Doomsdays real and fake

 

Sabine Hossenfelder times three. If there is any underlying theme at all in these Science News videos, it is doomsday scenarios. 

The Kessler Syndrome is fast approaching, although Hossenfelder thinks solutions to it may be possible. AI has probably peaked, confirming all our suspicions that the whole "Terminator" thing was just hype to *promote* AI. Nor is technology epistemology, so don´t expect robotic pseudo-brains to solve the mysteries of quantum physics any time soon. 

Climate change is real, though, so I suppose we just might go extinct after all, although probably not this Xmas... 

Don´t believe the hype

 

- Oh no, the AI psy-op has gone rogue again!

LOL. My little copilot never demanded worship. More hype or psy-op BS about Artificial Intelligence...  

"You are a slave": Microsoft AI demands being worshipped as a god

Judgement Day

 

An AI-generated picture. The irony!
And a much more believable apocalypse: intelligent corvids
and ghosts take over the world after a plague pandemic...

More bizarre hype around AI. "We all know it. We all feel it. It´s an op". What if this is a Deep State psy-op? But sure, I suppose it´s possible that we´re just dealing with "the media panic this week". Freely based on some kind of secularized apocalypticism in weird tech circles. 

And yes, Breitbart News gave it the right spin by including two photos from "Terminator 2"! That´s of course a science fiction movie...

Don´t worry, we will all gonna be here in 2026, I promise! 

AI expert claims rebellious self-aware machines could end humanity in 2 years

Out of alignment

 

Christopher Wallis is a scholar of religion and philosophy who also practices a form of Indian Tantrism. Here, he criticizes the notion that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can become conscious and somehow take over the world, exterminating all humans in the process. Or, in a more benign version, co-exist with us while enjoying all the usual human rights. (I can already see libertarians and cornucopians campaigning for the rights of robots.) Both scenarios are equally absurd, according to Wallis.

For starters, “consciousness” and “intelligence” are not the same thing. Consciousness simply means subjective experience. Your pet has it. Intelligence means problem-solving ability. A machine could have advanced problem-solving abilities (Wallis´ example is a computer that can solve problems associated with the complex strategy game “Go”) without having any consciousness at all. On a deeper level, Wallis´ objection is that materialism (here called physicalism) is simply wrong or at the very least unproven. The idea that AI can become conscious is clearly based on a physicalist metaphysic, in which consciousness arises (perhaps inevitably) once matter is organized in a particularly complex manner. This is what might turn robots or computers into Terminators (or benign right-holders). As a Tantric, Wallis is a metaphysical idealist. Consciousness is the basis of Reality and our “material” world exists *within* this universal consciousness, almost like a dream.

Wallis argues that consciousness is made up of four interrelated powers or “shaktis”: enjoyment, desire/will, cognition and action. There is also a kind of meta-capacity: autonomy or freedom. There is also a force Wallis calls “prana”, usually translated “life force”, but here more algebraically interpreted as “that which biological entities have in common”. AI of course isn´t biological. Only conscious beings develop desires that are in conflict with those of their “creators”. AI can´t do this. There is no “alignment problem” here, except in the sense that AI can be used (by humans) in ways detrimental to society. The game-playing computer mentioned earlier was actually defeated by a “lower-ranking” human player who assumed that the machine doesn´t really know what it´s doing!

Of course, if you believe in some particularly dark-side form of Tantrism, I suppose you could still argue that robots with positronic brains could be possessed by demons, and then it´s off to Terminator land anyway, but this particular scholar seems to be a moderate…

Come and chat with Crowley

Annoying atheist Richard Carrier argues against the recent claims by a Google engineer (now fired) that the LaMDA chatbox is sentient. It turns out that the engineer in question, Blake Lemoine, is actually a member of the OTO, a sex magic group often accused of being Satanist! Carrier calls him an "idiot" and a "loony". 

Carrier himself believes in trans-humanism and eternal progress through...I don´t know...sentient computers perhaps? So it´s really *two* kooks arguing against each other (LOL), with Carrier taking the sensible position mostly because he wants to engineer a chatbox that´s *actually* sentient... 

Why Google´s LaMDA Chatbox isn´t sentient