Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post, thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Is artificial intelligence the great filter that makes advanced technical civilisations rare in the universe?
This professor is arguing we need to regulate AI because we havenāt found any space aliens yet and the most conceivably explanation why is that they all wiped themselves out with killer AIs.
And hits some of the greatest hits:
Zero mentions of global warming of course.
I kinda want to think that the author has just been reading some weird ideas. At least he put himself out there and wrote a paper with human sentences! Itās all aboard the AI hype train for sure, and constantly makes huge logical leaps, but it somehow doesnāt make me feel as skeezy as some of the other stuff on here.
Personally I think a unnoticed black swan event relating climate change is way more likely. āWhoops turns out that we thought 1.5C wasnāt that big a problem but this causes some feedback loop in the oceans killing them all, yes it caused more algae to grow, but these had less nutrition causing the fish to overeat and die, causing the algae to choke themselves out. Dead seas everywhereā.
Sad upvote.
Dont worry, as people are aware this might happen, it isnāt technically a black swan event. It is just a risk we are ignoring ;) (im not sure if this is actually a real risk, or that we really are ignoring it, im not a marine biologist).
I feel this makes it an unlikely great filter though. Surely some aliens would be less stupid than humanity?
Or they could be on a planet with far less fossil fuels reserves, so they donāt have the opportunity to kill themselves.
Think both āhas the wisdom as a society to prevent unknown unknown side effects from industrialization from wrecking the ecosystemā and āhas almost no access to fossil fuelsā could also be pretty effective filters. In the latter case they prob would still be around but they wouldnāt spread in the universe so we wouldnāt hear from them which I think would satisfy the filter reqs.
āSometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.ā
Calvin and Hobbes, 8 November 1989
āThey say the pollutants we dump in the air are trapping the Sunās heat and itās going to melt the polar ice caps! Sure, youāll be gone when it happens, but I wonāt! Nice planet youāre leaving me!ā
Calvin and Hobbes, 23 July 1987
I hate that you canāt mention the Fermi paradox anymore without someone throwing AI into the mix. Thereās so much more interesting discussions to have about this than the idea that weāre all gonna be paperclipped by some future iteration of spicy autocomplete.
But whatās even worse is that those munted dickheads will then claim that they have also found the solution to the Fermi paradox, which is, of course, to give more money to them so they can make their shitty products
even worsesafer.Also:
Somehow Clippy 9000 thatās clever enough to outsmart the entirety of the human race because itās playing 4D chess with multiverse time travel, is, at the same time, too stupid to come up with any plan that doesnāt kill itself in the end, too?
Theres a concentrated effort, it seems, at bringing rationalist stuff into SETI.
Yeah, the fermi paradox really doesnāt work here, an AI that was motivated and smart enough to wipe out humanity would be unlikely to just immediately off itself. Most of the doomerism relies on ātile the universeā scenarios, which would be extremely noticeable.
If only the āDark Forestā hypothesis of human-extraterrestrial interaction would enter the public consciousness any sooner. Weād at least have more interesting ideas than this shit.
NB: I have not watched the 3BP adaptation yet, tho I have heard it is good. I have listened to the first two books as audiobooks and am tickled by Bruno Roubicekās mildly (three body) problematic accent-work.
Both Lovecraft and Reynolds play with the idea that sentience, when discovered, is hunted down and exterminated by hostile entities. Scalziās Old Manās War universe is somewhere where alien species are in ruthless competition.
All of it is a deflection of the possible and frankly terrifying possibility that we are alone (at least in this galaxy)
The exo-galactic searches havenāt found anything eitherā¦
Having a bit of eye trouble, so please ignore any typos. Weird scratching feeling behind the eye, trying not to touch it.
But yeah, isnāt that odd that we have not found any? Perhaps it is that if we see them they also see us baā¦ jesus my eye, fuck. Sorry. But yeah perhaps seeing goes both ways? And perhaps this is why we have not āfoundā anything in exo-galactic searches, perhaps it is all a coverup, because we do not want to be seen in return.
I mean, isnāt it also odd how important aliens, and the search of extraterrestrial life are in our culture but how few resources we actually put in finding them? Perhaps as soon as we spot something the searchers get shut down, or worse!
(Donāt worry my eye is fine, Iām also not being serious, I was doing a bit inspired by the There is no Antimemetics Division SCP series. Now also in short clip form. CW a certain type of lovecraftian horror + memetics. Might not want to read it if you got freaked out by Rokos B, or weird horror in general).
I have never been a huge fan of most of the scp stuff (not that itās bad, itās just not really my thing), but I have reread that series several times at this point, itās so good!
This story series has a lot more focus on people vs a dry procedural things focus as the normal scp stuff has, so not strange that this hits differently.
the academic-pressrelease-industrial complex has a lot to fuckinā answer for