[FRIAM] crackpots and privilege

[Steve Smith]

> My grandsons' girlfriends (twenty-somethings) say that they think 
> babies are disgusting.  I hope they change their minds.  In any case, 
> what does a shortage of babies have to do with AI?

Babies *are* (can be) disgusting, but same for puppies, kitties, and 
garden-soil from the right (wrong) perspective!

Maybe the point is "nobody left for the AI overlords to lord over" ?

I think the key is "existential threat"...    I didn't look for 
Schmidt's statement anywhere, so I'm just speculating that maybe he's 
doing a mild echo of Musk's idea that a collapsing (first) world 
population is somehow a *bigger* existential threat?

With my techhead hat on I am inclined to imagine that AI will help me 
(well, not ME anymore, but people vaguely like who I once thought I was 
or wanted to be) solve micro-techonomic problems like the ones that lead 
to Teflon(tm) and Velcro(tm) and higher density/faster-charge EV 
batteries, and higher density/dynamic range pixel-displays, and neural 
lace to wire (grow?) into my brain/ganglia, and microbes that can 
convert moon/mars-dust to Soylent/Huel/Water/??? etc.

My PsychoHistory hatted self (Asimov - Foundation 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)> and the 
non-fictional variant 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory#:~:text=Psychohistory%20is%20an%20amalgam%20of,stated%20intention%20and%20actual%20behavior.> 
) is inclined to imagine that AI *can* help with the "big problems", the 
ones nominally too large, too interdisciplinarian, too obtuse, too 
"wycked" (In Complexity Science jargon), possibly too counter-intuitive 
for most (any?) human or group of humans to grasp.

My Ned Ludd (very tight by definition?) hat has me thinking more down 
the rabbit holes of worst-case scenarios where all the arrogant, 
narcissistic @$$h0ii3z of the world (starting at the top with those 
whose names start with Pu Tr Be Zu Mu(r/s) Ne De ... and staggering down 
the hierarchy of potency and scope to most of us here most of the time) 
think they "know what is best" and put their resources to using the AI 
lever to "make it so"...

Even (especially) me, I constantly imagine that "if they made ME King" 
(or to the point, if *I* was the /wormtongue/ in the AI Overlord's ear) 
that I would "make the world safe and happy for everyone, ever after 
with no unintended consequences or unpleasant side effects".

One *might* guess that the smartest thinkers in the most grounded, 
thoughtful, gentle think-tanks (e.g.  in a Tibetan Lamasary or the "Club 
of Rome" or SIPRI or CESR or the Justice League of America or the people 
who task "jewish space lasers" or ??? ) would be practicing their 
AI-whispering skills right now. Maybe tasking Marcus' Quantum Computer 
with "the hard problem of universal consciousness"?


  An up-to-date version of Asimov's 9 Billion Names of God 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God> ?

>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Thu, May 25, 2023, 12:48 PM Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org> wrote:
>
>     Google news decided to surface an article from Fortune today. 
>     It's headlined "Society's refusal to have enough babies is what
>     will save it from the existential threat of A. I., Eric Schmidt
>     says".  The headline is accompanied by a very serious head shot of
>     Eric.  Nice try, Google, but you're not sucking me down that
>     rabbit hole.
>
>     Meanwhile, someone apparently read my mind about the rationality
>     of disaster prepping and wrote an epic novel about it 40 years ago
>     in Catalan.  The Garden of the Seven Twilights by Miquel de Palol
>     is available in English translation and as an ebook on
>     overdrive.com <http://overdrive.com> at your local library.  The
>     narrator crosses refugee swamped Barcelona to check on his mom and
>     gets sent off by her to a McMansion'ed medieval monastery high in
>     the Pyrenees where the elite are amusing themselves with stories
>     while awaiting the resolution of the first war of entertainment. 
>     Lots of stories about themselves and their friends and acquaintances.
>
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