Superpowers, Not Superintelligence

(bond.now)

15 points | by edbernays 1 hour ago

5 comments

  • AndrewKemendo 5 minutes ago
    I wrote this in 2018:

    AI and privacy are incompatible

    https://medium.com/@andrewkemendo/artificial-intelligence-an...

    Highlight towards the end

    “I will make a prediction of my own: more deeply intertwined AI based services will increase the decision making capabilities for users over the next several decades to such an extent, that it will be considered irresponsible not to use them.

    Ok, fine then we’ll do it offline!

    I can hear you now: “Well fine, I value my privacy but I also agree that these services are beneficial. So we will just make systems that never touch Amazon, Google or Facebook or whatever mega corporation services. We’ll own our own data and I’ll just keep all my private data locally in my own home and have my open source Smart Speaker totally off the grid. Or maybe just send out relevant data where necessary. I’ll build my own DDPG based Deep Learning systems and teach it everything it needs to know!” But will you?”

  • chrisjj 45 minutes ago
    > Zuckerberg promises an agent that understands you, your goals, everything you care about.

    I.e. the most dangerous program you can imagine.

  • JohnMakin 1 hour ago
    You can tell the people pioneering this are utterly miserable and soulless. "Let's build something to automate all the parts of your life that are actually your life."

    What person that was even mildly satisfied with living their life would want this? What's next, agents that play video games and watch tv for me? What's the point?

    • hlynurd 46 minutes ago
      Thanks to people pioneering this I can spend a lot more time on the things I want.
      • JohnMakin 39 minutes ago
        " It plans his daughter’s recipes and orders the ingredients."
        • hlynurd 20 minutes ago
          Believe or not people pay for others to do this for themselves.
    • dfee 30 minutes ago
      i have and continue to build a ton of automations against my life. my goal is to offload more and more of my "life" to it.

      - bills? bookkeeping? reading DMARC emails? yeah, i want to do none of it, but i desperately want these chores done.

      - spend time with kids? study interesting topics? eat and drink interesting things? i want more of this.

      • apsurd 25 minutes ago
        life is what happens during all the waiting for life to happen.
        • exe34 9 minutes ago
          That's a nice thought terminating cliché.

          We get to choose what we want to spend time on and what we would prefer to offload. I'm sure you don't grow your own potatoes.

    • interstice 57 minutes ago
      Freedom to decide? Not that humanity is historically great at deciding what brings itself happiness.
      • Insanity 51 minutes ago
        Humanity or humans? Individual humans could, but as a collective we make stupid choices.
        • estearum 21 minutes ago
          Humans are quite bad at doing what brings them (durable) happiness
    • heaney-555 48 minutes ago
      People said this about every new convenience, such as email over physical mail, buying things online instead of in stores, etc. It's a tired argument.
      • estearum 18 minutes ago
        It seems quite clear at this point that important parts of our social and economic fabric are in fact damaged by people buying everything online, ordering food delivery, drive-through windows, streaming movies, and so on
      • apsurd 9 minutes ago
        but why is it a tired argument?

        You'd clearly never believe this but there's even an argument that cars are of dubious benefit to society. Personal/passenger cars mostly in that they've reshaped our entire civilized landscape to be inhumane and all the long-term and downstream health effects that that entails.

    • IncreasePosts 45 minutes ago
      What scenarios are you imagining where people are automating away the interesting parts of their life ?

      Searching for a new movie to watch can be fun in itself, but it ight not be want I want to do at any specific point in time. So what's so bad about having a system offer me a recommendation?

      • JohnMakin 39 minutes ago
        A use case provided in this very article is "plans daughter's recipes and orders the ingredients." The whole act of doing that without automating it is what makes it meaningful.

        What a miserable mindset.

        • qsera 30 minutes ago
          The trick is to convince young people that it is a good idea before they get a chance to learn that they are literally trading off parts of their life away...
        • siriusastrebe 35 minutes ago
          Next you can ask the AI how to teach the kid how to get recipes from AI. A real time saver for both of you.

          After that, ask the AI what kind of life lessons are good to impart on your kid.

        • deadbunny 36 minutes ago
          Pretty sure the cooking and spending time with their daughter is the meaningful bit for them. Why would they automate the setup steps otherwise?
  • apsurd 30 minutes ago
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