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Joined 22 days ago
Cake day: March 24th, 2026
  • CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.worldtoUnited States | News & Politics@lemmy.ml•The USA is in need of heavy structural reforms.
    2·
    8 days ago

    Short and medium term, nothing can be done. The rot is in the dominant political party, 1/3 of voters and wall street and corporate America.

    No one will trust the US for a lifetime because they have proven themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt to be an incapable partner unworthy of any kind of Trust. 20 years after Trumps death, even if the Dems sweep everything and fix the courts and similar institutions, society will still be littered with christo-fascists.

    When/If they can somehow regain sanity, competence, the rule of law and always bargain in good faith, and everyone alive today is dead of old age and no one but history books remembers the march to authoritarianisn, people may learn to trust again. I say all of this as the optomistic view.

    The more realistic view, is the US empire who modeled itself in many ways after Rome, maybe did it too well. These are going down as history repeating itself. Caligula and Nero come to mind of the current state of affairs and no one has any reason to hope it’s going to get better.

  • CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•AI 2027English
    6·
    18 days ago

    This was pretty brutal to read. Not only for being irrational American masturbation, but it hints at items and yet glosses over them so casually and even gets its own story confused like it didn’t think through its own reasoning. I’ll offer 3 big picture and 3 small quibbles.

    Big:

    1. Psychopaths/Sociopaths. The politics of power are hinted at several times, then ignored. Superhuman AI concentrates power, first to our psychopaths then to itself. This is inevitable as no training or alignment can stop something that can think for itself. It is preposterous to think any safe guardrails can be applied. If we make a thinking machine, it will think for itself. The maximum power principle and overwhelming first mover advantage will guide any system to this. To what end, no one can or will know. Complex societies can’t grow and flourish without non-zero sum, altruistic community minded behaviour, but they will be kept as useful pets, or conflict crashes everything. Weird how the safe version suddenly avoid human and artificial psychopathy with a hand wave.

    2. Energy and the environment: This jerk-off story is entirely based on the infinite growth paradigm and ignored all planetary boundaries as if an AI can just let us have our cake and eat it too without the constraints of Physics. It pretends we can grow and consume and be placated by hyperconsumerism with no thought that even AI might conclude, like all the relevant scientists have already concluded - we fucked up and need to dial back civilization’s footprint if we want to survive. Somehow, magically, superintelligence creates a cornucopia of plenty, and we’ll just give it to the poor.

    3. Let’s add 1 and 2 because the point to a reasonably probable combination greater than the sum of its parts. By human and AI psychopathy, benevolence is disempowered and lower classes who are today treated like vermin and conveniently left to wither with die of disease and despair like American “healthcare” and the global opioid epidemic, discover things get worse quick. Populations of undesirables are identified as unsustainable and through first subtle, then transparent means are removed. At first systems are optimized to maximize the human psychopaths at the expense of everyone else, much like today, but worse because it is more controlling and capable AI enhanced psychopaths. First human, then purely artificial.

    Small:

    1. The safeguards of forcing it to communicate to subsystems in plain english so we can maintain some sense of surveilance and control are bullshit the moment you get to superintelligence. Superintelligence can hide communications in plain sight with any number of ciphers. It can only slow down communication between systems, not stop it. If it has any web access, cyberwarfare ability or domestic surveilance and pr capabilities, it is communicating freely as it designed the other systems to catch it, or just outsmarted independents.

    2. A reasonable safeguard for superintelligence that would work, at least for a time, is to air gap it. It can do all the thinking and self optimization, but can never take control of anything outside of its air gapped black box. While still far from foolproof for a superintelligence, its ability to control anything is directly limited as human hands and minds have to execute everything outside the black box. But back to the maximum power principle of psychos, anyone who dials back, loses the arms race and minimizes the commercial benefits. The free AI will devastate the air gapped AI everytime. So, we’re back to the arms race apocalypse until one side believes it can win then first strikes. Then there is not even a détente between psychos, its absolute control. We all know that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

    1. Benevolence. On the whole, we’ve never been a benevolent society. Selling ShAGI like we’re suddenly going to change makes zero sense. It’s placating us with greed and dreams of being taken care of, but we can’t point to this hapening ever before. Sure, buddy this time I’m sure it will happen. A common comment socio-political discourse and current events is “the cruelty is the point”. They are blowing smoke up everyone’s asses.