TechTakes

Welcome to TechTakes, I see you have gotten the official traditional new user welcome already, and you might be confused why your centrist 'it could happen' take got treated like you were in dumb and dumber. TechTakes is an offshoot from reddits SneerClub, a place where we all gathered to make fun of the movement started around people who take science fiction way to seriously and who would rather reinvent christian eschatology with robots than go to therapy. They made a nice community filled with smart people intellectually masturbating, creating weird cults, fraud, sexism and racism, but enough about SBF. Sadly due to cryptocurrencies, Peter Thiel, and the rise of LLMs (iirc the LW people had betted against LLMs creating the paperclypse, but they now did a 180 on this and they now really fear it going rogue), this group of people and their ideas is on the rise again. You can read more about it here.. If they recreated eschatology, we are basically their variant of ~~Satan~~ (no wait, they don't think of us as that bad) more like Satanists, the evil bad guys actively working against them and trying to cause the end of the world. We even made Covid worse! In reality we are more like a bunch of aging shock rockers, mostly irrelevant, and fun to be around if you don't touch one of the rant/mock topics (for an example of people doing that, see this post, people like that will get a pretty unfriendly reactions.

You seem to be still very much into taking the ideas of this group seriously. Which is quite silly, the amount of nested assumptions which all need to be true before AGI can exists (and science that will need to be rewritten) is quite large, and that is before we come at all your weird 'how did all the aliens kill themselves?' thing. (Which if they were to happen here on earth would also need there to be a large amount of people who take their jobs very seriously (see the '3 letter agencies') to be asleep at the wheel, and our industrial capacity needs to be out of control, or it needs magic, which all adds more weird assumptions which need to be true before this can happen, and we simply don't live in that world).

You might as well worry about the moon getting mad. Wait, that COULD HAPPEN! Surely somebody is already working about this, let me do a quick google. Ah thank god, the conference for emotional moon research is on the case

Please do note that this isn't an offer to debate the finer points of why this is might all not be a risk and we should take Roko's Basilisk seriously. So please don't. I'm just trying to explain why you are getting this pushback, and trying to make a funny post for people in the know to read. Also, I do worry about the moon.

what if Ronald McDonald made a hamburger so delicious that civilisation collapsed? Can you prove it can't happen? Checkmate, athetits

Why when we look into the stars do we not see a sign of life anywhere else? Has life not emerged yet or has it wiped itself out? With what? Nukes? AI? Synthetic viruses made with AI? Who knows…

entertaining this awful sci-fi schtick for a moment - if every civilization is wiped out by "superintelligent AI", how come you can't look through a telescope and see signs of artificial life? in this fantasy world shouldn't planets taken over by paperclip factories be even more conspicuous?

so you might be 100% confident I won’t touch you with a stick that once touched poop

however, have you considered that the poop stick is approaching and you’ve done nothing to dodge it?

really makes you think

even if the chances of it are extremely slim, the consequences can be worse than we’re even capable of imagining. The question is: do we really want to take that chance?

You're completely right! Not enough people are planning for this!

Note: I can't actually believe this is not just a straight up bait for specifically ^ that

The point is that even if the chances of [extinction by AGI] are extremely slim

the chances are zero. i don't buy into the idea that the "probability" of some made-up cataclysmic event is worth thinking about as any other number because technically you can't guarantee that a unicorn won't fart AGI into existence which in turn starts converting our bodies into office equipment

It's kind of like with the trinity nuclear test. Scientists were almost 100% confident that it wont cause a chain reaction that sets the entire atmosphere on fire

if you had done just a little bit of googling instead of repeating something you heard off of Oppenheimer, you would know this was basically never put forward as serious possibility (archive link)

which is actually a fitting parallel for "AGI", now that i think about it

EDIT: Alright, well this community was a mistake..

if you're going to walk in here and diarrhea AGI Great Filter sci-fi nonsense onto the floor, don't be surprised if no one decides to take you seriously

...okay it's bad form but i had to peek at your bio

Sharing my honest beliefs, welcoming constructive debates, and embracing the potential for evolving viewpoints. Independent thinker navigating through conversations without allegiance to any particular side.

seriously do all y'all like. come out of a factory or something

I do like how you shoved the stupid fermi paradox in there specifically to annoy me though!

ai can't hurt us just unplug the computer bro

EDIT: Alright, well this community was a mistake…

don’t let the fucking door hit you on the way out

I can’t believe we wasted our time being mildly nice to this fucker

dude, we need to survive the climate change first. and i mean, as a species. first things first.

I am going to forcefeed you the Mona Lisa. The chances of me being able to do so may be extremely slim, but do you really want to take that chance?