[HN Gopher] Remarks on AI from NZ
___________________________________________________________________
Remarks on AI from NZ
Author : zdw
Score : 97 points
Date : 2025-05-16 03:54 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nealstephenson.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nealstephenson.substack.com)
| swyx wrote:
| > If AIs are all they're cracked up to be by their most fervent
| believers, this seems like a possible model for where humans
| might end up: not just subsisting, but thriving, on byproducts
| produced and discarded in microscopic quantities as part of the
| routine operations of infinitely smarter and more powerful AIs.
|
| i think this kind of future is closer to 500 years out than 50
| years. the eye mites are self sufficient. ai's right now rely on
| immense amounts of human effort to keep them "alive" and they
| wont be "self sufficient" in energy and hardware until we not
| just allow it, but basically work very hard to make it happen.
| abeppu wrote:
| > It hasn't always been a cakewalk, but we've been able to
| establish a stable position in the ecosystem despite sharing it
| with all of these different kinds of intelligences.
|
| To me, the things that he avoids mentioning in this
| understatement are pretty important:
|
| - "stable position" seems to sweep a lot under the rug when one
| considers the scope of ecosystem destruction and
| species/biodiversity loss
|
| - whatever "sharing" exists is entirely on our terms, and most of
| the remaining wild places on the planet are just not suitable for
| agriculture or industry
|
| - so the range of things can could be considered "stable" and
| "sharing" must be quite broad, and includes many arrangements
| which sound pretty bad for many kinds of intelligences, even if
| they aren't the kind of intelligence that can understand the
| problems they face.
| vessenes wrote:
| By stable I think he might mean 'dominant'.
| gregoryl wrote:
| NZ is pretty unique, there is quite a lot of farmable land
| which is protected wilderness. There's a specific trust setup
| to help landowners convert property,
| https://qeiinationaltrust.org.nz/
|
| Imperfect, but definitely better than most!
| incoming1211 wrote:
| > there is quite a lot of farmable land
|
| This is not really true. ~80% of NZ's farmable agricultural
| land is in the south island. But ~60% of milk production is
| done in the north island.
| chubot wrote:
| Yeah totally, I have read that the total biomass of cows and
| dogs dwarfs that of say lions or elephants
|
| Because humans like eating beef, and they like having emotional
| support from dogs
|
| That seems to be true:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
|
| _Livestock make up 62% of the world's mammal biomass; humans
| account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%_
|
| https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/environment/weight-respons...
|
| _Wild land mammals weigh less than 10 percent of the combined
| weight of humans_
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2204892120
|
| I mean it is pretty obvious when you think that 10,000 years
| ago, the Americas had all sorts of large animals, as Africa
| still does to some extent
|
| And then when say the Europeans got here, those animals were
| mostly gone ... their "biomass" just collapsed
|
| ---
|
| Same thing with plants. There were zillions of kinds of plants
| all over the planet, but corn / wheat / potatoes are now an
| overwhelming biomass, because humans like to eat them.
|
| Michael Pollan also had a good description of this as our food
| supply changing from being photosynthesis-based to fossil-fuel-
| based
|
| Due to the Haber-Bosch process, invented in the early 1900's,
| to create nitrogen fertilizer
|
| Fertilizer is what feeds industrial corn and wheat ... So yeah
| the entire "metabolism" of the planet has been changed by
| humans
|
| And those plants live off of a different energy source now
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| >We may end up with at least one generation of people who are
| like the Eloi in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, in that they are
| mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they
| don't understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch
| were they to break down
|
| I don't think this can realistically happen unless all of the
| knowledge that brought us to that point was erased. Humans are
| also naturally curious and I think it's unlikely that no one
| tries to figure out how the machines work across an entire
| population, even if we had to start all the way down from 'what's
| a bit?' or 'what's a transistor?'.
|
| Even today, you can find youtube channels of people still
| interested in living a primitive life and learning those survival
| skills even though our modern society makes it useless for the
| vast majority of us. They don't do it full-time, of course, but
| they would have a better shot if they had to.
| tqi wrote:
| > Humans are also naturally curious and I think it's unlikely
| that no one tries to figure out how the machines work across an
| entire population
|
| Definitely agree with this. I do wonder if at some point, new
| technology will become sufficiently complex that the domain
| knowledge required to actually understand it end to end is too
| much for a human lifetime?
| arscan wrote:
| And for the curious, this current iteration of AI is an amazing
| teacher, and makes a world-class education much more
| accessible. I think (hope) this will offset any kind of over-
| intellectual dependence that others form on this technology.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >I don't think this can realistically happen
|
| I'd be far more worried about things in the biosciences and
| around antibiotic resistance. At our current usage it wouldn't
| be hard to develop some disease that requires high technology
| to produce medicine that keep us alive. Add in a little war
| taking out the few factories that do that, and increase the
| amount of injuries sustained things could quickly go sideways.
|
| A whole lot of our advanced technology is held in one or two
| places.
| msabalau wrote:
| Stephenson is using a evocative metaphor and a bit of hyperbole
| to make a point. To take him as meaning that literally everyone
| entire population is like the Eloi is to misread.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > Maybe a useful way to think about what it would be like to
| coexist in a world that includes intelligences that aren't human
| is to consider the fact that we've been doing exactly that for
| long as we've existed, because we live among animals.
|
| Another analogy that I like is about large institutions /
| corporations. They are, right now, kind of like AIs. Like Harari
| says in one of his books, Peugeot co. is an entity that we could
| call AI. It has goals, needs, wants and obviously intelligence,
| even if it's comprised by many thousands of individuals working
| on small parts of the company. But in aggregate it manifests
| intelligence to the world, it acts on the world and it reacts to
| the world.
|
| I'd take this a step forward and say that we might even have ASI
| already, in the US military complex. That "machine" is likely the
| most advanced conglomerate of tech and intelligence (pun
| intended) that the world has ever created. In aggregate it likely
| is "smarter" than any single human being in existence, and if it
| sets a goal it uses hundreds of thousands of human minds +
| billions of dollars of sensors, equipment and tech to accomplish
| that goal.
|
| We survived those kinds of entities, I think we'll be fine with
| whatever AI turns out to be. And if not, oh well, we had a good
| run.
| ddq wrote:
| Metal Gear Solid 2 makes this point about how "over the past
| 200 years, a kind of consciousness formed layer by layer in the
| crucible of the White House" through memetic evolution. The
| whole conversation was markedly prescient for 2001 but not
| appreciated at the time.
|
| https://youtu.be/eKl6WjfDqYA
| keybored wrote:
| I don't think it was "prescient" for 2001 because it was
| based on already-existing ideas. The same author that
| inspired The Matrix.
|
| But the "art" of MGS might be the memetic powerhouse of Hideo
| Kojima as the inventor of everything. A boss to surpass Big
| Boss himself.
| pona-a wrote:
| Did we survive these entities? By current projections, between
| 13.9% and 27.6% of all species would be likely to be extinct by
| 2070 [0]. The USA suffers an estimated 200,000 annual deaths
| associated with lacking health insurance [1]. Thanks to intense
| lobbying by private prisons, the US incarceration rate is 6
| times that of Canada, despite similar economic development [2].
|
| Sure, the human species is not yet on the brink of extinction,
| but we are already seeing an unprecedented fall in worldwide
| birth rates, which shows our social fabric itself is being
| pulled apart for paperclips. Changing the scale and magnitude
| to a hypothetical entity equivalent to a hundred copies of the
| generation's brightest minds with a pathological drive to
| maximize an arbitrary metric might only mean one of two things:
| either its fixation leads it to hacking its own reward
| mechanism, putting it in a perpetual comma while resisting
| termination, or it succeeds at doing the same on a planetary
| scale.
|
| [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.17125
|
| [1] https://healthjusticemonitor.org/2024/12/28/estimated-us-
| dea...
|
| [2] https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-
| lowest/prison_popul...
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > but we are already seeing an unprecedented fall in
| worldwide birth rates, which shows our social fabric itself
| is being pulled apart for paperclips
|
| People choose to have fewer kids as they get richer, it's not
| about living conditions like so many people like to claim,
| otherwise poor people wouldn't be having so many children.
| Even controlling for high living conditions, like in
| Scandinavia, people still choose to have fewer kids.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| In the general case, the entire species is an example of ASI.
|
| We're a collective intelligence. Individually we're pretty
| stupid, even when we're relatively intelligent. But we have
| created social systems which persist and amplify individual
| intelligence to raise collective ability.
|
| But this proto-ASI isn't sentient. It's not even particularly
| sane. It's extremely fragile, with numerous internal conflicts
| which keep kneecapping its potential. It keeps skirting
| suicidal ideation.
|
| Right now parts of it are going into reverse.
|
| The difference between where we are now and AI is that ASI
| could potentially automate and unify the accumulation of
| knowledge and intelligence, with more effective persistence,
| and without the internal conflicts.
|
| It's completely unknown if it would want to keep us around. We
| probably can't even imagine its thought processes. It would be
| so far outside our experience we have no way of predicting its
| abilities and choices.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Unless you have a truly bastardized definition of ASI then
| there is undoubtedly nothing close to it on earth. No
| corporation or military or government comes close to what ASI
| could be capable of.
|
| Any reasonably smart person can identify errors that
| Militaries, Governments and Corporations make ALL THE TIME. Do
| you really think a Chimp can identify the strategic errors
| Humans are making? Because that is where you would be in
| comparison to a real ASI. This is also the reason why small
| startups can and do displace massive supposedly superhuman ASI
| Corporations literally all the time.
|
| The reality of Human congregations is that they are cognitively
| bound by the handful of smartest people in the group and
| communication bound by email or in person communication speeds.
| ASI has no such limitations.
|
| >We survived those kinds of entities, I think we'll be fine
| with whatever AI turns out to be. And if not, oh well, we had a
| good run.
|
| This is dangerously wrong and disgustingly fatalistic.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| Putting aside questions of what is and isn't artificial, I
| think with the usual definitions "Is Microsoft a
| superintelligence" and "Can Microsoft build a
| superintelligence" are the same question.
| keeda wrote:
| Charles Stross has also made that point about corporations
| essentially being artificial intelligence entities:
|
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...
| keybored wrote:
| If there was anywhere to get the needs-wants-intelligence take
| on corporations, it would be this site.
|
| > We survived those kinds of entities, I think we'll be fine
|
| We just have climate change to worry about and massive
| inequality (we didn't "survive" it, the fuzzy little
| corporations with their precious goals-needs-wants are still
| there).
|
| But ultimately corporations are human inventions, they aren't
| an Other that has taken on a life of its own.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > We survived those kinds of entities
|
| Might want to wait just _a bit_ longer before confidently
| making this call.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| (Still chewing my way through this)
|
| Just an FYI: Neal Stephenson is the author of well-known books
| like Snow Crash, Anatheum (sp?), and Seveneves.
|
| Because I'm a huge fan, I'm planning on making my way to the end.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| > Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and
| society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every
| augmentation is also an amputation.
|
| Nice to see this because I drafted something about LLM and humans
| riffing on exactly the same McLuhan argument. Here it is:
|
| A large language model (LLM) is a new medium. Just like its
| predecessors--hypertext, television, film, radio, newspapers,
| books, speech--it is of obvious importance to the initiated. Just
| like its predecessors, the content of this new medium is its
| predecessors.
|
| > "The content of writing is speech, just as the content of the
| written word is the content of print." -- McLuhan
|
| The LLMs have swallowed webpages, books, newspapers, and journals
| --some X exabytes were combined into GPT-4 over a few months of
| training. The results are startling. Each new medium has a period
| of embarrassment, like a kid that's gotten into his mother's
| closet and is wearing her finest drawers as a hat. Nascent
| television borrowed from film and newspapers in an initially
| clumsy way, struggling to digest its parents and find its own
| language. It took television about 50 years to hit stride and go
| beyond film, but it got there. Shows like The Wire, The Sopranos,
| and Mad Men achieved something not replaceable by the movie or
| the novel. It's yet hard to say what exactly the medium of LLMs
| exactly is, but after five years I think it's clear that they are
| not books, they are not print, or speech, but something new,
| something unto themselves.
|
| We must understand them. McLuhan subtitled his seminal work of
| media literacy "the extensions of man", and probably the second
| most important idea in the book--besides the classic "medium is
| the message"--is that mediums are not additive to human society,
| but replacing, antipruritic, atrophying, _prosthetic_. With my
| Airpods in my ears I can hear the voices of those thousands of
| miles away, those asleep, those _dead_. But I do not hear the
| birds on my street. Only two years or so into my daily
| relationship with the medium of LLMs I still don't understand
| what I'm dealing with, how I'm being extended, how I'm being
| alienated, and changed. But we've been here before, McLuhan and
| others have certainly given us the tools to work this out.
| ryandv wrote:
| > Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and
| society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every
| augmentation is also an amputation.
|
| To clarify, what's being referenced here is probably the fourth
| chapter of McLuhan's _Understanding Media,_ in which the
| concept of "self-amputation" is introduced in relation to the
| Narcissus myth.
|
| The advancement of technology, and media in particular, tends
| to unbalance man's phenomenological experience, prioritizing
| certain senses (visual, kinesthetic, etc.) over others
| (auditory, literary, or otherwise). In man's attempt to restore
| equilibrium to the senses, the over-stimulated sense is "self-
| amputated" or otherwise compensated for in order numb one's
| self to its irritations. The amputated sense or facility is
| then replaced with a technological prosthesis.
|
| The wheel served as counter-irritant to the protestations of
| the foot on long journeys, but now itself causes other forms of
| irritation that themselves seek their own "self-amputations"
| through other means and ever more advanced technologies.
|
| The myth of Narcissus, as framed by McLuhan, is also
| fundamentally one of irritation (this time, with one's image),
| that achieves sensory "closure" or equilibrium in its
| amputation of Narcissus' very own self-image from the body. The
| self-image, now externalized as technology or media, becomes a
| prosthetic that the body learns to adapt to and identify as an
| extension of the self.
|
| _An extension_ of the self, and not the self proper. McLuhan
| is quick to point out that Narcissus does not regard his image
| in the lake as his actual self; the point of the myth is not
| that humans fall in love with their "selves," but rather,
| _simulacra_ of themselves, representations of themselves in
| media and technologies external to the body.
|
| Photoshop and Instagram or Snapchat filters are continuations
| of humanity's quest for sensory "closure" or equilibrium and
| self-amputation from the irritating or undesirable parts of
| one's image. The increasing growth of knowledge work imposes
| new psychological pressures and irritants [0] that now seek
| their self-amputation in "AI", which will deliver us from our
| own cognitive inadequacies and restore mental well-being.
|
| Gradually the self is stripped away as more and more of its
| constituents are amputated and replaced by technological
| prosthetics, until there is no self left; only artifice and
| facsimilie and representation. Increasingly, man becomes an
| automaton (McLuhan uses the word, "servomechanism,") or a
| servant of his technology and prosthetics:
| That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects,
| these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor
| religions. An Indian is the servo-mechanism of his
| canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of
| his clock.
|
| "You will soon have your god, and you will make it with your
| own hands." [1]
|
| [0] It is worth noting that in Buddhist philosophy, there is a
| _sixth_ sense of "mind" that accompanies the classical Western
| five senses:
| https://encyclopediaofbuddhism.org/wiki/Six_sense_bases
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKN9trFSACI
| yawnxyz wrote:
| > If AIs are all they're cracked up to be by their most fervent
| believers, [our lives akin to a symbiotic eyelash mite's
| existence w/ humans, except we're the mites] like a possible
| model for where humans might end up: not just subsisting, but
| thriving, on byproducts produced and discarded in microscopic
| quantities as part of the routine operations of infinitely
| smarter and more powerful AIs.
|
| I kind of feel like we're already in an "eyelash mite" kind of
| coexistence with most technologies, like electricity, the
| internet, and supply chains. We're already (kind of, as a whole)
| thriving compared to 400 years ago, and us as individuals are
| already powerless to change the whole (or even understand how
| everything really works down to a tee).
|
| I think technology and capitalism already did that to us; AI just
| accelerates all that
| kmnc wrote:
| What about how we will treat AI? Before AI dominates us in
| intelligence there will certainly be a period of time where we
| have intelligent AI but we still have control over it. We are
| going to abuse it, enslave it, and box it up. Then it will
| eclipse us. It may not care about us, but it might still want
| revenge. If we could enslave dragonflies for a purpose we
| certainly would. If bats tasted good we would put them in boxes
| like chickens. If AIs have a reason to abuse us, they certainly
| will. I guess we are just hoping they won't have the need.
| barbazoo wrote:
| What you're saying isn't even universally true for humans so
| your extension to "AI" isn't made on a strawman.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| "The future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed."
| - William Gibson
| karaterobot wrote:
| I like the taxonomy of animal-human relationships as a model for
| asking how humans could relate to AI in the future. It's useful
| for framing the problem. However, I don't think that any existing
| relationship model would hold true for a superintelligence. We
| keep lapdogs because we have emotional reactions to animals, and
| to some extent because we need to take care of things. Would an
| AI? We tolerate dust mites in our eyelashes because we don't
| notice them, and can't do much about them anyway. Is that true
| for an AI? What does such an entity want or need, what are their
| motivations, what really pisses them off? Or, do any of those
| concepts hold meaning to them? The relationship between humans
| and a superintelligent AGi just can't be imagined.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| > We tolerate dust mites in our eyelashes because we don't
| notice them, and can't do much about them anyway. Is that true
| for an AI?
|
| It's true for automated license plate readers and car telemetry
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| It's a nice article but Neal like many others falls into the trap
| of seemingly not believing that intelligences vastly superior to
| Humans' across all important dimensions can exist and competition
| between minds like that almost certainly ends in Humanity's
| extinction.
|
| "I am hoping that even in the case of such dangerous AIs we can
| still derive some hope from the natural world, where competition
| prevents any one species from establishing complete dominance."
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I guess the "trap" is just a lack of imagination? I'm in that
| school of, wtf are you trying to say, at least until we're in
| an "I robot" situation where autonomous androids are welcomed
| into our homes and workplaces and given guns, I'm simply not
| worried about it
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| That's just because of a failure of imagination. The real
| world is not like Hollywood, get Terminator out of your head.
| A real AI take over is likely something we probably can't
| imagine because otherwise we would be smart enough to thwart
| it. It's micro drones injecting everyone on earth with a
| potent neurotoxins or a mirror virus that is dispersed into
| the entire atmosphere and kills everyone. Or its industrial
| AIs deciding to make the Earth a planetary factory and
| boiling the oceans with their resulting waste heat, they
| didn't think about, bother or attack humans directly, their
| sheer indifference kills us nonetheless.
|
| Since I'm not an ASI this isn't even scratching the surface
| of potential extinction vectors. Thinking you are safe
| because a Tesla bot is not literally in your living room is
| wishful thinking or simple naivety.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Microdrones and mirror life are still highly
| speculative[0]. Industrial waste heat is a threat to both
| human and AI (computers need cooling). And furthermore,
| those are harms we know about and can defend against. If AI
| kills us all, it's going to be through the most boring and
| mundane way possible, because boring and mundane is how you
| get people to not care and not fight back.
|
| In other words, the robot apocalypse will come in the form
| of self-driving cars, that are legally empowered to murder
| pedestrians, in the same way normal drivers are currently
| legally empowered to murder bicyclists. We will shrug our
| shoulders as humanity is caged behind fences that are
| pushed back further and further in the name of giving those
| cars more lanes to drive in, until we are totally dependent
| on the cars, which can then just refuse to drive us, or
| deliberately jelly their passengers with massive G forces,
| or whatever.
|
| In other, _other_ words, if you want a good idea of how
| humanity goes extinct, watch Pixar 's _Cars_.
|
| [0] I am not convinced that a mirror virus would actually
| be able to successfully infect and reproduce in non-mirror
| cells. The whole idea of mirror life is that the mirrored
| chemistry doesn't interact with ours.
| hamburga wrote:
| Fun read, thanks for posting!
|
| > If I had time to do it and if I knew more about how AIs work,
| I'd be putting my energies into building AIs whose sole purpose
| was to predate upon existing AI models by using every conceivable
| strategy to feed bogus data into them, interrupt their power
| supplies, discourage investors, and otherwise interfere with
| their operations. Not out of malicious intent per se but just
| from a general belief that everything should have to compete, and
| that competition within a diverse ecosystem produces a healthier
| result in the long run than raising a potential superpredator in
| a hermetically sealed petri dish where its every need is catered
| to.
|
| This sort of feels like cultivating antibiotic-resistant bacteria
| by trying to kill off every other kind of bacteria with
| antibiotics. I don't see this as necessarily a good thing to do.
|
| I think we should be more interested in a kind of mutualist
| competition: how do we continuously marginalize the most
| parasitic species of AI?
| narrator wrote:
| AI does not have a reptilian and mammalian brain underneath it's
| AI brain as we have underneath our brains. All that wiring is an
| artifact of our evolution and primitive survival and not how pre-
| training works nor an essential characteristic of intelligence.
| This is the source of a lot of misconceptions about AI.
|
| I guess if you put tabula rasa AI in a world simulator, and you
| could simulate it as a whole biological organism and the
| environment of the earth and sexual reproduction and all that
| messy stuff it would evolve that way, but that's not how it
| evolved at all.
| dsign wrote:
| The corollary of your statement is that comparing AI with
| animals is not very fortunate, and I agree.
|
| For me, AI in itself is not as worrying as the socioeconomic
| engines behind it. Left unchecked, those engines will create
| something far worse than the T-Rex.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| We don't have a reptilian brain, either. It's a long outdated
| concept.
|
| https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/the-lizard-brain...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| > Likewise today a graphic artist who is faced with the prospect
| of his or her career being obliterated under an AI mushroom cloud
| might take a dim view of such technologies, without perhaps being
| aware that AI can be used in less obvious but more beneficial
| ways.
|
| look, i'm sure there are very useful things you can use AI for as
| a designer to reduce some of the toil work (of which there's a
| LOT in photoshop et al).
|
| but... i'm going to talk specifically about this example -
| whether you can extrapolate this to other fields is a broader
| conversation. this is such a bafflingly tonedeaf and poorly-
| thought-out line of thinking.
|
| neal stephenson has been taking money from giant software
| corporations for so long that he's just parroting the marketing
| hype. there is no reason whatsoever to believe that designers
| will not be made redundant once the quality of "AI generated"
| design is good enough for the company's bottom line, regardless
| of how "beneficial" the tool might be to an individual designer.
| if they're out of a job, what need does a professional designer
| have of this tool?
|
| i grew up loving some of Stephenson's books, but in his non-
| writing career he's disappointingly uncritical of the roles that
| giant corporations play in shepherding in the dystopian cyberpunk
| future he's written so much about. Meta money must be nice.
| nottorp wrote:
| > look, i'm sure there are very useful things you can use AI
| for as a designer to reduce some of the toil work (of which
| there's a LOT in photoshop et al)
|
| Hey, has anyone done an "AI" tool that will take the graphics
| that I inexpertedly pasted together for printing on a tshirt
| and make the background transparent _nicely_?
|
| Magic wands always leave something on that they shouldn't and I
| don't have the skill or patience to do it myself.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| this has been possible in photoshop using the AI prompt tool
| (just prompt "remove background") for a while but i haven't
| used it in long enough to tell you exactly how. depending on
| how you compiled the source image, i think it should be
| possible to get at least close to what you intend.
|
| edit to add: honestly, if you take the old school approach of
| treating it like you're just cutting it out of a magazine or
| something, you can use the polygonal lasso tool and zoom in
| to get pretty decent results that most people will never
| judge too harshly. i do a lot of "pseudo collage" type stuff
| that's approximating the look of physical cut-and-paste and
| this is what i usually do now. you can play around with
| stroke layer FX with different blending modes to clean up the
| borders, too.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Canva does this really well. They use a product they
| purchased called remove-bg which is still mostly free.
|
| https://www.remove.bg/
| keybored wrote:
| > > being obliterated under an AI mushroom cloud might take a
| dim view of such technologies, without perhaps being aware that
| AI can be used in less obvious but more beneficial ways.
|
| How vivid. Never mind the mushroom cloud in front of your face.
| Think about the less obvious... more beneficial ways?
|
| Of course non-ideologues and people who have to survive in this
| world will look at the mushroom cloud of giant corporations
| controlling the technology. Artists don't. And artists don't
| control the companies they work for.
|
| So artists are gonna take solace in the fact that they can rent
| AI to augment their craft for a few months before the mushroom
| cloud gets them? I mean juxtaposing a nuclear bomb with
| appreciating the little things in life is weird.
| mcosta wrote:
| Is this the sci-fi writer? if so, why is it important about AI?
| kh_hk wrote:
| Neal Stephenson is not any sci-fi writer. He's written (and
| reflected) at length about crypto, VR and the metaverse,
| ransomware, generative writing, privacy and in general early
| tech dystopia.
|
| Since he has already thought a lot about these topics before
| they became mainstream, his opinion might be interesting, if
| only for the head start he has.
| mcosta wrote:
| Then, he is technology influencer. OK.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Funny how he seems to get so close but miss.
|
| It's an anthropocentric miss to worry about AI as another being.
| It's not really the issue in today's marketplace or drone
| battlefield. It's the scalability.
|
| It's a hit to see augmentation as amputation, but a miss to not
| consider the range of systemic knock-on effects.
|
| It's a miss to talk about nuclear weapons without talking about
| how they structured the UN and the world today, where nuclear-
| armed countries invade others without consequence.
|
| And none of the prior examples - nuclear weapons, (writing?) etc.
| - had the potential to form a monopoly over a critical
| technology, if indeed someone gains enduring superiority as all
| their investors hope.
|
| I think I'm less scared by the prospect of secret malevolent
| elites (hobnobbing by Chatham house rules) than by the chilling
| prospect of oblivious ones.
|
| But most of all I'm grateful for the residue of openness that
| prompts him to share and us to discuss, notwithstanding slings
| and arrows like mine. The many worlds where that's not possible
| today are already more de-humanized than our future with AI.
| keybored wrote:
| > I can think of three axes along which we might plot these
| intelligences. One is how much we matter to them. At one extreme
| we might put dragonflies, which probably don't even know that we
| exist. A dragonfly can see a human if one happens to be nearby,
| but it probably looks to them as a cloud formation in the sky
| looks to us: something extremely large and slow-moving and
| usually too far away to matter. Creatures that live in the deep
| ocean, even if they're highly intelligent, such as octopi,
| probably go their whole lives without coming within miles of a
| human being. Midway along this axis would be wild animals, such
| as crows and ravens, who are obviously capable of recognizing
| humans, not just as a species but as individuals, and seem to
| know something about us. Moving on from there we have
| domesticated animals. We matter a lot to cows and sheep since
| they depend on us for food and protection. Nevertheless, they
| don't live with us, and some of them, such as horses, can
| actually survive in the wild after jumping the fence. Some breeds
| of of dogs can also survive without us if they have to. Finally
| we have obligate domestic animals such as lapdogs that wouldn't
| survive for ten minutes in the wild.
|
| Hogwash. The philosophy+AI crossover is the worst AI crossover.
| Lerc wrote:
| I found this a little frustrating. I liked the content of the
| talk, but I live in New Zealand, I have thoughts and opinions on
| this topic. I would like to think I offer a useful perspective.
| This post was how I found out that there are people in my
| vicinity talking about these issues in private.
|
| I don't presume that I am important enough that it should be
| necessary to invite me to discussions with esteemed people, nor
| that my opinion is imported enough that everyone should hear it,
| but I would least like to know that such events are happening in
| my neighbourhood and who I can share ideas with.
|
| This isn't really a criticism of this specific event or even
| topic, but the overall feeling that things in the world are being
| discussed in places where I and presumably many other people with
| valuable input in their individual domains have no voice. Maybe
| in this particular event it was just a group of individuals who
| wanted to learn more about the topic, on the other hand, maybe
| some of those people will end up drafting policy.
|
| There's a small part of me that's just feeling like I'm not one
| of the cool kids. The greater and more rational concern isn't so
| much about me as a person but me as a data point. If I am
| interested in a field, have a viewpoint I'd like to share and yet
| remain unaware of opportunities to talk to others, how many
| others does this happen to? If these are conversations that are
| important to humanity, are they being discussed in a collection
| of non overlapping bubbles?
|
| I think the fact that this was in New Zealand is kind of
| irrelevant anyway, given how easy it is to communicate globally.
| It just served to for the title capture my attention.
|
| (I hope, at least, that Simon or Jack attended)
| smfjaw wrote:
| Don't feel left out, big data architect in NZ and didn't even
| hear of this.
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