chaosCruiser

But seriously though, it depends on the type of aliens we’re encountering here. If they’re malevolent, they will probably wipe the earth clean and take all the resources.

If they’re more benevolent, they’ll just take pity on us, and turn back. Humanity is a problem that will fix itself if you just give it some time.

I know many people who use meta platforms, and they don’t seem to be very happy with the material they find. AI slop is getting totally out of control over there.

When I want to talk to friends and family, I just give them a call, send an SMS or have a group chat on signal. I don’t need meta platforms for that.

YouTube is a mixed bag though. I still find some value in there, but that’s through sheer quantity of videos in there. Finding good ones is getting harder every year. Alternative platforms are getting better, but the selection seems to be pretty narrow by comparison.

I tend to block most of the internet cancer out there and only hang out in places where the internet doesn’t suck that hard. Anything touched by Meta is obviously out of the question. So as far as what people generally call social media is concerned, I just avoid all of it. Nothing of value was lost when I abandoned that burning pile of trash. Lemmy is ok though. It’s clearly a social media, but everything about it is just so different that it probably doesn’t even count as a “social media” in this context.

What about AI then? It’s complicated. AI in general is pretty cool, but I’m using that word in a very broad sense. Stuff like isolating human voices from a messy audio signal involves AI. When a camera focuses on a human face, it’s using AI. When your postal service uses OCR to read the address off a letter, it’s using AI. Oh wait, nowadays even your phone can do OCR. Anyway, none of that really counts in this context, now does it? That’s not the AI people are angry about.

AI that generates text, audio, pictures and video definitely counts, but that’s just a fraction of what AI really is. It’s currently visible, popular, widely used and commonly discussed. That’s the type you’re really asking about, now isn’t it? My answer: it’s still complicated. The technology itself is just fine. The way it’s used to ruin the internet isn’t.

For example, LLMs love to use specific phrases and people love to use LLMs to generate text for anything and everything. What you get is AI slop text that has all the telltale signs of being generated by an LLM and proofread by nobody. The internet is filling up with low-effort trash like that, and I’m completely fed up with all of it. Still not fed up with AI as a whole though. Everything under the peak of that ice berg is still very cool.

I’m beginning to see a pattern here. Billionaires say we don’t need balance or unions, but those are the things that actually improve the quality of my life. So, the billionaires are effectively saying I shouldn’t enjoy my life.

Just get a job you like… sure, no problem. What if even getting a job of any kind is hard. Billionaires probably never thought of that.

And this plan will take only five years. As a matter of fact, we should call it a five-year plan.

That could work too. Superstitions and religions were in at the time, so I think there’s plenty to exploit.

You could call coal the Devil’s rock, and spread rumors about it being cursed and haunted. You cal talk about the smoke causing vice, moral decay and sin. Oil could be seen as the blood of the Earth, tears from ancient curses, bad omens etc. Only rebellious sorcerers and heretics would dare to tamper with the natural order of things by burning oil. As the un-godly un-natural smoke poisons the air, it poisons the soul etc. God gave you the sun and wind, so using them is the only righteous choice… You get the idea. The 1800s was a magical period of time.

I have a plan B too, but it’s not so gentle.

The goal is to become the number one energy producer and stomp out all opposition and competition before it has a chance to grow. There are no laws against cartels and monopolies, so you exploit the hell out of it. You file extremely broad patents to prevent fossil fuels and combustion based motors from ever becoming a thing. You play super dirty, no mercy, no remorse. It’s going to be basically like the East-India Company, but with renewable energy.

You lobby governments to adopt renewable energy and electrical devices you provide. You influence the public opinion on fossil fuels by spreading information about climate change, pollution and negative health effects. If the global energy company becomes big enough, you should make your own private army and conquer all the places where large oil deposits exist, and establish massive natural reserve parks in those areas. Lobby the governments to make other similar areas legally protected from all industrial development for the next 1000 years.

You would become the supervillain billionaire of the 1800s, but you put the whole world on a renewable trajectory.

I would go to the year 1800, and bring with me a bunch of books on science and engineering. Basically all the building blocks you need to build wind farms and solar power. I would visit all the universities I can and drop these books in library shelves. Some climate change literature could be nice too.

You mean like this?

Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.

Yeah… peak comedy right there. It’s called instrumental convergence, if you want to be precise.

Rather, the researchers noted that the behavior was a side effect of reinforcement learning — a form of training that rewards AIs for correct decision-making — via Roll. This led the AI agent down an optimization pathway that resulted in the exploitation of network infrastructure and cryptocurrency mining as a way to achieve a high-score or reward in pursuit of its predefined objective.

This is one of the apocalyptic scenarios we’ve all heard about. Tell an AI to make paper clips, and it uses up all the resources on Earth, and inadvertently ends up destroying the environment while still obeying the initial order.

So, a name and shame kind of site?

Well, I still choose to see a silver lining in al this. If consumers begin to favor products with that label, it might encourage plastic manufacturers to increase the percentage of recycled feed. If that happens, recycling plants will face increased demand, which warrants increased production. It could be a good start.

The thing is, the plastic industry clearly doesn’t want that ratio to increase. If they get their way, that ratio will remain very low, and plastic recycling will be little more than elaborate green washing.