I’m always amused by the number of tough guys that have such a fragile grasp on their masculinity. 
Wanna be a real tough guy? Don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks.
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They already have a technical term for that. They call the concept a Sigma Male.
They also think that Sigma Males are rare because it’s an unattainable stretch goal to be a powerful independent manly man, but because you just are, not because you care about whether other people care about how manly you are.
They keep telling on themselves.
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I wonder what he thought “mass deportation now" meant, if not that?
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He, and a lot of other people, deluded themselves into thinking that (a) there really were hordes of violent criminal illegal immigrants who could be rounded up and just sent back to where they came from, and that (b) this would just happen somehow without disrupting the lives of the good, hard-working, non-criminal illegal (and legal) immigrants. They completely missed, or more likely ignored, the many times when Trump and others in his circle made it clear that, to them, all illegal immigrants (and many of the legal immigrants), especially the brown ones, are, by definition, violent criminals; that their mere presence in this country is an act of violence against the United States.
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Meanwhile, many of the people orchestrating this mass deportation are themselves convicted felons.
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To illustrate the seemingly insurmountable challenge humans would face against superintelligent systems, he offered a stark comparison between humans and squirrels.
“No group of squirrels can figure out how to control us, right? Even if you give them more resources, more acorns, whatever, they’re not going to solve that problem. And it’s the same for us,” Yampolskiy concluded, painting a bleak picture of humanity’s potential helplessness against a truly superior artificial intelligence.
I didn’t listen to the podcast, because… ugh, Joe Rogan, but this seems awful fucking vague to me… we’re like squirrels compared to AI? REALLY? where is he getting that from the current available evidence.
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Well I’m actually perfectly willing to believe that Joe Rogan is like a squirrel compared to AI and I do mean the current, giant Markov-chain version that’s really just a coin-sorter for words.
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But imagine if someday we were? Squirrels are so helpless in the face of humanity’s superior intellects, some people have almost figured out how to keep them out of bird feeders.
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LOL! True enough!
Just in general, he’s making broad predictions based on nothing concrete, as far as I can see from this article. For me, the disconnect is how do we get the sci-fi version of a super-intelligent AI… It’s like the underpants gnomes with these dudes… like it’s CLEAR that that is not what we have now. There has been no reasonable explanation for how something that is built by human minds/hands, via coding, is going to all of a sudden become self-aware and start down a road of some kind of independent super-intelligence. I feel like many people think that’s true because of how AI was treated in films from the 70s to now… as something that of course will slip it’s bonds and become something greater than it was created, BUT HOW IN THE FUCK DOES THAT HAPPEN… Everyone just assumes it’s gonna happen, and never points to the path where that happens. Maybe this guy does in his books, but it was certainly not explained in that article…
Also…
intellectology
Is this another case of a mediocre white dude? I can’t tell… Maybe it’s just too much for my lady brain trained in the humanities…
[ETA] Here is a bit of an expansion of the argument that Yampolskiy makes…
Whenever anyone mentions the idea of a “black box” as this article does, I’m put in the mind of the field of cybernetics…
[ETA] Sorry… one more addition… if AI poses a threat, it’s in how people are USING it in the here and now… case in point…
Not to mention the propaganda uses, the misinformation uses, etc…
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The correct comparison would be squirrels who are intelligent enough to genetically engineer humans even more intelligent than them. And I’m not sure whether that type of squirrel couldn’t control the humanity they themselves created.
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Yeah, that’s my thinking on this, too. How does it make sense that something we make can somehow make the jump to being smarter than us without our intervention? Does this show a misunderstanding about what human intelligence actually is? It seems like people get obsessed over these “metrics” created to objectify human smarts (like IQ tests, which we know are deeply flawed because of their original intent), rather than looking at the actual complexity of human’s smarts in a variety of ways… It’s not just knowing a bunch of shit, after all. If so, then that one guy at the pub trivia who always gets all the questions right would be the smartest guy on earth or whatever…
This is not to say that AI doesn’t pose specific threats, but I sort of feel like THIS particular sort of fearmongering misses the ACTUAL threats (or is perhaps designed to distract us from those threats) - the one noted in the article above, the environmental concerns with data centers, the threat to people’s livelihood, mis/disinformation, basically all the shit that people like Merchant, Doctorow, and Zitron have been talking about.
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I think this kind of doomsday prophetism is a specific kind of narcissism. These people get fixated on an idea and then tell everyone else that they are just too stupid to see, because they can’t imagine exponential growth. It must be very satisfying to a narcissist to be able to tell almost everyone how wrong they are because they’re too stupid to see the truth.
In reality, we understand what they are saying. Yes, in theory a self-replicating intelligent system could become more intelligent with every iteration, surpassing humans, but they can’t deal with the fact that most people consider this a highly unlikely scenario only applicable if actual AI is achieved, which is far from certain, rather than an inevitability. And, as you say, there are lots of problems with the current pseudo-AI that actually make life worse right now that deserve more bandwidth than sci-fi ideas.
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And once it surpasses humans in that respect, its intelligence will inevitably translate into actual power, just like how smart people are…um, are the ones calling all the shots now… 
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Given Rogan’s intellectual capabilities, maybe it is Squirrel-brained Rogan vs AI with him not doing too well.
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Harsh.
Harsh but fair, as the UK saying goes.
Very fair.
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Oddly enough, this got recommended to me today…
Rogan: I thought pipes break just because the water expands?
Tyson: Yeah, I just described that, in the opposite direction.
Rogan: But, I didn’t know it gets larger.
Tyson: That’s what expansion means. What kind of… what… what’s with your vocabulary here?
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Is that different from a Gigachad? I can’t keep track anymore.
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