swlabr

10^27 future lives

Ok here’s my Rat fermi-time traveller party paradox, in short, the Rat FTTP paradox.

1. According to Rat doctrine, many worlds is true and science is amazing and will solve all problems eventually.
2. Lack of time travel is a problem, meaning in some world, eventually there will be time travel, by 1.
3. Lack of 10^27 people is a problem*, so we will also have that, also by 1.

The paradox: If time travel is so easy and there will be so many future lives, where are all the future rats?

No seriously, where are they? This FTTP orgy was supposed to start 24 hours ago.

Years ago a friend of mine asked me if I was interested in IoT/smart devices and I said I didn’t want to be locked out of my house if the wifi was out. His reaction indicated to me that he lost some amount of respect for me, and in turn I lost respect for him.

Since then I’ve only really seen IoT stuff in the homes of tech people, everyone else just DGAF. I think AI is following that same trajectory.

PS Years later pretty much the same exchange happened with brain simulated “immortality”, with the same mutual loss of respect.

PPS I currently have some smart lights installed. Once the initial novelty of having a bunch of RGB lights wore off, I pretty much just use them as normal bulbs, except with their brightness turned all the way down.

PPPS I also have some google speakers. None of them are in use.

the new thing, well nobody can tell you that you’re doing things wrong if nobody knows for sure what are you doing. to even tell whether it’s working or not you’d need to sit in heads of israeli military planners and know what are their exact objectives and acceptable collateral damage

Yeah, and I don’t think they are ever going to be explicit about how their “AI” works.

I mean I either want no fingers or all the fingers for my pizza

I’ve tried various face creams of different levels of prestige and not really noticed a difference, so, no, I guess.

Pizza that tasted like it was generated by AI tbh

CW: Palestine-Israel.

Something I’ve observed is various members of the rats being zionist/pro-israel/anti-palestine. This doesn’t really surprise me, but that’s not what I’m commenting on.

One topic that occasionally gets discussed is Israel’s use of “AI” in warfare. I’m only going to link one source and I’m not going into it too deeply.

So what I’m wondering is: this seems to pattern match to one of the great AI doom narratives, ie. of AGI* being given control of military assets; where is the rationalist outrage? I searched Lesswrong for mentions of Israel and the IDF but turned up empty handed.

To be clear: this is a request for submissions. I am not rhetorically sneering at what I am perceiving as a hypocritical lack of outrage, to do so would require proof. That being said it’s probably clear from this comment that my mind is constructing that narrative.

*of course I am not saying that whatever the IDF is saying is AI is AGI, as AGI is not real.

I’ve started noticing what might be described as “filler art” being done by AI. For example, while a local restaurant was being constructed, it had boards up to obscure the goings on with AI art on it- easily distinguished by bad hands, disturbing looking noodles, and amorphous blobs resembling, uh, more morphous blobs. I didn’t take any photos because I didn’t want to ruin the sanctity of my phone.

Once they finally opened I tried their food and it sucked.

Oh hey someone in the comments said it even better:

For even more brevity with no loss of substance: ”A turkey gets fed every day, right up until it's slaughtered before Thanksgiving.”

Monologue, 10 second read: “yeah dawg so extrapolating from data seems intuitive, but data alone is not enough to make accurate or convincing predictions.”

Mean Girls! (the original)

“Screw the art, I have LLMs!”