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Re:The Darwinian argument for worrying about AI by c_crank on Friday June 30, 2023 @12:00PM (#36537351)
The evolutionary ancestor to chickens still exists, and there are probably some chickens here and there that have escaped and become wild again. So long as the environment allows. The evolution of chicken penning would have been gradual, as well, as human structures evolved over time and sedentary human civilization formed. Very gradual changes.

>You won't have to be. Someone else will be that stooge. That you're sufficiently skeptical won't save the human race. How many people send Nigerian email scammers their life savings?

Not enough to decimate the entire financial system. Some companies may outsource all their decision making to some kind of LLM. They will then face lawsuits related to quality, unless that LLM behaves in a 'friendly' enough way not to cause issues.

>Like there won't be some "chicken wrangler" the AI can hire? How many bitcoins would it have to scrape together to pay for the hitman that would push you around?

Criminal organizations that handle these kinds of tasks rarely take unsolicited requests in bitcoin. They like to know who is asking, and why.

Re:The Darwinian argument for worrying about AI by tinideiznaimnou on Friday June 30, 2023 @02:02PM (#36539458)
>Criminal organizations that handle these kinds of tasks rarely take unsolicited requests in bitcoin. They like to know who is asking, and why.

Lone gunmen radicalized by reading words on the Internet don't even need payment. They don't even need to know which one of the 100 people they shoot up before offing themselves was the actual target. It's called "stochastic terrorism", look it up and despair.

I'm half convinced we're already past that and into "stochastic genocide" territory (hi!). Assuming consciousness is just a biological function, an actor with sufficient scope is absolutely capable of breeding it out of our species. Perhaps through instituting a filter on reproduction which presents itself as a fundamental conflict of values (between sexes; between social strata; etc), but in fact simply serves to foil the perpetuation of those genes that enable the capacity for disobedience.

I mean, have you seen the radical left or radical right (both of which the neoliberal end-of-history scenario supposedly rendered obsolete, before they suddenly turned up as if they had never gone away, at some point after the 2008 redistribution) actually achieve anything this century, other than, well, fucking around, beating each other up, shout increasingly elaborate forms of "lalala I can't hear you" at each other, and grow up to become harmless "spicy normies"? They're one of the distractions: the familiar stimulus of "political struggle" to assist with the conditioning, the "cloth mother" of monkey attachment experiments.

OTOH, none of the actually viable novel grassroots subcultures (which have a hold on youth, i.e. on humans in prime reproductive age) have an explicit goal or political manifesto. They just sorta sustain themselves, and superficially look like emergent groupings of dysfunctional people who bullshit each other and mooch off of polite society - nothing to see here. Upon closer inspection, you would notice that they all act like they're controlled from "elsewhere", and that "elsewhere" is in your pocket or on your desk right now.