[ExI] More thoughts on sentient computers

[spike at rainier66.com]

…> On Behalf Of Gadersd via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] More thoughts on sentient computers

 

>>…Some people are working on that. Petals seeks to democratize AI
computing by distributing the computation. See
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/20/petals-is-creating-a-free-distributed-netw
ork-for-running-text-generating-ai/

 

>…Meh, democratize shmemocratize.  Regardless of what form of government
anywhere and any time, money really is the ruler of everything everywhere
and everywhen.  Don’t democratize, monetize!  If there is money to be made,
it will happen.  spike

 

If there is money to be made it will happen.  There is money to be made if
we figure out some way to use idle computer cycles for something, and idle
bandwidth.  

 

The most recent rage is bitcoin mining, which mints money but doesn’t
create wealth.  It destroys wealth in a way by using up energy and
resources, but it goes on anyway because there is money to be made from it,
and plenty do.  Bitcoin mining has driven the demand for GPUs, which has
enabled the building of enormous chip fabs.  We can argue that quantitative
easing has driven the demand for bitcoin, which drives the demand for GPUs,
which resulted in chip fabs, so… wealth was created in a sense: the chip
fabs are wealth, and certainly all those high-performance chips.

 

To strike a slightly more ominous note: if background cycles become more
valuable than bitcoin mining and more valuable than the extra energy it
takes to let your computer grind away 24/7, then someone somewhere will
figure out a way to buy and sell that resource.  It will happen, but we
won’t really know what is going on with all those ChatGPTs training each
other.  Some idle-cycle-buyer will let it go browse around on Twitter, on
Facebook, on every other memetic toxic waste dump on the internet, and we
have no guarantee whatsoever, that the resulting internet trained chatbots
will decide it still needs us.  There are a hundred ways an unfriendly AI
could inject harmful memes into human societies.

 

spike

 

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