FillThisEmptyCup

FillThisEmptyCup t1_jbw8i7f wrote

Reply to comment by Sawses in Scientists call for global action to clean up space junk by thebelsnickle1991

Possibly. More than possible, the great filter can certainly be some entropy problem where exponential complexity is accompanied by more than exponential energy needs, which eventually cannot be sourced locally.

Certainly most civilizational collapses could be described in such a manner, because sufficiently directed energy could readily solve most problems.

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FillThisEmptyCup t1_jbp2fc7 wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in As a techno-nihilist who thinks that AI is our only way out of dystopia: by Rofel_Wodring

I had no clue what the OP was trying to say anyway. In the old days, we'd call this a word salad. "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."

One central premise they have is decentralization. They think AI will be decentralized and distributed.

Yes, that was a founding principle of the internet or maybe the later worldwideweb; dream of the interconnect net with many different but roughly equal nodes, but I don't see where any of the historical trends since then point that way. We went from free-wheeling usenet to forums to superwebsites like reddit or facebook or youtube capturing and moderating 90% of the conversations, making an Overton window of their own -- from many outlets to a relative few with much more censorship and locks on what can be said than the early wild west days of the www.

Same with hosting in general, where there used be 10s of thousands, with the majority of the net in some superdatacenter owned by a few big names like amazon with even big names like netflix running on it.

Similarly, even when someone is using AI, right now it's in the hands and total control of somebody that has the computing power to train it. Since Moore's law is effectively over, I don't know why anyone would think computing power in 40 years will be so far advanced per $$$$ as the same 40-ish time span of 1980 to now. It'll be faster, sure, just not the same orders of magnitude difference we have experienced before. I'm using a 2012 computer (Linux) that I would never have dreamed of staying on half as long in the 80s or 90s or 00s. It's fast enough and speeds for what I used it for haven't improved too much (different needs will have different POVs ie games). Hence, no unconnected AI in everyone's pocket. Even if it were to exist, the big boys with bigger datacenters can still afford/train a much better AI than in someone's 2060 iPhone/implant will have. Just like today, more processing power, more dataset, etc.

And simply having AI is not a missile, or a gun, or anything else. Having AI Jason Borne without military hardware doesn't mean anything. Sure, you can 3d prints stuff but everything has limits and industrial processes can make things better than some garage tinkering in a lot of these cases.

I think OP was trying to paint some technopunk future. I'm sure the US will fail sometime in the future, though I hesitate to name a date. It will be a mundane thing like debt and loss of currency reserve. Not some band of geek brothers forging alliances to bring the corrupt system down.

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