Sfdebris.net

Beastro wrote: ↑Tue Jul 16, 2019 3:57 am

Rocketboy1313 wrote: ↑Sat Jul 13, 2019 7:37 pm Star Trek's "Stay with your own kind" issues bother me more and more when I recall how cultural exchange is such a fun concept.

That's one side to the coin. The other is chaos, upheaval, violence...

The base reason for xenophobia can simply boil down to the fact that contact with strange groups of people for tens of thousands of years resulted into the introduction of new pathogens ones own group might have varying resistances to.

There's also another aspect of it of things like the chaotic effects of forced migration or slavery, something pertinent here given the involuntary isolation and containment of this group of Klingons.

Finally, the great medium of cultural exchange through human history has been empire, something I'd hardly think many moderns on this would look on as something of a good thing though it is part of why I do despite the deep, deep costs that come with that exchange and diffusion for both sides of an empire.

Beastro wrote: ↑Tue Jul 16, 2019 3:57 am Finally, the great medium of cultural exchange through human history has been empire, something I'd hardly think many moderns on this would look on as something of a good thing though it is part of why I do despite the deep, deep costs that come with that exchange and diffusion for both sides of an empire.

Yukaphile wrote: ↑Tue Jul 16, 2019 6:19 pm I've seen his stuff! He's the guy with the speech impediment, yes?

Darth Wedgius wrote: ↑Tue Jul 16, 2019 6:13 pm

Beastro wrote: ↑Tue Jul 16, 2019 3:57 am The problems I have are less of the "AI gains self-awareness and rebels" stereotype, but rather an AI programmed with a strict outlook that then blindly enforces it as the programmer sees it. Great and mighty AI are set up with the framework of something like a Marxist (or really any other) outlook and then go on to enforce it repeatedly despite the failures of the system that simply brought collapse when done by humans, instead doesn't because it's is constantly maintained and repaired at the expense of Mankind because of the lack of frailty in a machine that allow any tyranny to eventually decline and fall.

The result would be something like Ellison's AM, only not self-aware and filled with misanthropic hatred but instead enforcing a Procrustean hell on Earth because its creators wanted their ideology to reign and make Man and the reality bow to their beliefs rather the other way around.

No disagreement here!

The YouTuber Isaac Arthur (who is generally great and anybody here should watch his stuff) has mentioned a "paperclip maximizer" which can be as intelligent as all get out, and who has the goal of making as many paperclips as possible. If eliminating humanity will help it make more paperclips, and if it can do so, then...

I've wondered if an AI with a hard-coded goal of minimizing human suffering would make itself very, very helpful in all areas of life... and then wipe out humanity, preventing millions of untold generations of human suffering.

When you're making a mind that thinks a thousand times faster than yours, it pays to be very careful indeed.