Lovable Sidekick

What’s breathtaking is how clueless education system administrators are failing at their jobs. They’ve been screwing up the system for a very long time, and now they have a whole new set of shiny objects to spend your money on.

Okay here are my estimates:

1: 100% but I don’t have a timeline. It’s not going as fast as the cultural hype presents it. We don’t even really understand human thinking yet, let alone how to make a computer do it. But I’m sure we’ll get there eventually.

2: Also 100%. AI doesn’t need to decide on its own to kill all humans, it could be assigned that goal by some maniac. The barrier to possessing sophisticated AI software is not nearly as high as the barrier to getting destructive nuclear weapons, biohazards, etc. Sooner or later I’m sure somebody who doesn’t think humanity should exist will try to unleash a malevolent AI.

3: At or near zero, and I only include “or near” because mistakes happen. Automated systems that could potentially destroy the human race should always include physical links to people - for example, the way actually launching a nuclear missile requires physical actions by human beings. But of course there’s always the incompetence factor - which could annihilate the human race without the help of AI.

You need not only propose a “plausible” scenario, you also need to present a reason to believe it will happen. It’s plausible that a rogue faction could infiltrate the military, gain access to launch codes and deliberately start WWIII. It’s plausible that a bio lab could create an organism that overcomes the human immune system and resists all medications. A nonzero chance of any of those happening isn’t proof that they’re inevitable, with or without AI.

I think you probably know I’m not saying judges aren’t democrats or liberals, I’m saying the actions of individual judges aren’t the actions of “The Democrats” or “The Libs” or any other group they belong to,they’re individual decisions. Meme creators just like to oversimplify the world.

The way an acquittal works is a judge or jury in a courtroom makes a decision. I can’t answer for flawed court decisions, but when they do happen it’s not “The Democrats” or “The Libs” making those rulings.

Or how about you don’t assign me tasks and I don’t do them? Cuz I don’t remember signing up for a class.

Or not.

I’ve seen tons of these comics. Can somebody asplain how “No, you can’t do that” is a compromise?

If it has decent internet service, just let me know who I have to kill!

I’m sarcastic because I would assign the same probability as a zombie apocalypse. At the nuts and bolts level I think they’re both technically flawed on a Hollywood fantasy level.

What does an AI apocalypse even look like to you? Computers launching nuclear missiles or what? Shutting down power grids?

Good point. To be fair they’re also celebrating a culture that was in place for quite a while before the actual war, which the war was trying to preserve.

Yes I know, the robot apocalypse people seem desperate to be afraid of is always just around the corner. Geoff Hinton, while a definite pioneer in AI, didn’t kick anything off, he was one of a large number of people working on it, and one of a small number predicting armageddon.

The amount of cultural energy Americans have put into the old west cowboy era is amazing when you realize it only lasted 25 or 30 years, between the Civil War and the 1890s. All the classic westerns are set in that brief window of time. I think many people have the impression that whole generations lived and died during that era.

If you broaden it a little from job/hobby to living in the real setting of a movie, you’ll notice characters going places that make no sense at all. Like if it’s Seattle they might start a boating scene on Lake Union and ends up at Mercer Island, swinging by Alki beach on the way.

The trick is to judge things on their own merit and not on the hype around them.

The AI haters will hate this, but I think AI is gonna provide the push that forces the fundamental changes we want. You can only replace so many people with AI and robots. The theoretical point of zero employees also means zero customers, because nobody has any money to buy anything, so making employees obsolete makes business and profits obsolete. In the real world the system will change long before that point, because it will have to. It might be from food riots and social breakdown, or political movements finally taking hold, I don’t know, but AI will make the profit system eat itself. I’m just not looking forward to the extremely difficult transition period.

Broke my heart when my daughter at age 9 or 10 said one day that science was for boys. She went to a very progressive elementary school, I’m a software dev, and have no idea where that came from.

In my 20s I once threw my back out pressing an elevator button.