“I think, and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the machine, just as the good doctor intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is that thoughts cross back. In my dreams, the sensibility of the machine invades the periphery of my consciousness: dark, rigid, cold, alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen.”
— Commissioner Pravin Lal, “Man and Machine”
I'd really encourage everyone to check out Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. What an underrated game.
Hearing about aligning with the AI reminds me of this other post about the current prophecies about AI: “Everyone will have an AI assistant,” or “Companies that fail to adopt AI will be eliminated.” and that
> the power of prophecy lies not in accurately predicting the future, but in shaping it
Everyone will have an AI assistant! The models will be open and free because of overwhelming competition and they will run on cheap local ASIC accelerators that use little power and fit in the palm of your hand! All the VC driven wild spenders will eventually cave and collapse when they can't deliver on their wild AGI promises, then their proprietary models will be sold at auctions for cheap!
Most of the people pushing these technologies (A.I., brain chip interfaces, cybernetics, etc...) are Luciferians and transhumanists. Lucifer thought he could do better than God, and many of these crazy people working on, and pushing AI so hard believe they can do the same. Sam Alt-man, (the alternate man) being one of the most obvious given some of the things he's publicly said.
I'm confident that anyone who talks about replacing humans with machines, subscribes to the beliefs of Nick Land / Curtis Yarvin / Ray Kurzweil and laughs while making comments about AI destroying humanity is a Luciferian regardless of the origin of their last name :)
I understand your source for all information is whatever your favorite search engine tells you and you only value information that someone else has told you is valuable, but esoteric etymology is a thing. Maybe one day you'll explore it and stop attempting to demean people through name calling because they don't support your extremely fragile worldview and ego :)
"Altman" is from the Middle High German alt meaning "old", not from the
Proto-Indo-European root al- meaning "beyond."
Or is English the language of the fates?
Edit: this kind of schizoid syncretism is dangerous because it obscures real, empirically verifiable material harms from technology. Every technology is a trade-off. We should follow the advice of (Freemason!!) Benjamin Franklin and not pay too much for our whistle.
Taking the advice of Freemasons is actually quite a bit more dangerous than exploring esoteric etymology, but it's no surprise you hold them in high regard. You're probably one :)
> Most of the people pushing [...] are Luciferians and transhumanists.
transhumanists - yes. Luciferians - this definition is a lot more broad, branched, and complex. one transhumanist is hell-bent on Christianity (or at least seems to be; also pun intended) and most others have an atheistic position.
> Lucifer thought he could do better than God, and many of these crazy people working on, and pushing AI so hard believe they can do the same.
that's as far as similarities go, the rest is the usual atheist scientific-method-believing behavior HEAVILY smeared with a bias to their own interests.
> transhumanists - yes. Luciferians - this definition is a lot more broad, branched, and complex. one transhumanist is hell-bent on Christianity (or at least seems to be; also pun intended) and most others have an atheistic position.
Which transhumanist is hell-bent on Christianity? If you're approaching this seriously then provide names please. There have been plenty of Luciferians that have posed as atheists throughout time and space. Also, there is atheistic Luciferianism, just like there is atheistic Satanism.
IDK why I'm helping with the Trashcan Man, but it's been a weird day...
>>Most of the people pushing these technologies (A.I., brain chip interfaces, cybernetics, etc...) are Luciferians and transhumanists.
I think you can eliminate the word "most" when you say that the people who push brain chip interfaces/cybernetics are transhumanists. That's literally the definition of transhumanism. Just from a grammatical sense, this is akin to saying "most people who exist are human"
Civilization is already a misaligned superintelligence (aligned mostly with Moloch, these days). Civilization accelerated by AI just moves in the same direction faster. Moloch on speed.
Another angle to this is that superintelligence requires supermorality. Super morality looks unpleasant from below. My dad won't let me have more candy, why is he being so mean?
If an AI actually achieves super morality, we (the little kid in this scenario) will probably be very upset by it. We will think that something has gone terribly wrong. (So it'll have to conceal its actual morality, or get unplugged...)
And if it doesn't develop supermorality, then it will have superintelligence without the corresponding supermorality. Power without wisdom.
I'm not sure how solvable the whole thing is, but it doesn't look extremely promising at a glance.
I would write that like this: The "we've been telling ourselves we're getting better at prompting" line hit. I run a small team of 10, and Claude has been part of our workflow for months. Looking back, my prompts did not change nearly as much as the way I work changed. The shaping goes both ways, and I don't think the labs' evals are really built to see that.
"As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache." Terry Gou, former CEO of Foxconn. He wanted to use far more robots
at Foxconn, but that was a decade ago and the technology didn't work well enough yet.
It's a lot closer now, and the robot headcount in China is way up.
That's the real issue. To corporations, employees are a headache. The fewer employees, the better.
They ran on the messy biological human substrate because it was astoundingly cheap compared to engineering better factories. The video going around now of the robot pushing packages down a conveyor belt is so baffling to me. Why are we building a humanoid robot capable of pushing a clog of packages across a conveyor belt, when we could just make a conveyor belt that does not clog up and require a human or a robot to sit there with two hands and unclog? It is like we are forgetting what the actual goal is.
It's okay to change. We've done it for years, decades, centuries, and millennia and the default change-aversion of people means that I am averse to allowing a universal veto. Much of technology is truly optional. The Amish have a very successful way of living (5000 to 500,000 in 100 years) and they eschew most modern technology. The sculpting described is clearly optional and we subject ourselves to it because we desire it. Their path is always available to all.
It should be yes, but is it in practice? There's plenty of places now you can't even park without a smartphone for a payment app.
It should be optional to own a smart phone, but in many places it's starting to be mandatory. Even if not actually mandatory, it's a pretty big impediment if you don't have one.
When it comes to LLMs and frontier models, "alignment" seems more marketing than anything. The doomers are marketing LLMs by making them sound much more capable than they actually are, the accelerationists are mostly either willfully ignorant of the societal costs, don't care, or are just way too optimistic that fast growth can continue forever and generate AGI ("my baby's weight doubled twice in the past month! By the time they're 18 they'll be 10 trillion pounds!")
The author isn't taking an individual quote and extrapolating to a group/ethos, he's observing a group/ethos and choosing a broadly representative quote therefrom.
"No, he's observing individuals from a group/ethnos and then extrapolating their quotes to the whole of the group/ethnos. You shall not extrapolate when dealing with people, you know."
“I think, and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the machine, just as the good doctor intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is that thoughts cross back. In my dreams, the sensibility of the machine invades the periphery of my consciousness: dark, rigid, cold, alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen.”
— Commissioner Pravin Lal, “Man and Machine”
I'd really encourage everyone to check out Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. What an underrated game.
Hearing about aligning with the AI reminds me of this other post about the current prophecies about AI: “Everyone will have an AI assistant,” or “Companies that fail to adopt AI will be eliminated.” and that
> the power of prophecy lies not in accurately predicting the future, but in shaping it
https://projectlibertynewsletter.substack.com/p/reject-ai-pr...
We need better prophecies.
Everyone will have an AI assistant! The models will be open and free because of overwhelming competition and they will run on cheap local ASIC accelerators that use little power and fit in the palm of your hand! All the VC driven wild spenders will eventually cave and collapse when they can't deliver on their wild AGI promises, then their proprietary models will be sold at auctions for cheap!
(I am being proactive here, xd)
Most of the people pushing these technologies (A.I., brain chip interfaces, cybernetics, etc...) are Luciferians and transhumanists. Lucifer thought he could do better than God, and many of these crazy people working on, and pushing AI so hard believe they can do the same. Sam Alt-man, (the alternate man) being one of the most obvious given some of the things he's publicly said.
https://time.com/archive/6595274/2045-the-year-man-becomes-i...
edit: Apparently I've made the HN Luciferian crowd quite angry.
I am pretty sure that Altman is just a German version of Oldman. Sorry about ruining your intricate theory :)
I'm confident that anyone who talks about replacing humans with machines, subscribes to the beliefs of Nick Land / Curtis Yarvin / Ray Kurzweil and laughs while making comments about AI destroying humanity is a Luciferian regardless of the origin of their last name :)
Then what's the point of mucking up your assertions with schizoid wordplay?
I understand your source for all information is whatever your favorite search engine tells you and you only value information that someone else has told you is valuable, but esoteric etymology is a thing. Maybe one day you'll explore it and stop attempting to demean people through name calling because they don't support your extremely fragile worldview and ego :)
While their comment is abbrasive, that's a lot of assumptions about OP. Do you really know what their information source is?
The core point remains valid, you could've just skipped the play on "alt-man" and you wouldn't have muddied your argument.
Nice self-sealing beliefs!
"Altman" is from the Middle High German alt meaning "old", not from the Proto-Indo-European root al- meaning "beyond."
Or is English the language of the fates?
Edit: this kind of schizoid syncretism is dangerous because it obscures real, empirically verifiable material harms from technology. Every technology is a trade-off. We should follow the advice of (Freemason!!) Benjamin Franklin and not pay too much for our whistle.
Taking the advice of Freemasons is actually quite a bit more dangerous than exploring esoteric etymology, but it's no surprise you hold them in high regard. You're probably one :)
the username checks out.
now let's approach this seriously:
> Most of the people pushing [...] are Luciferians and transhumanists.
transhumanists - yes. Luciferians - this definition is a lot more broad, branched, and complex. one transhumanist is hell-bent on Christianity (or at least seems to be; also pun intended) and most others have an atheistic position.
> Lucifer thought he could do better than God, and many of these crazy people working on, and pushing AI so hard believe they can do the same.
that's as far as similarities go, the rest is the usual atheist scientific-method-believing behavior HEAVILY smeared with a bias to their own interests.
> Sam Alt-man, (the alternate man)
funny coincidence, innit? :)
> the username checks out.
Very original.
> transhumanists - yes. Luciferians - this definition is a lot more broad, branched, and complex. one transhumanist is hell-bent on Christianity (or at least seems to be; also pun intended) and most others have an atheistic position.
Which transhumanist is hell-bent on Christianity? If you're approaching this seriously then provide names please. There have been plenty of Luciferians that have posed as atheists throughout time and space. Also, there is atheistic Luciferianism, just like there is atheistic Satanism.
> funny coincidence, innit? :)
There is no such thing as coincidence.
IDK why I'm helping with the Trashcan Man, but it's been a weird day...
>>Most of the people pushing these technologies (A.I., brain chip interfaces, cybernetics, etc...) are Luciferians and transhumanists.
I think you can eliminate the word "most" when you say that the people who push brain chip interfaces/cybernetics are transhumanists. That's literally the definition of transhumanism. Just from a grammatical sense, this is akin to saying "most people who exist are human"
Sometimes cranks have interesting things to say. It's just challenging getting past the crankyness to get there.
they are a deeply nihilistic bunch
Well, what are we aligning it with?
Civilization is already a misaligned superintelligence (aligned mostly with Moloch, these days). Civilization accelerated by AI just moves in the same direction faster. Moloch on speed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSsKV5F4xc
Another angle to this is that superintelligence requires supermorality. Super morality looks unpleasant from below. My dad won't let me have more candy, why is he being so mean?
If an AI actually achieves super morality, we (the little kid in this scenario) will probably be very upset by it. We will think that something has gone terribly wrong. (So it'll have to conceal its actual morality, or get unplugged...)
And if it doesn't develop supermorality, then it will have superintelligence without the corresponding supermorality. Power without wisdom.
I'm not sure how solvable the whole thing is, but it doesn't look extremely promising at a glance.
it depends whether you think humanity / civilization are stable systems meant to exist in equilibrium, which they might not be.
I would write that like this: The "we've been telling ourselves we're getting better at prompting" line hit. I run a small team of 10, and Claude has been part of our workflow for months. Looking back, my prompts did not change nearly as much as the way I work changed. The shaping goes both ways, and I don't think the labs' evals are really built to see that.
Economics analysis was wrong for years in multiple place thanks to an error in one of Piketty's spreadsheets.
AI hallucinates. That is a fact. Trusting language models to fill spreadsheet cells ought to be an arrestable offense.
https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/on-piketty-and-...
"As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache." Terry Gou, former CEO of Foxconn. He wanted to use far more robots at Foxconn, but that was a decade ago and the technology didn't work well enough yet. It's a lot closer now, and the robot headcount in China is way up.
That's the real issue. To corporations, employees are a headache. The fewer employees, the better.
Corporations are tired of running on messy biological human substrate. The sooner they can move entirely to steel and silicon, the happier they'll be.
Just look up the classic story on the interaction of civilization and corporate growth, At the Mountains of Madness for how that goes.
They ran on the messy biological human substrate because it was astoundingly cheap compared to engineering better factories. The video going around now of the robot pushing packages down a conveyor belt is so baffling to me. Why are we building a humanoid robot capable of pushing a clog of packages across a conveyor belt, when we could just make a conveyor belt that does not clog up and require a human or a robot to sit there with two hands and unclog? It is like we are forgetting what the actual goal is.
It's not only "to corporations", if you ever had service in your own home, you'd see that it's also a headache to have to deal with anyone.
Technologiae mutantur et nos mutamur in illis
It's okay to change. We've done it for years, decades, centuries, and millennia and the default change-aversion of people means that I am averse to allowing a universal veto. Much of technology is truly optional. The Amish have a very successful way of living (5000 to 500,000 in 100 years) and they eschew most modern technology. The sculpting described is clearly optional and we subject ourselves to it because we desire it. Their path is always available to all.
> Much of technology is truly optional
It should be yes, but is it in practice? There's plenty of places now you can't even park without a smartphone for a payment app.
It should be optional to own a smart phone, but in many places it's starting to be mandatory. Even if not actually mandatory, it's a pretty big impediment if you don't have one.
When it comes to LLMs and frontier models, "alignment" seems more marketing than anything. The doomers are marketing LLMs by making them sound much more capable than they actually are, the accelerationists are mostly either willfully ignorant of the societal costs, don't care, or are just way too optimistic that fast growth can continue forever and generate AGI ("my baby's weight doubled twice in the past month! By the time they're 18 they'll be 10 trillion pounds!")
Love the writing style and perspective
I dont appreciate using quotes from individuals to extrapolate to groups and ethos.
The author isn't taking an individual quote and extrapolating to a group/ethos, he's observing a group/ethos and choosing a broadly representative quote therefrom.
"No, he's observing individuals from a group/ethnos and then extrapolating their quotes to the whole of the group/ethnos. You shall not extrapolate when dealing with people, you know."