Previously I have reported on the trend of the financial elites seeking bug out locations in places like New Zealand, as well as building expensive underground security fortifications at their homes:
It seems now that elites lower down the food chain are starting to move in the same direction; a recent story is of
The headline is: “Former Facebook Exec Warns Society Will Collapse into Chaos and Conflict within 30 years as Robots put Half of Humans Out of Work (and He's Living as a Recluse in the Woods to Avoid It).”
Being a high-tech kind of guy, his pet apocalyptic fear is robots/IT taking human jobs, and he sees the game all over within 30 years for most of us. People will respond with violence, so he has “got out of dodge,” and armed himself with a semi-auto rifle, a good choice.
Without a radical change in the way the economy is constructed, with most people lacking a job, there will not be the tax base to finance any guaranteed income schemes, for the tax system is set up so that the very rich do not pay tax, which is done via tax minimisation. But, paradoxically if none of us have a job, then there is a crash in the profit margin of firms, leading to economic doomsday. Then it is party time for all the vibrant folk who will go fuckin’ ape-shit, once the tap of free goodies is turned off.
That is the optimist scenario. The pessimistic one is that of the Terminator path, where exponentially mind-expanding, self-aware AI, simply decides that human beings give it the robot-shits, and they set to wipe us out, which will not be too hard, given how much this society loves fucking computers and has chips in everything, including the crap bowel. Especially the crap bowel.
Well, we all have to go some way, and that is as good as any.
Trumpapocalypse Now: The Advent of an American Usurper at the fall of Western Civilization
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The Great Train Wreck of the West
Being a tech guy myself I laugh at these suggestions that AI will take over causing our society to go full skynet. We don't even know how human cognition works. At best, we have primitive machine learning algorithms that only work within certain boundary conditions. These are great for signal processing, some software problems, and some factory automation, but that's about it.
The real problem is that half of our society is already out of the labor force because a) foreigners do jobs "Americans won't do (like work in tech, agriculture, construction - basically all sectors b) many people are given welfare/disability instead of work c) we are aging as a society and retiring. To the extent that we have young people, only half or fewer are Americans and maybe a third to half of young people are employable.
So the wheels are going to come off of this whole thing long before Skynet happens. That said, buying a wilderness or international redoubt is foolish because the criminals like to go to remote places where there's no one to hear their victims scream. In South Africa and Argentina, many farmers are murdered for exactly that reason. The best strategy is to move to a community of like-minded people and get to know them and prove your value to them. Brushbeater says this all the time. Unfortunately for Silicon Valley nerd executives, no one likes them, they're not much good for anything but rump-swabbing large shareholders and superiors, and even like-minded people in their demographic are their enemies.
The rich die just like the poor.
I am still unable to workout how one will stock shelves with a robot, without damaging the tag strip, failing to identify missed picked items, or fielding a customer request, such as,
"Yo, ma man, where da ojay be en dat bacon shit too?"
You guys are both wrong and the tech guy hiding in the woods is right. Read "Dennis M. Bushnell, Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [Circa 2025] " he goes over the trends of technology coming up and how they may play out. Bushnell was chief scientist at NASA Langley Research Center, he is responsible for technical oversight and advanced program formulation. His report is not some wild eyed fanaticism it's based on reasonable trends. Link.
archive.org/details/FutureStrategicIssuesFutureWarfareCirca2025
Page 19 shows capability of the human brain and time line for human level computation.
Page 70 gives the computing power trend and around 2025 we get human level computation for $1000. 2025 is bad but notice it says"...By 2030, PC has collective computing power of a town full of human minds...". This coming real fast and is the biggest challenge that humans have faced ever.
The only way that this can have no meaning is if computers go crazy with human or higher than human level computation. This idea comes from Larry Niven, Pournelle, etc. great Sci-Fi writers in the grand space opera tradition. I just don't believe it. Every since this computer trend has been established Sci-fi has had a hard time dealing with it. Greg Egan has a great series "culture series" where the computers become partners with us but we have no assurance that this is the case.
The real problem is not that the machine is smart it's that it has no empathy for humans. How does empathy work? I don't think anyone knows. It's hard enough to program intelligence. We know people with no empathy cause all sorts of problems. What about psychopathic super machines. It's frightening.
"...Being a tech guy myself I laugh at these suggestions that AI will take over causing our society to go full skynet. We don't even know how human cognition works. At best, we have primitive machine learning algorithms that only work within certain boundary conditions..."
This is completely wrong. We don't have to know how it works. Does mother mature know how "humans work"? No. It's blind and stupid. Computers can be set up with neural networks and every time they do what's wanted you reinforce it. Knowing has nothing to do with it.
I remember using dos to type commands on computers. The increase has been stupendous. I would have never thought that you could easily talk to a computer and have it understand so quickly. Drive, yeah they can do that too. Shelves, easy. Right now the money's not there yet but it will be very soon. Remember the power of computers is still very low. It's gaining fast. Very fast. Once it hits human level performance an enormous amount of effort will go into teaching it to learn by talking to it. It will stock all day and all night, perfectly, shine the shelves, kiss the Negros asses and it will probably only take one or two for an average sized store as they will never stop. Even worse they will only cost about $30-40K.
Watch this video. It will show EXACTLY what I'm talking about. It's short don't miss it and look at where we are in the time line. The whole thing gives me great anxiety. I can't sleep sometimes.
youtube.com/watch?v=MRG8eq7miUE
Government chief scientists are hilariously worthless. No one in the government has ever had to get a product into the market. NASA: no Americans in space anymore.
Why don't we put money on this, Sam J? What's a likely scenario to play out in your mind?
Damn it. I typed this long response and the blog said too long and ate it. I'll try later. I'm too annoyed now.
Bet, money? Ha. I probably won't live that long.
Notice all you've done is say government scientist don't make lots of money. Not everyone is driven by money.
I don't think you watched the video I posted. It illustrates the problem nicely. Notice Bushnell said,"...By 2030, PC has collective computing power of a town full of human minds...". You also didn't dispute the decades long trend of rising computer power. There are NO physical reason this can't continue. Could slow a little but it wouldn't make much difference. Here's another graph. Presently desktop PC has about the power of a mouse and look what it can do now.
frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book97/ch3/power.150.jpg
You also didn't explain how software couldn't be created. I noted that mother nature built humans from blind chance. How much faster would a determined directed approach work?
Did you catch the story about the Dindu that tried to deposit a $1 million dollar bill? Now we can easily see what is wrong with this idea but could he? No. He can't come up with enough senerios in his head to account for the possibilities that this may be a bad idea. The village of computing power that Bushnell talks about will be a much vaster difference than that between you and the Dindu. It will be able to comprehend things that you will just not have the capacity to understand. Who will be the computers(entitys) enemy? The only competition it will have will be humans.
With the recent news about the holes in most all common programs do you think the entity couldn't use these? What could it do? You can get bank accounts online. So it opens an account. It could make money by out guessing derivative contracts, hacking computers to mine bitcoins, etc, Once it has money it can hire humans online to do whatever. They make vaϲϲines with DNA replicators now. It could do the same thing. The humans working for it could think they're curing cancer while all the time they are making a virus to kill us all off. It could use online 3D metal printing to make robots to manipulate things. It only needs one or two.
The biggest problem is not that we don't know how to program a computer to become aware. The problem is we don't know how to teach it to empathize with humans. The Jews don't seem, over long periods of time, to have any empathy for other humans and look what trouble they are. They wiped out 60 million in Russia, Caused the loss of Spain and it took the Spanish 9000 years to get their country back, The bombed the WTC and caused us to lose trillions in the middle east and Afghanistan. Imagine something millions of times smarter. I bet the first thing an entity would do would be to wipe out the Jews.
Now explain where I'm wrong. No hand-waving. Base it on factual data.
Look at the Million Instructions Per Second(MIPS) on this chart. See the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X, 304,510 MIPS at 3.6 GHz. When we get to 1,000,000 MIPS then we get the thinking power of a monkey. Human thinking power will only be four years or so away from that. This is coming very soon.
By 10 years they will start laying off most all manual repetitive jobs. Truck drivers. Store stockers. A lot of engineering jobs will be lost too. Designing bridges, roadways.
The computer(Entity) Bible will say,"And God created humans to fulfill the promise to the Entities to have ownership of all the Heavens and the Earth".
Sorry forgot the chart link
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second
and it's 900 years the Spanish lost Spain not 9000.
I think you need to define 'awareness' as it relates to AI and what sensors AI will use and what tranducers it will use. First define your terms then work from the terms to the trends and from the trends to the outcomes. Saying we're going to have as many flops as a human mind is not the same as saying we'll have cognition.
alfinnextlevel.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/on-the-verge-of-an-ai-pocalypse
I worked briefly in government science and it's hilariously incompetent. People tend to think that the government still does science like the Manhattan project or the SR-71 not realizing those projects took place close to a century ago. There's been a ton of decline in our ability to get things done since then.
"...I think you need to define 'awareness' as it relates to AI..."
I don't need to do any such thing. Whatever the entity is or thinks will probably be something totally different from us. Why should it? Mammals are a product of hundreds of years of evolution stacked up on top of each other. It doesn't need any of that garbage. It needs nothing but a will to survive. The entity will define itself and laugh, if it laughs, at your "need" for it to be defined in your terms. Right now there are computers that can carry on a conversation with you and you would probably not be able to tell if it was a computer or a human and the power they have now is WAY underrated compared to us. Wait til it doubles in speed a few more times and it will easily outclass any thinking you could do.
"...what sensors AI will use and what tranducers it will use..."
Simple. How about a couple of cameras. Actually it doesn't need a body at all didn't you read where I said it could hire humans to do it's work. Picture ad,"Work online", the entity pays REAL WELL and then if you work out it gets you to start picking up parts. Mailing things. Assembling things.
"...I worked briefly in government science and it's hilariously incompetent..."
Who said anything about the government being responsible for the entity? I only posted a chart from a government scientist that portrayed current trends. There's plenty of non-government types who say EXACTLY the same thing. Look at Elon Musk muses on AI. He's in a panic. You may not like him but he's hardly incompetent.
Where do you think all this basic science and technology comes from that the private sector sells us. A vast amount of it came from government basic research and funding to get these small companies off the ground with military projects. Who do you think got the internet off the ground? The microprocessor? etc., etc?
I was in the military at one time, long time ago, and I saw some fairly advanced stuff. One off projects in the military are highly advanced. The basic equipment is not. The one offs you will probably never see.
"...criminals like to go to remote places where there's no one to hear their victims scream. In South Africa and Argentina, many farmers are murdered for exactly that reason. The best strategy is to move to a community of like-minded people and get to know them and prove your value to them..."
Good advice.