from Hacker News

Four questions concerning the internet

by raptorraver on 4/30/23, 7:23 PM with 30 comments

by calderwoodra on 4/30/23, 10:17 PM
Am I the only one who immediately writes off authors that mention Microsoft's Syndey as something scary/to be worried about? The whole "it said <scary thing>" seems overblown to me
by yowzadave on 5/1/23, 1:45 AM
> Even in the mid-1980s, Black had noticed how hours spent on a computer were changing him. ‘I noticed that my thinking became more refined and exact,’ he wrote, ‘able to carry out logical analyses with facility, but at the same time more superficial and less tolerant of ambiguity or conflicting points of view.’
Well this skewers the worst tendencies of the HN comment section…
by gregfjohnson on 5/1/23, 12:01 AM
Signature properties of human language and consciousness are recursion and self-awareness. As ChatGPT and its ilk continue to vacuum up basically all of the human-generated content on the net, more and more of that content will be discussion of ChatGPT and its ilk. These AI's already do an impressive job of composing essays in response to questions about the impact of AI's (that is, themselves). It feels like we are (mataphorically) probing around in the dark, with electric probes, connecting parts of circuits to other parts of circuits, and we are getting close to inadvertently closing circuits that will "levitate" these technologies into something like internally stimulating and augenting self reference. I would prefer we not do this.
by labster on 5/1/23, 12:20 AM
I don’t see why people are so worried about AI in the future. AI has been exploiting humans for 500 years already, and destroying Earth’s habitability for the last 150 years.
I’m talking about our first AIs, the corporations. They maximize their goals at any cost, live forever, assimilate other corporations, and frequently trick humans to engage in unsafe behavior for their own benefit. They expand to control more and more territory, concentrate power to themselves, and seek to make humans dependent on them — while at the same time polluting everywhere to make the human race weaker. They don’t intend this, they just have an alien code of ethics that worships shareholder value as the height of virtue.
How is computer AI going to be worse than what we’re already doing?
by cholmon on 5/1/23, 12:11 AM
The fourth question is in a later blog post, "The Neon God" - https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-neon-god
by twic on 5/1/23, 12:32 AM
There's an HTML, non-Scribd, version of the mentioned book (pamphlet?) by David Black here:
https://wn.rudolfsteinerelib.org/RelArtic/BlackDavid/DB1981/...
Seems the author does technical due diligence at a VC firm now:
https://www.blackliszt.com/2021/10/what-is-technical-due-dil...
by sbaiddn on 4/30/23, 11:31 PM
My favorite luddite on the only tech site worth reading. HN, how do you keep doing it? :D
His part Two is available (to subscribers at least)
by zamnos on 5/1/23, 12:27 AM
> Question One: why does digital technology feel so revolutionary?
The digital revolution, which began some 30 years hence, has little to do with the more recent advancements in AI/ML. The reason digital technology feels so revolutionary is because it is - it's our first glimpse into a post-scarcity future. Distribution costs for a digital work to all of humanity is low, and approaches zero if we get rid of copyright.
Copyright is an antiquated system, suitable only for a pre-digital age. We need a better system. One that incentivizes the creation of works while also admitting that DRM to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. If instead every copy that was distributed over the Internet, including via Bittorrent paid the author back, suddenly it's not a problem anymore. There are other problems/details to be worked out, but the first step is in admitting you have a problem.
by NumberWangMan on 4/30/23, 11:02 PM
> Out there, said all the old tales from all the old cultures, is another realm. It is the realm of the demonic, the ungodly and the unseen: the ‘supernatural.’ Every religion and culture has its own names for this place. It lies under the barrows and behind the veil, it emerges in the thin places where its world meets ours. And the forbidden question on all of our lips, the one which everyone knows they mustn’t ask, is this: what if this is where these things are coming from?
Both yes and no, in a sense.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
We are doing this because our individual incentives are not aligned with those of the group. Moloch is the god of misaligned incentives, of coordination problems, of arms races and races to the bottom. It's a property of any system with selfish actors, which means any system that humans are part of, and probably any intelligent being that arose out of natural selection would have been hypothetically been part of.
From `Meditations on Moloch`:
> There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”
> The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”
> Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”
> Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”
by throwaway202303 on 5/1/23, 12:39 AM
Boring
by smitty1e on 5/1/23, 1:24 AM
The internet is a mechanism that has had a catalytic effect on the viscosity of information.
Animus against that catalyst is so much hormonal groaning.
Human nature is constant.
by mftb on 4/30/23, 11:17 PM
From the linked post:
> I cheated a bit there, I admit. I changed one of the words. The name that the saint used in that passage was not ‘Ahriman’. It was ‘Antichrist.’
That's manipulation. That's gross. That's a shame. There are some interesting ideas in the post.