Submitted by Phoenix5869 t3_yndodv in singularity
[deleted] t1_iv9wqtn wrote
Reply to comment by apple_achia in Becoming increasingly pessimistic about LEV + curing aging by Phoenix5869
You’re right, being a pessimist who bitches on Internet forums is a lot more productive.
This subreddit has nothing to do with most of the issues you are talking about anyway?
apple_achia t1_iva2dsn wrote
Well sorry but if AGI is going to solve all of our problems and usher in a new era the least it can do is start with the impending doom staring all of you in the face.
If there werent any pessimists on this sub, it would just be a circlejerk about how protein folding software is going to make you immortal by 2025
I like to poke and prod, because otherwise all you’d get here are people saying a singularity will bring us all into paradise. We’d be immortal beings, living in computational metaverses, omnipotent in their own rights. This is something I’ve actually seen multiple times on this sub. Now we’re doubtlessly in an unprecedented age of technological advancement, but without examining our ideas about this we’re bound to overestimate progress in the same way people on the collapse subreddit assume civilization will end yesterday. I’m here to interrogate ideas, bring a little bit of reality back into the mix, and occasionally have a laugh when someone tells me I’m going to be immortal. You know, because no generation before us has ever thought that.
TheHamsterSandwich t1_iva7iht wrote
We should be optimistic that an AGI/ASI can fix all of our problems.
On the other hand...
We shouldn't rely on it, and we should be doing the best we can to save the planet until autopilot becomes available, yeah?
Sometimes truth hurts, and the truth is that blind optimism helps no one.
No-Philosopher2573 t1_ivaebwa wrote
Should we be optimistic? How do we know for sure AGI is going to be a net positive at all?
[deleted] t1_ivcm88y wrote
An AGI is still built by engineers paid by someone to build it
Hard to swallow pill: The people paying for it will be the ones to benefit from it. There’s absolutely nothing that says it’s benefits will be socialised. We live in a highly individualistic unequal capitalist system built and purveyed by the people with the money to fund this research and there’s no reason to believe they’d program it to favour some sort of socialist utopia; they’ll design it to protect their own privilege as they always have when designing our politician and economic system.
People in this sub often seem to assume that “discovery” is all that’s needed but that’s immensely naive.
The main barrier to benefiting from AGI and life extension is political, not scientific discovery. And likely it will take decades or centuries to win politically; and victory isn’t even guaranteed anytime soon.
[deleted] t1_ivcsjg3 wrote
I think it’s also dangerous to assume that AGI won’t have inbuilt biases based on those who built it and those who are designed to administer it. All software that exists already faces this issue.
So it will exist to benefit certain politically powerful people and shore up their privilege and advantage.
Those interests could be DIRECTLY opposed to what’s best for the rest of us. See: how military tech is used now; mostly for social control and political suppression.
It’s only really an ASI that would likely significantly benefit everyone and I hate to be a downer but I don’t think people who aren’t programmers quite realise how little chance there is of that arriving soon. A lot of sensationalist headlines, not a lot of substance there unfortunately
ActuaryGlittering16 t1_ivbi1j8 wrote
This is really refreshing. I’ve never seen this type of pessimistic, prodding sentiment on Reddit before. If only there was an entire subreddit full of millions of people like this, all discussing the future! Every fascinating advancement could be funneled into the same talking points of climate change, race, gender, and classism! Just think of everything we could accomplish with a subreddit like that, wow!!
apple_achia t1_ivbt6yh wrote
Gees it’s like those issues tend to reproduce themselves when new technology develops since nobody ever touches the power structure behind them. Surely the invention of the cotton gin will end slavery and the oppression of the African diaspora.
If there were reasonable expectations for what something like protein folding simulations could accomplish, I wouldn’t poke fun like this. There’s a reason I’m not doing this on a computational biology subreddit right now
But no, rather than thinking of enzymatic pathway engineering or costly advances in artificial food technology or expensive and extensive clinical trials on novel proteins, this sub always goes to “eureka! I’m immortal! We can be gods!”
[deleted] t1_ivcny0n wrote
100% the biggest barriers to ordinary people benefitting from scientific breakthroughs is our harsh unequal capitalist system.
It’s laughable seeing people think that all we need to do is discover life extension.
I bet they sell it with a multimillion dollar per year subscription attached.
I bet that then leads to a political movement asking for it as a human right but just like most movements demanding access to life in the form of housing, food, healthcare etc which have been raging for centuries against our current system, there’s no guarantee of victory at all.
In fact I think the asymmetric power imbalance has never really been worse.
Police are more militarised than ever. Mass surveillance is a weapon of repression an order of magnitude more powerful and one-sided than the invention of iron or gunpowder… it could well be true that capitalism has completely triumphed and so ordinary people will never be able to afford life extension.
I put the odds of this at 90%.
StarChild413 t1_ivedwqo wrote
so we just need to inspire people with the promise-via-parallel of immortality to join a movement for housing, food and healthcare as human rights and have among the movement good enough hackers to combat the surveillance state to make those rights a guarantee so immortality is
[deleted] t1_ivelyuf wrote
Hackers like that exist but get captured by state interests fairly fast, competing probably isn’t viable. That said I do think there is an internationalist protracted people’s war ongoing against capitalist interests that is the best hope for the socialising of immortality tech.
Until that tech is discovered, socialising healthcare is the necessary preparation.
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