“This whole saga makes me genuinely embarrassed to follow this stuff. I just want a sub that has an informed opinion on AI, this is worse than crypto bro bullshit.”
“Every hype-man who posts vague tweets and hype posts should be ridiculed. Every clown who posts screenshots of said tweets on this sub should be ridiculed.”
““AGI is coming out next year” - this sub for the last 4 years”
some self aware highlights.
I hadn’t put it together before but it completely makes sense that singularity believers would easily fall for AI hype.
yeah, iirc the first step to singularity or at least what causes it is an ASI so we have this community of dweebs thinking that that’ll solve everything and not, like, communism, which probably won’t solve everything but certainly more than whatever the fuck llms are doing.
Drooling with anticipation for sapient hologram helpmeets with godlike powers that also unconditionally love them and want to fuck them lead to some very wishful thinking.
One of the weirdest struggle sessions I had before I was away for almost a year was some smug computer toucher that directly invoked that movie for their argument for why LLMs were at least as sentient/sapient as us mere meat computers.
Yes, others also brought up that it was fiction and fiction doesn’t have to adhere to scientific or philosophical rigor, but that treat hog didn’t care. We’re all meat puppets and our consciousness is an illusion to them and the treat printer said “I love you” so it’s just like it was for John Blade Runner, who would totally drive a Cybertruck
Gonna have to wait a long time now that every startup grift and zombie legacy company has redefined AI to mean “computer does stuff” and declared victory. At least, if the billboards on the 101 I see on the way to SFO are any indication - Salesforce will use “AI” to increase your “productivity”. What does that mean? It means give us your money, chumps.
Not that AI robot slave girlfriends were ever happening in any case; obviously everyone in /r/singularity is competing for the title of most scientifically illiterate person alive and has no clue how the brain - or anything, really - works.
It’s incredible watching them slowly realise that they bet their hopes for utopia on a slightly more annoying customer service chatbot.
As someone who once was a transhumanist (back when there were still Socialists in the community) I almost feel bad for them. Almost. A lot of them are young and haven’t yet realised that hope from tech alone is always, always hollow. What they do with that knowledge…well…I got better, but I was always communist.
As someone who once was a transhumanist (back when there were still Socialists in the community)
Are you me?
I used to actually go to those so-called futurology conferences back on the west coast. I stopped going when the military started setting up shop there and the spectacles got too creepy to bear. It went from “a future where everyone is better off is in measurable distance” to “imagine immortality and superpowers for the worst people in the world, also buy some internet funny money!”
Tbf, at least tech is real and observable so putting hope in science is better than putting it in fairytales forced on western civilization through extreme violence by the Roman Empire and other means of settler colonialism.
It’s still thought poison and being smug about your atheism isn’t really contributing anything to this conversation about credulous atheists buying into technology cults.
at least tech is real and observable
Except when it isn’t, such as billionaire grifter promises and fraudulent marketing hype gimmicks.
settler colonialism
Still in effect without religion, such as this:
Oof, touché. I consider myself more agnostic than atheist, but I suppose I was a little too harsh. I just get frustrated with religion when Christians tell me that climate change doesn’t matter because “the world has to end for Jesus to come back.” Allowing the world to end feels too much like a death cult. Otherwise, I have no problem with religious people who don’t try to force their religion into politics and on others.
i mean theyre cultists so
the leap from ‘cute statistics engine that is basically an elaborate and flawed google search’ to ‘thinking robot girlfriend that worships me’ is huge and they keep acting like its trivial
the leap from ‘cute statistics engine that is basically an elaborate and flawed google search’ to ‘thinking robot girlfriend that worships me’ is huge and they keep acting like its trivial
Sometimes the leap feels easier to make for them if they belittle living beings and call them “meat puppets” or “meat computers.” Saw that shit on Hexbear too before the LLM grift and the societal enshittification and environmental damage it was causing became too obvious to ignore, even if some were fine with “not real jobs” being eliminated back then.
if they belittle living beings
To be fair, the “cute statistics engine” has already achieved artificial liberalism
Years ago, I read someone post “you (computer touchers) don’t ‘fucking love’ science, you stare at its ass while it walks by.”
That’s what we’re seeing in the “singularity” cult: people that don’t actually have much of a grasp of science but are really really excited about vague promises of immortality and superpowers.
Humans have been dreaming about finding the secret to immortality for thousands of years. It isn’t possible and it isn’t happening in our life time. With how critically underfunded scientific research is, at best scientists may find a way to slow down the aging process by 5 to 10% each generation.
Yeah, it just isn’t happening without a massive cooperative effort over generations. Not just the time for each generation of volunteers to be monitored, but also the work needed to address age-related entropy that isn’t purely “lifespan” - no point splicing yourself into tortoise-person if you spend the next three hundred years as Joe Biden.
That’s a selfless undertaking for tens of thousands who will never see the benefits and might suffer some real nasty side effects. Leaving aside whether or not it should be done in the first place, it’s just not compatible with the Rich Man Afraid of Hypothetical Screaming Void impulse which drives modern life extension nowadays.
Their idiot eschatology community has now reached the development level of having false prophets. What exciting places will they go from here?
