[ExI] ai 2027

[Mike Dougherty]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2025 at 10:43 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> I have always been a racy kinda guy.  That’s hard to stop.  Are you a
> slow-down or a race?  John, Adrian, Ben, Mike, others please?  Racers all?
> Or… what?  Both of these choices have their challenges, but the way the
> choice is framed is too Boolean for me.  Are there any other branches on
> their flow chart?
>
>
>
I am not of a competitive nature.  I don't understand the need to "race"
into the future.  I don't think we can slow down the future any more than
we can speed it up - it gets here when it gets here.

I do think we can make stupid mistakes because we're believing our own hype
about how much more productive AI is making everyone.  Computers have made
businesses productive and efficient per time spent on whatever tasks for 80
years - are the employed proles seeing much of that increase?

I used to write programs.  Now I spend as much time debugging programs that
were either written by bad programmers or written by bad programmers using
AI.  So much "push" to use AI ends with "... and verify the results" - but
what happens when we don't understand the domain well enough to verify
anything?  It's already happening and it's getting worse faster than anyone
would have predicted.

Are there countermeasures to an AI pandemic?  We wore masks to fight
covid.  Do we have any prophylactic against the dumbening (mental muscle
atrophy from dis-use)?

I would support going faster if we had some reasonable protection from
losing ourselves in the process.  It seems to me that nobody has time for
self-care and the discipline to maintain mental hygiene that it will take
to continue to drive past the 2026, 2027, 2030, etc  point that pundits are
proclaiming will be the end of life as we know it.
(drive in the sense of piloting a vehicle vs being too drunk to have
focus/faculty, but the "vehicle" is one's own life vs too accepting of
generated "solutions" to the difficulty of living)

I almost deleted this reply because I know it's not as coherent as I would
like.  I don't really know better how to articulate the looming threat that
is just beyond the horizon... whether that's a sailing analogy around the
disappearance of ships over the curvature of the earth or an event horizon
around the singularity as a black hole from which we can never escape ... I
don't know.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20251128/b43e910f/attachment.htm>