complex sum greater than its parts.

And that’s just ants.

They aren't even close to there. There isn't a shred of intelligence in an LLM, let alone sentience.

But understanding that requires reading the code or writing that it spits out rather than having yet another LLM do it for you.

> They weren’t trying to solve aging or bring everyone to the highest standard of living,

There are still people working on medicine, social issues, biology and so on and so forth. People are trying to do these, despite concerted efforts from the ai companies and from the right wings ideologues trying to stop them.

> they didn’t care to connect the world, explore it, and find others.

Then again, people who claimed to be connecting world intentionally harmed real people and even made themselves complicit in genocide. Yes, I am talking about Facebook. And the ones framing themselves as wanna by exploratory are sociopath billionaires who don't care about damage to real people they cause, even glee it it.

> They assembled in the highest courts of the day and involved the most brilliant minds to discuss whether or not linear algebra will bring about Armageddon.

Citation needed. Most brilliant minds do not discuss that. Minds drunk on hype do.

> They shunned any creative or productive endeavor which dared to automate tedium or build on the works of the public domain (lowercase)

Again, I do not know what you are talking about here. We have both visual artists and musical artists. People create and share their creations. Again, despite ai-boosters trying to demotivate them and convince them it is pointless, people are still creative.

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