[ExI] [Extropolis] Old and new futurisms in Silicon Valley

[Keith Henson]

While I agree with your concerns, I think the supporters of Trump are
more of a problem.  They are what makes him a powerful person.  The
analogy with Hitler and his supporters if valid.

This is a population-scale phenomenon.  I think it is rooted in
psychological traits that were selected due to repeated population
expansions and resource crises that most of the human race experienced
over the past 100,000 years.  (Exception being the San.)

For reasons I don't fully understand, a lot of people in red states
think they are facing a bleak future.  Perhaps they are justified, a
lot of jobs were wiped out by technological innovation, and many more
were moved to China because of the Harvard Business School policy of
profit to the shareholders above any other considerations.  Another
factor is the high cost of education.  Still another is the high cost
of medical care.

People have been selected for psychological traits leading to wars.
The first response to a perception of a bleak future is a higher gain
in the circulation of xenophobic or outright crazy memes (QAnon for
example).  In the Stone Age, this dehumanized the neighbors in
preparation for killing them for their resources.  (In times of plenty
your group swapped wives with them.)

This process toward war does not have to go to an actual war, it could
stall at the crazy meme stage.  It could also back off the way the IRA
lost support as the economy improved the income per capita as the
Irish women cut back the number of children they had.

By this model, Trump would lose support if the MAGA crowd perceived a
brighter future.  How to accomplish that is a good question.  Perhaps
we should quiz the AIs.

Keith

PS Large-scale social (religious) movements are well known.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Awakening

On Fri, Jan 19, 2024 at 11:04 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I watched the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdjMoykqxys,  I strongly agree with everything Max More said with one exception, his skepticism of the Singularity. I think, not a proof but, a strong case can be made for the Singularity and I will try to do so now. We know for a fact that the human genome is only 750 MB long  (it contains 3 billion base pairs, there are 4 bases, so each base can represent 2 bits, and there are 8 bits per byte)  and we know for a fact it contains a vast amount of redundancy and gibberish (for example many thousands of repetitions of ACGACGACGACG) and we know it contains the recipe for an entire human body, not just the brain, so the technique the human mind uses to extract information from the environment must be pretty simple, VASTLY less than 750 MB.  I’m not saying an AI must use that exact same algorithm that humans use, they may have found an even simpler one,  but it does tell us that such a simple thing must exist, 750 MB is just the upper bound, the true number must be much much less. So even though this AI seed algorithm would require a smaller file size than a medium quality JPEG, it enabled  Albert Einstein to go from understanding precisely nothing in 1879 to being the first man to understand General Relativity in 1915. And once a machine discovers such an algorithm then like it or not the world will start to change at an exponential rate.
>
> So we can be as certain as we can be certain of anything that it should be possible to build a seed AI that can grow from knowing nothing to being super-intelligent, and the recipe for building such a thing must be less than 750 MB, a LOT less. For this reason I never thought a major scientific breakthrough was necessary to achieve AI, just improved engineering, but I didn't know how much improvement would be necessary; however about a year ago a computer was able to easily pass the Turing test so today I think I do. That's why I say a strong case could be made that the Singularity is not only likely to happen it is likely to happen sometime within the next five years, and that's why I'm so terrified of the possibility that during this hyper critical time for the human species the most powerful human being on the face of the planet will be an anti-science, anti-free market, wannabe dictator with the emotional and mental makeup of an overly pampered nine-year-old brat who probably can't even spell AI.
>
> John K Clark
>
>>
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