But the torment nexus is so cool!

It's fine, I'll just create a small torment nexus!

IMHO this would be a hilarious movie

I've read/seen about half of these. I haven't seen They Live yet. What do you feel are the "must read/see" from the list?

Not OP. Making guesses here…

• Idiocracy = humanity becomes catastrophically stupid / institutions decay
• The Matrix = humans are reduced to resources inside a machine-controlled system
• Terminator = machines actively exterminate humanity

Idiocracy X Matrix: People are dumb & happy, caused their own problems, so maybe Wall-E?

Idiocracy X Terminator: Our stupidity puts us in a bad situation of creating our own demise. Dr. Strangelove perhaps?

Matrix X Termiantor: Machine dominate humanity out of existence. The cross here feels shallow, like these films are pretty similar with regards to humans, machines, and the outcome. Oblivon (2013) kinda works? 9 could also work.

Center: I dunno, Robocop? Systems failing, corporations suck, lethal machines. Honestly Black Mirror likely wins, but it’s too broad a series.

They weren't relevant for the message.

That's not a reassuring thought. We've been improving our standard of living for tens of thousands of years, but past performance does not guarantee future results. Right now the only certainty is that it's a long way down and we're already starting to fall. If the epstein class has its way, we're going back to serfdom or worse.

Because your job is to shutup, keep your head in the sand, and pay your taxes while your life force is drained from you by entities and machinations beyond your grasp.

Because much of the world’s economy is powered by the collective addiction of a huge portion of the population that willingly gives up its agency and privacy for hits of brain chemicals that make them feel superficially good while ultimately only serving the needs of a few obscenely wealthy people who fully understand and are okay with the harms they cause. We’re their batteries. We give them their power and they trap us with shiny gadgets and new games to play, continually turning our power against us and exploiting more of our economic, social, and cultural value.

I feel like Gattaca or Metropolis are missing here...

Surveillance capitalism

consciousness is less relevant… a paperclip making ai doesn’t need consciousness to convert the world into paperclips

self improvement without a human in the loop is legitimately close, and once that happens it’s possible we lose control and alignment becomes incredibly difficult (alignment with human values is inefficient, so removing that barrier is low hanging fruit)

viruses also aren’t conscious or even definitively alive, but because they can effect the world on their own (which ai now can too to some degree), they can negatively impact us because they’re not aligned with the things we’d like

and on consciousness too, if you believe our brain is just chemical and electrical processes and there’s nothing more, we are just a big statistics machine, so there’s nothing technically stopping some program from being conscious, and in that case it’s kinda the “million monkeys at a million typewriters” situation… if AI speeds up AI development then things get exponential, and when you speed things up 1,000,000x who’s to say it doesn’t stumble onto a solution - it doesn’t even have to look anything like current models in that case… in 32 seconds it’ll have (theoretically; i’m not saying that’s possible or anything) completed a years worth of improvement, and models from a year ago were significantly less capable

there’s also emergent behaviour, and plenty of other weird things (heck LLMs in general are kinda emergent behavour… we didn’t think that simply increasing size would lead to the structure and behaviour that we see)