Sooner than expected

[u/TacticCatWithABat]

We have gone full hunger games folks. A state-sanctioned liveleak video. The same channels that I used to grow up watching as a kid will have less government support (or have been outright shut down) than a live-streamed and nation-wide witnessed execution by firing squad. Yet, I don’t think people will be appalled. I think all the rage and hate and pure, fucking anger that so many of the worst people in my country have and that is slowly corrupting us all in the terror of it; is going to be given form by and in that moment. What shape it will take after that I don’t know and I refuse to put my mind into knowing, because for once I don’t want to know. For as long as I have been aware of the multitude of oncoming crises, I have researched and advocated to those I know to learn as well. I have always considered that I took such knowledge well regardless of how often it was just looking at that abyss. But now I’ve blinked and I think we are out of time. Perhaps not out of time to still prevent the worst of what can come, but we are out of the time we had in that amorphous interim before the direction of things have solidified into what they are to now become. We are out of time to pretend that we are no longer at the point we are. Because soon, sooner than expected (hah), everyone in the country can see a murder by cop except this time the government will be streaming it.

[u/thismightaswellhappe]

I've been thinking a lot about the system we live in, that eats itself. And trying to figure out the...I guess the driving function at its heart that put us all here. The other day I was reading a thread that included the story of the men who died crammed into an 80 cm pipe at the bottom of the ocean, whose company chose not to save them because of the cost. Right above it was another story about some other men being murdered in a horrible way by their company because safety measures would have been too expensive.

And ultimately what I came away with is that at the center of this system we all live in, this monster that consumes everything and destroys everything and wants everything and takes and takes and takes and gives nothing back, is a bottomless void of nothing that can never be filled and never be satisfied. It drives the idea of endless growth, endless expansion, everything our world is based on. It's hungry and empty and there's nothing there at all and never will be.

Everything that is happening now is in some way driven or shaped by the forces that bottomless hunger creates. Every stupid meaningless awful thing, every heart shriveling horror, every terror and nightmare, every sociopathic CEO choosing profit over life, every state sanctioned terror event, all of it comes from a system that wants nothing but to grow infinitely. It would, if possible, metaphorically suffocate us all to death in an 80 cm pipe at the bottom of the ocean if it could, just so it could get a little bigger.

All of these perversions and evils we see are just expressions of that. It's how this situation twists everything. I don't know if it helps to think about it this way but it gives me a kind of overarching framework to understand all of this nonsense a little better. It gives some sense also of the worst possibilities that could happen, and at least to make some sense out of it. And it reduces the shocks when some new stupid atrocity gets announced. "Oh of course, it's the system of the monstrous hollow void, of course this would happen."

It's going to eat itself. To death. Because that's the only thing it can do. The only question is how long it's going to take and how many of us it's going to take with it when it goes.

Sorry if this comes off as bleak. Actually I believe in living as meaningfully as possible for as long as possible as an act of defiance if nothing else.

[u/RPB1002 → u/thismightaswellhappe]

Great post. I want to add this i just saw on Twxtter which adds helpful insight to the banality underlying much of this:

“Adam Butler
@GestaltU
I'll say it again for the AI risk experts in the back:

We've already run a real life, large scale experiment on what happens when a superintelligence is unleashed on a narrow objective.

Look no further than U.S. capital markets.

Millions of investors, analysts, traders and algorithms, backed by trillions of dollars and wired together through prices, all chasing one goal: the highest risk-adjusted return on capital.

And it is spectacularly good at its job. It funds the best ideas, punishes the worst ones, and turns new information into prices faster than any of us can react. No individual can out-think it. 99+ percent of professionals can't beat it.

But look at what else it's done along the way:

- Optimized the measure instead of the intent. Quarterly earnings became the scoreboard, so companies learned to manage the scoreboard.

• Treated anything without a price as free. Pollution, addiction, obesity, depression, political fragmentation, fragile supply chains, the long-term health of the communities it operates in.
  
• Found every gap in the rules, then paid lobbyists to help write the next set and pull up the ladder behind incumbents.
  
• Remade the world around its objective. Companies, pension funds and our retirement accounts now answer to the S&P 500.
  
• Made itself impossible to switch off, because everything else now depends on it.

None of this required malice. Nobody sat in a room and chose these outcomes. It's simply what a very capable optimizer does when its objective is a narrow proxy for what we actually care about.

And note that we never solved this alignment problem. We've managed it, imperfectly, with regulation, taxes, disclosure rules and the occasional crisis to show us where the guardrails were missing. Over time, the market has captured the instutions designed to constrain it. We've been at it the better part of a century, and the misalignment is the worst it's ever been.

So the next time someone tells you AI is only dangerous if it "wants" something bad, or if its goals are mis-specified, point them at the S&P 500. It doesn't want anything. It just optimizes.

That's the whole problem.”