David GerardApr 14, 2024

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 21 April 2024

https://awful.systems/post/1360254

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 21 April 2024 - awful.systems

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid! Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no. If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high > The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Show threadSailor Sega SaturnApr 15, 2024

Is artificial intelligence the great filter that makes advanced technical civilisations rare in the universe?

This professor is arguing we need to regulate AI because we haven’t found any space aliens yet and the most conceivably explanation why is that they all wiped themselves out with killer AIs.

And hits some of the greatest hits:

  • AI will nuke us all because the nuclear powers are so incompetent they’d hook the bombs up to Chat-GPT.
  • AI will wipe us out with a killer virus for reasons
  • We may not be adorable enough towards AI to prevent being vaporized even if we become cyborgs 🥺
  • AI will wipe out an entire planet. Solution: we need people on a bunch of different planets and space-stations to study it "safely"
  • Um actually space aliens would all be robots. Be free from your flesh prisons!

Zero mentions of global warming of course.

I kinda want to think that the author has just been reading some weird ideas. At least he put himself out there and wrote a paper with human sentences! It’s all aboard the AI hype train for sure, and constantly makes huge logical leaps, but it somehow doesn’t make me feel as skeezy as some of the other stuff on here.

Show threadSoyweiserApr 15, 2024
Personally I think a unnoticed black swan event relating climate change is way more likely. ‘Whoops turns out that we thought 1.5C wasn’t that big a problem but this causes some feedback loop in the oceans killing them all, yes it caused more algae to grow, but these had less nutrition causing the fish to overeat and die, causing the algae to choke themselves out. Dead seas everywhere’.
Show threadArchiteuthis
Sad upvote.
Apr 15, 2024 at 8:09pmWeb
Show threadSoyweiserApr 15, 2024
Dont worry, as people are aware this might happen, it isn’t technically a black swan event. It is just a risk we are ignoring ;) (im not sure if this is actually a real risk, or that we really are ignoring it, im not a marine biologist).
Show threadtitotalApr 16, 2024

I feel this makes it an unlikely great filter though. Surely some aliens would be less stupid than humanity?

Or they could be on a planet with far less fossil fuels reserves, so they don’t have the opportunity to kill themselves.

Show threadSoyweiserApr 16, 2024
Think both ‘has the wisdom as a society to prevent unknown unknown side effects from industrialization from wrecking the ecosystem’ and ‘has almost no access to fossil fuels’ could also be pretty effective filters. In the latter case they prob would still be around but they wouldn’t spread in the universe so we wouldn’t hear from them which I think would satisfy the filter reqs.