It’s grifting, pure and simple. All those things may be possible but Sam Altman is spewing this line of bullshit to keep the venture capital flowing into his company.
Exactly. As a SW engineer, I don't know how far we are from an AGI exactly, but I am confident enough Altman and openAi have no idea where to even start.
As a SW engineer
I read that and immediately thought of you working in a Star Wars hangar, fixing rebel ships
That sounds like the general consensus from most SW engineers.
As a software engineer that works in AI, the "breakthrough" we've made is in proving that LLM's can perform well at scale, and that hallucinations aren't as big a problem as initially thought. Most tech companies didn't do what OpenAI did because hallucinations are brand-damaging, whereas OpenAI didn't give a fuck. In the next few years, all existing AI systems will be through LLM's, and probably as good at ChatGPT.
We might make more progress now that researchers and academics see the value in LLM's, but my weakly held opinion is that it's mostly surrounded by hype.
We're nowhere near what most would call AGI, although to be blunt, I don't think the average person on here could truly tell you what that looks like without disagreeing with AI researchers.
and probably as good at ChatGPT
We are so fucked.
In Venice he never claims that he will be the one to do these things, at least in that tweet he doesn't claim to be the one that's going to do those things.
I'm not sure what the line about creating new realities means. I assume he means VR and not that AI is going to give us the ability to access hyperspace or something.
The current state of capitalism will ensure the second line never sees the light of day
deregulated capitalism is a curse on society
Said looking at one regulated to almost mercantilist levels.
We can already create enough abondance that no human starves, sleep outside or can't affotd medical treatment. Still look at the world.
Why bother to let humans live if they are not profitable enough for the megacorps? That almost sounds like work.
No no, they're desperately looking for that, because gating infinite abundance away from the plebs will be amazing for quarterly profits and entertainment! Think of all the reality shows you can make by pitting the poor against themselves!
Abundance is already here, tons of food are destroyed and thrown out when they accidentally make too much while people are starving, there's no money in abundance, it's the artificial lack of supply that keeps prices high and profits soaring.
Food isn't the only resource in the equation. Most of the resources are limited and even diminishing.
I agree but I think their point was more along the lines of "Even if we have complete abundance of everything (as in, the capabilities to produce anything in abundance), capitalists will continue to create artificial lack of supply to continue profiting off of the workers. For example, look at the food abundance we have"
capitalists will continue to create artificial lack of supply
I think it's not that, but just:
capitalists won't spend their money to create logistical chains for free.
"Collect and distribute supply" won't do itself, someone should do that.
And noone will do that for free
Approximately 1/3 of all food produced is wasted.
Have you read Ishmael?
The first paragraph? Can't say I disagree.
Second paragraph? Delusional. Or actively deceitful. Given Altman's background, I'm leaning toward the second.
We already have abundance at scale; the rest is just greed and logistics
It's enough to look at how much stuff is available in a supermarket, or in the average, home, to know we live in an age of abundance. The problem is, is that abundance is not shared, but hoarded.
We have enough food to feed the world, we have enough production for everyone in the world to have a smartphone and internet access and electricity. We can make clothes for everyone, we can home everyone. We have enough healthcare for everyone.
By an objective measure, we have abundance, we have enough. The world is just severely mismanaging our resources and the distribution of them. Because the economy doesn't work for humans, instead humans work for the economy.
Cure all human disease?
Paragraphs are bodies of text. So the second paragraph in this scenario is the one where we are only a few breakthroughs away.
Words are a series of letters.
He agrees that we can cure all human disease? That's silly.
It's just bait for investors. This is the kind of crap that gets people with money and zero understanding of computers to buy stocks.
The thing that keeps us from living lives of abundance is not a lack of technology.
It’s true—for a very exclusive interpretation of “we”.
We'll have all that, and escalating poverty at scales that are difficult to imagine...
An issue with this tweet is that we already have the capacity to do a lot. We have the technology to provide healthy and diverse diets for the entire planet and fit a cities worth of farming inside a few city blocks (vertical hydroponics/aeroponics). We have the ability to create electricity in a dozen different renewable ways. We have the ability to desalinate water creating nearly infinite fresh water, we have enough square footage in the world to easily house everyone. We have stellar education systems that we could hand out to the entire world.
Why don't we do it? Well, all these things cost money. But the issue is, there also exists staggering amounts of money across the world. The panama papers revealed just a fraction of the wealth being hoarded by just a fraction of the wealthiest people in the world (and most implicated in the panema papers weren't even too crazy, like soccer stars and business owners). There's exists tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars of wealth created by the world just floating around in billionaires bank accounts and in the coffers of world powers.
So it's not an issue of abundance coming in the near future, we have it here on earth right now.
exactly.
many of the mundane atrocities being committed every day are deliberate choices in service of capital rather than people.
you know, health insurance companies, etc.
I feel like AGI might be the furthest away of all those things.
Well, I am convinced we currently have no idea how an AGI could be made. It shouldn't be a HW issue since it is possible to have a human brain worth of computing power in a small cluster. So it could be near impossible or we may be one great shower thought away, there is no way to know.
If we means the human race, it's absolutely true. There's just no mention of a timeline.
These people are frauds.
This reads like Musk promising everyone that his imaginary train will be faster and cheaper than everything else.
Every rich tech bro has convince themselves they are the savior of the world.
Just put it in chatgpt I'm sure it will figure it all out
Sure. Just need to get a bunch of trillions hoarded away by billionaires and throw it at R&D to solve these problems and I bet it would happen.
These rich fuckers making proclamations like that yet somehow still expecting someone else to pay for the solutions.
He's not wrong. He's probably not going to be the guy leading the charge on any of that but he's not wrong.
He's forgetting about the part where it'll be monetized in such a way that only the rich will benefit.
Check again. He never said it wouldn't!
He's not forgetting: that's what he's proposing!
You're not exactly wrong but at the same time we all benefited from the invention of say electricity or computing. If they do invent fusion or something I'm sure we'll get benefits. Maybe not free power but at the very least that allow us to buy it.
With access to that much power we could desalinate seawater on an industrial scale or power some of the carbon capture technologies. It will make things better.
It's a cult. Altman is one of the TESCREAL devotees. He truly believes that he can build the electronic messiah.
Hail the Omnissiah! I mean what-
Remember: burning an effigy a day keeps the Evil away~
Well, the bar for an electronic messiah is not that high, considering its predecessors in the cult field.
It's delusional. The problems we have are not caused by lack of technology and cannot be solved by new technology.
Opium.
I gotta find a way to filter out techbros from my feed.
I think he believes what he's saying. From his perspective AGI will be great, and a lot of people think that AI and quantum computing will have a feedback loop where AI will help us create a better quantum computer which will make a better AI and so on...
Down here in the filth though, we're going to go through mass unemployment, rapid shifts in markets, loss of privacy due to increasingly sophisticated AI powered surveillance, and complete loss of our freedom of speech.
So, all that stuff probably will happen to people like him. Just not us.
AI will help us create a better quantum computer which will make a better AI
Current "AI" is just LLMs. They don't need some crazy quantum supercomputer. They aren't improved by more processing power.
They need a ton of data to work at a basic level. There's no reason to think that future programs will just get better on their own. Especially if a lot of data is now LLM generated. They have no capacity to learn on their own through research.
The irony of repeating the exact same thoughts as every thread like this contains, about how because it's just a sophisticated "parrot" then it cannot be intelligent 😂
We don't even have NGI.
He isn't wrong, but the pathways is by taxing the absolute fuck out of billionaires
Healthy optimism
Optimism, pessimism, those are never healthy. They cloud your view of the truth, and make you assume that you know what you don't.
So if a pilot is in a failing aeroplane and is coming down for a landing that he knows is almost certainly going to lead to death. Having a more optimistic view of the situation is always bad? What about the people on the plane that are either going to die instantly or live, why be scared beforehand.
One of my favourite quotes is:
"The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation."
And this brings me back to optimism. How many times have you watched a sports game where it was shut out and over then in the dying minutes of the game you see a team win it and the commentators will say something like "no one thought that was possible, except for the men on the pitch and at the end of they day that's all that matters"
I can't believe I'm defending optimism because I'm thr least optimistic person in the world.
I can’t believe I’m defending optimism because I’m thr least optimistic person in the world.
I'm defending realism even if I'm extremely pessimistic, so... welcome to the club.
So if a pilot is in a failing aeroplane [...]
From the pilot's PoV, both optimism and pessimism mean the potential loss of the tiny chance of survival - one because it underestimates the effort necessary to achieve the desired result, another for giving it up. While realism is the option that actually allows you to seize that chance, and say "we're probably fucked, but I can increase my odds of survival with my effort".
From the passengers' PoV: if they know that the plane will crash, and can't realistically do anything about it, optimism means wasting their likely last moments of life. While realism means accepting "I'm going to die in a few moments; better grab the gorgonzola from my bag and enjoy it, I probably won't be able to gift it to my cousin. Komm, Susser Tot!"
And this brings me back to optimism. How many times have you watched a sports game
I don't watch sports, but I think that what I said still applies: optimism leading to less effort than the necessary to win, pessimism leading to giving up, realism leads to a cold analysis of the situation and what should be done to get the best result.
I don't think most of these people realize that Earth has finite resources, and we're already running short on some of them
These people jump immediately to star lifting what will give you several planets of resources and energy. It's very "rest of the fucking owl."
And who do you think will be in charge of all of these things? Lol
Cocaine is a helluva drug.
what is AGI?
Artificial General Intelligence
Adjusted Gross Income.
they’re absolutely correct we will make all of these breakthroughs, but you dear reader? will benefit from none of them
Only for share holders.
Endless abundance *for the trillionaires that manage to blast themselves off the rotting rock before it collapses in on itself
I believe the first paragraph except colonizing space, at least not without hundreds of years of new technology at the human pace of invention.
We humans cannot even minimally adequately care for one another or this habitat, the one we evolved from, the most accommodating, self-correcting(to a point), resilient habitat that humanity will EVER know by far, and we've been fucking this easy situation up like breathing. Earth isn't even the "enter your name" part of the interstellar civilization test, that would be colonizing our local moon. No, failing the Earth test is basically taking the test to the bathroom assuming it to be toilet paper.
Everything else in non-multigenerational reach will be completely and totally unforgiving. Even in the best circumstances, one person going stir crazy if we're talking about sending real people can literally get everyone else killed, one major failure everybody dead, one major accident everybody dead.
Sorry, I know most of us are deluded into believing salvation comes from reckless attempts at ready fire aim growth, but if we don't get this world fully squared away from the consequences of our reckless actions, find homeostasis and successfully meet the needs of the humans here on easy mode Earth, the idea that we can make colonies of hundreds or thousands on our Moon/Titan/Mars is a bad joke.
We can send 5-20 HIGHLY TRAINED perfect specimens to Mars or Titan to plant a flag and grow potatoes for a few years, and I'm all for that as a human rallying achievement, we really need one of those, but that isn't the same thing as developing a true, sustainable presence on another world. We'll have either long since decimated this habitat or pulled out a miracle of finding equilibrium with it long before we're ready for that.
I believe none except colonising space... The others are so far off that we don't even know for sure if they're even possible, what's going to go wrong or whether we're looking in the complete wrong direction, meanwhile you're dismissing the only realistic one in the next 250 years because we're close enough that we actually know how hard it is.
There's something to be said about chasing after things that are impossible as the possible seems too hard, but I'm not enough of a philosopher for that.
Knowing how hard something is can be a larger barrier than not knowing. But the main barrier preventing space colonies is the same thing preventing ocean colonies — "Why?". What motivation is there to settle space? Exploration and experimentation can be done for motivation of seeing if we can, but settling needs known payoff both for the settlers and the funders.
Asteroid mining is the only current suggested motivation for such a thing. And it's very possible that by the time we figure out asteroid capture, we won't need humans present for that work.
Asteroid mining and space industry is a huge reason, and it's the next logical step for humanity, especially since it means we can put dirty industry where nature and life doesn't exist.
There are absurd amounts of resources in space, a lot of which are difficult to access or rare on earth. In addition, space can give opportunities for new forms of manufacturing, from being able to control the level of gravity due to weightlessness, to being surrounded by vacuum. Two things which are either very difficult or impossible to recreate on earth.
You don't need to "capture" asteroids. You mine them in place and build heavy industry and everything you need in-situ. It's a hell of a lot easier to launch a new vessel off an asteroid than Earth. For some reason, people always think we'll be bringing these resources back to the surface of the Earth. That's wasteful, why do we want to throw them back into a gravity well?
We don't even need fancy fusion tech or anything for this to work, regular fission reactors can power things just fine. And the bonus is, you don't have to worry about where you put the waste. Just designate another asteroid in a clear orbit where it's most likely to not hit anything else for the next ten thousand years as a dumping ground, and mark it on the maps.
And in order to achieve it we need to get rid of some dipshit CEOs
If it weren't for the thieving class and the people who fall for their bullshit, I'm convinced we'd be having serious discussions about what it means to live in a post-scarcity society by now.
It's very rational, it's always been mocked and looked down upon to be optimistic. But through the ages it has been proven to be true that we achieve much more than we imagine.
However the pessimism built in to most people probably helps this drive and is actually a good thing.
Is that new reality going to end up being a shinier version of Office Space for everyone, everywhere, forever?
If so you can keep all that shit.
Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!
he wants to live inside his computer
I don't disagree with any of these things, we just don't know when they will come to be and its going to be a rough ride. Old and new systems fighting, the history and the future all happening at once. We are experiencing something that has never happened to any species on earth, or maybe in the entire universe ever, so we're flying blind, ready or not.
Hopium. There's far too much "evil" force in this world for there to ever be an edan or unity. Overall chaos is what got us to our current state of humanity. Chaos will always be.
Don't read that as me saying humans are shit though. It's more like humans don't want to take their lack of "power" seriously. Which is natural or whatever... I know it all sounds negative, but I don't mean for it to sound negative. Chaos is the only constant, order comes from it, but chaos is always dominant from the present moment to the future. You can't stop the universe, including human society from changing and growing. You can learn about it and create from it but it always owns you. No matter who you are.
None of the things mentioned here that we could achieve would require an absence of evil or need the whole world to cooperate. Hell we've been doing the last one for quite some time in the form of books, movies and video games.
DMT
yes
Yes.
Ugh. So many places in the world already have abundance that is hard to imagine; but that's only the case because of extreme hoarding of resources and wealth.
It's a character flaw called "wishful belief" - that is, failure to distinguish between what you predict that'll happen and what you hope that'll happen.
I'm sure we could do all of these things if we weren't biased towards consolidating power into the hands of a few biased individuals.
Of course, I'm just quoting Fourth International Posadist rhetoric, but Posadas may have a point.
I can confidently say we won't do any of these things until we can kill capitalism and trends towards autocracy.
I can confidently say we won't do any of these things until we can kill capitalism and trends towards autocracy.
So basically never. The appetite of the regular person to revolt is nonexistent, unfortunately.
Never is a long time. The common people are tiring of what capitalism has wrought and the ongoing drive to force people to do more for less and discard those who are sufficiently useful. Our appetite to revolt may well be fueled by this push. A greater danger is the tendency for successful revolutions to turn into serial dictatorships, each overthrowing the previous one until everyone is dead tired of war. France took around a century to sort itself out from monarchy, and today is still capitalist.
On the other hand, the climate crisis might drive us to extinction, and if it doesn't, is estimated (by the few who dare to estimate it) to reduce the population to below 500 million. If we end up migrant tribes again, we might be able to tackle the trends towards feudalism early.
And the climate crisis is not the only great filter we're being confronted with. Personally, I don't hope anymore so much as look soberly at where we are now and try to guess at where we'll go. And for now the best we can do in the US is hope we can obstruct and delay the steady march towards autocratic fascism until the desperados running the Republican party can't keep it together anymore.
I know that's not inspiring, but if someone is saying something to inspire us, they're taking us for marks.
Very well said. It’s such a shame to know that there is something better out there, what it looks like isn’t exactly clear, but there is a better way. The workers truly need to unite, for the benefit of us all.
I agree! We just need to kill capitalism for that to happen.
All of this can be yours for the low, low price of $19.99/month.
I’m especially cynical when it comes to the “cure all human diseases” part.
You want to manage a disease. Make it tolerable and survivable. That way, you’ve got a patient customer for life, and you can milk them for decades.
Edit: I’m talking from the point of view of an asshole capitalist, folks.
It's probably cocaine
Cokeium
cokaina... todays topic, slavery
Cocainum
Hyping up the stock price.
Helluva drug
https://youtu.be/oSPT27XyY1U
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/oSPT27XyY1U
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
We already have that abundance. It's just waiting to be liberated.
Yes
It’s grifting, pure and simple. All those things may be possible but Sam Altman is spewing this line of bullshit to keep the venture capital flowing into his company.
Exactly. As a SW engineer, I don't know how far we are from an AGI exactly, but I am confident enough Altman and openAi have no idea where to even start.
I read that and immediately thought of you working in a Star Wars hangar, fixing rebel ships
That sounds like the general consensus from most SW engineers.
As a software engineer that works in AI, the "breakthrough" we've made is in proving that LLM's can perform well at scale, and that hallucinations aren't as big a problem as initially thought. Most tech companies didn't do what OpenAI did because hallucinations are brand-damaging, whereas OpenAI didn't give a fuck. In the next few years, all existing AI systems will be through LLM's, and probably as good at ChatGPT.
We might make more progress now that researchers and academics see the value in LLM's, but my weakly held opinion is that it's mostly surrounded by hype.
We're nowhere near what most would call AGI, although to be blunt, I don't think the average person on here could truly tell you what that looks like without disagreeing with AI researchers.
We are so fucked.
In Venice he never claims that he will be the one to do these things, at least in that tweet he doesn't claim to be the one that's going to do those things.
I'm not sure what the line about creating new realities means. I assume he means VR and not that AI is going to give us the ability to access hyperspace or something.
The current state of capitalism will ensure the second line never sees the light of day
deregulated capitalism is a curse on society
Said looking at one regulated to almost mercantilist levels.
We can already create enough abondance that no human starves, sleep outside or can't affotd medical treatment. Still look at the world.
Why bother to let humans live if they are not profitable enough for the megacorps? That almost sounds like work.
No no, they're desperately looking for that, because gating infinite abundance away from the plebs will be amazing for quarterly profits and entertainment! Think of all the reality shows you can make by pitting the poor against themselves!
Abundance is already here, tons of food are destroyed and thrown out when they accidentally make too much while people are starving, there's no money in abundance, it's the artificial lack of supply that keeps prices high and profits soaring.
Food isn't the only resource in the equation. Most of the resources are limited and even diminishing.
I agree but I think their point was more along the lines of "Even if we have complete abundance of everything (as in, the capabilities to produce anything in abundance), capitalists will continue to create artificial lack of supply to continue profiting off of the workers. For example, look at the food abundance we have"
I think it's not that, but just:
"Collect and distribute supply" won't do itself, someone should do that. And noone will do that for free
Approximately 1/3 of all food produced is wasted.
Have you read Ishmael?
The first paragraph? Can't say I disagree.
Second paragraph? Delusional. Or actively deceitful. Given Altman's background, I'm leaning toward the second.
We already have abundance at scale; the rest is just greed and logistics
It's enough to look at how much stuff is available in a supermarket, or in the average, home, to know we live in an age of abundance. The problem is, is that abundance is not shared, but hoarded.
We have enough food to feed the world, we have enough production for everyone in the world to have a smartphone and internet access and electricity. We can make clothes for everyone, we can home everyone. We have enough healthcare for everyone.
By an objective measure, we have abundance, we have enough. The world is just severely mismanaging our resources and the distribution of them. Because the economy doesn't work for humans, instead humans work for the economy.
Cure all human disease?
Paragraphs are bodies of text. So the second paragraph in this scenario is the one where we are only a few breakthroughs away.
Words are a series of letters.
He agrees that we can cure all human disease? That's silly.
It's just bait for investors. This is the kind of crap that gets people with money and zero understanding of computers to buy stocks.
The thing that keeps us from living lives of abundance is not a lack of technology.
It’s true—for a very exclusive interpretation of “we”.
We'll have all that, and escalating poverty at scales that are difficult to imagine...
An issue with this tweet is that we already have the capacity to do a lot. We have the technology to provide healthy and diverse diets for the entire planet and fit a cities worth of farming inside a few city blocks (vertical hydroponics/aeroponics). We have the ability to create electricity in a dozen different renewable ways. We have the ability to desalinate water creating nearly infinite fresh water, we have enough square footage in the world to easily house everyone. We have stellar education systems that we could hand out to the entire world.
Why don't we do it? Well, all these things cost money. But the issue is, there also exists staggering amounts of money across the world. The panama papers revealed just a fraction of the wealth being hoarded by just a fraction of the wealthiest people in the world (and most implicated in the panema papers weren't even too crazy, like soccer stars and business owners). There's exists tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars of wealth created by the world just floating around in billionaires bank accounts and in the coffers of world powers.
So it's not an issue of abundance coming in the near future, we have it here on earth right now.
exactly.
many of the mundane atrocities being committed every day are deliberate choices in service of capital rather than people.
you know, health insurance companies, etc.
I feel like AGI might be the furthest away of all those things.
Well, I am convinced we currently have no idea how an AGI could be made. It shouldn't be a HW issue since it is possible to have a human brain worth of computing power in a small cluster. So it could be near impossible or we may be one great shower thought away, there is no way to know.
If we means the human race, it's absolutely true. There's just no mention of a timeline.
These people are frauds.
This reads like Musk promising everyone that his imaginary train will be faster and cheaper than everything else.
Marketing...
Every rich tech bro has convince themselves they are the savior of the world.
Just put it in chatgpt I'm sure it will figure it all out
Sure. Just need to get a bunch of trillions hoarded away by billionaires and throw it at R&D to solve these problems and I bet it would happen.
These rich fuckers making proclamations like that yet somehow still expecting someone else to pay for the solutions.
He's not wrong. He's probably not going to be the guy leading the charge on any of that but he's not wrong.
He's forgetting about the part where it'll be monetized in such a way that only the rich will benefit.
Check again. He never said it wouldn't!
He's not forgetting: that's what he's proposing!
You're not exactly wrong but at the same time we all benefited from the invention of say electricity or computing. If they do invent fusion or something I'm sure we'll get benefits. Maybe not free power but at the very least that allow us to buy it.
With access to that much power we could desalinate seawater on an industrial scale or power some of the carbon capture technologies. It will make things better.
It's a cult. Altman is one of the TESCREAL devotees. He truly believes that he can build the electronic messiah.
Hail the Omnissiah! I mean what-
Remember: burning an effigy a day keeps the Evil away~
Well, the bar for an electronic messiah is not that high, considering its predecessors in the cult field.
It's delusional. The problems we have are not caused by lack of technology and cannot be solved by new technology.
Opium.
I gotta find a way to filter out techbros from my feed.
I think he believes what he's saying. From his perspective AGI will be great, and a lot of people think that AI and quantum computing will have a feedback loop where AI will help us create a better quantum computer which will make a better AI and so on...
Down here in the filth though, we're going to go through mass unemployment, rapid shifts in markets, loss of privacy due to increasingly sophisticated AI powered surveillance, and complete loss of our freedom of speech.
So, all that stuff probably will happen to people like him. Just not us.
Current "AI" is just LLMs. They don't need some crazy quantum supercomputer. They aren't improved by more processing power.
They need a ton of data to work at a basic level. There's no reason to think that future programs will just get better on their own. Especially if a lot of data is now LLM generated. They have no capacity to learn on their own through research.
The irony of repeating the exact same thoughts as every thread like this contains, about how because it's just a sophisticated "parrot" then it cannot be intelligent 😂
We don't even have NGI.
He isn't wrong, but the pathways is by taxing the absolute fuck out of billionaires
Healthy optimism
Optimism, pessimism, those are never healthy. They cloud your view of the truth, and make you assume that you know what you don't.
So if a pilot is in a failing aeroplane and is coming down for a landing that he knows is almost certainly going to lead to death. Having a more optimistic view of the situation is always bad? What about the people on the plane that are either going to die instantly or live, why be scared beforehand.
One of my favourite quotes is:
"The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation."
And this brings me back to optimism. How many times have you watched a sports game where it was shut out and over then in the dying minutes of the game you see a team win it and the commentators will say something like "no one thought that was possible, except for the men on the pitch and at the end of they day that's all that matters"
I can't believe I'm defending optimism because I'm thr least optimistic person in the world.
I'm defending realism even if I'm extremely pessimistic, so... welcome to the club.
From the pilot's PoV, both optimism and pessimism mean the potential loss of the tiny chance of survival - one because it underestimates the effort necessary to achieve the desired result, another for giving it up. While realism is the option that actually allows you to seize that chance, and say "we're probably fucked, but I can increase my odds of survival with my effort".
From the passengers' PoV: if they know that the plane will crash, and can't realistically do anything about it, optimism means wasting their likely last moments of life. While realism means accepting "I'm going to die in a few moments; better grab the gorgonzola from my bag and enjoy it, I probably won't be able to gift it to my cousin. Komm, Susser Tot!"
I don't watch sports, but I think that what I said still applies: optimism leading to less effort than the necessary to win, pessimism leading to giving up, realism leads to a cold analysis of the situation and what should be done to get the best result.
Aah, the innocence of 2022.. 🫠
I don't think most of these people realize that Earth has finite resources, and we're already running short on some of them
These people jump immediately to star lifting what will give you several planets of resources and energy. It's very "rest of the fucking owl."
And who do you think will be in charge of all of these things? Lol
Cocaine is a helluva drug.
what is AGI?
Artificial General Intelligence
Adjusted Gross Income.
they’re absolutely correct we will make all of these breakthroughs, but you dear reader? will benefit from none of them
Only for share holders.
Endless abundance *for the trillionaires that manage to blast themselves off the rotting rock before it collapses in on itself
I believe the first paragraph except colonizing space, at least not without hundreds of years of new technology at the human pace of invention.
We humans cannot even minimally adequately care for one another or this habitat, the one we evolved from, the most accommodating, self-correcting(to a point), resilient habitat that humanity will EVER know by far, and we've been fucking this easy situation up like breathing. Earth isn't even the "enter your name" part of the interstellar civilization test, that would be colonizing our local moon. No, failing the Earth test is basically taking the test to the bathroom assuming it to be toilet paper.
Everything else in non-multigenerational reach will be completely and totally unforgiving. Even in the best circumstances, one person going stir crazy if we're talking about sending real people can literally get everyone else killed, one major failure everybody dead, one major accident everybody dead.
Sorry, I know most of us are deluded into believing salvation comes from reckless attempts at ready fire aim growth, but if we don't get this world fully squared away from the consequences of our reckless actions, find homeostasis and successfully meet the needs of the humans here on easy mode Earth, the idea that we can make colonies of hundreds or thousands on our Moon/Titan/Mars is a bad joke.
We can send 5-20 HIGHLY TRAINED perfect specimens to Mars or Titan to plant a flag and grow potatoes for a few years, and I'm all for that as a human rallying achievement, we really need one of those, but that isn't the same thing as developing a true, sustainable presence on another world. We'll have either long since decimated this habitat or pulled out a miracle of finding equilibrium with it long before we're ready for that.
I believe none except colonising space... The others are so far off that we don't even know for sure if they're even possible, what's going to go wrong or whether we're looking in the complete wrong direction, meanwhile you're dismissing the only realistic one in the next 250 years because we're close enough that we actually know how hard it is.
There's something to be said about chasing after things that are impossible as the possible seems too hard, but I'm not enough of a philosopher for that.
Knowing how hard something is can be a larger barrier than not knowing. But the main barrier preventing space colonies is the same thing preventing ocean colonies — "Why?". What motivation is there to settle space? Exploration and experimentation can be done for motivation of seeing if we can, but settling needs known payoff both for the settlers and the funders.
Asteroid mining is the only current suggested motivation for such a thing. And it's very possible that by the time we figure out asteroid capture, we won't need humans present for that work.
Asteroid mining and space industry is a huge reason, and it's the next logical step for humanity, especially since it means we can put dirty industry where nature and life doesn't exist.
There are absurd amounts of resources in space, a lot of which are difficult to access or rare on earth. In addition, space can give opportunities for new forms of manufacturing, from being able to control the level of gravity due to weightlessness, to being surrounded by vacuum. Two things which are either very difficult or impossible to recreate on earth.
You don't need to "capture" asteroids. You mine them in place and build heavy industry and everything you need in-situ. It's a hell of a lot easier to launch a new vessel off an asteroid than Earth. For some reason, people always think we'll be bringing these resources back to the surface of the Earth. That's wasteful, why do we want to throw them back into a gravity well?
We don't even need fancy fusion tech or anything for this to work, regular fission reactors can power things just fine. And the bonus is, you don't have to worry about where you put the waste. Just designate another asteroid in a clear orbit where it's most likely to not hit anything else for the next ten thousand years as a dumping ground, and mark it on the maps.
And in order to achieve it we need to get rid of some dipshit CEOs
If it weren't for the thieving class and the people who fall for their bullshit, I'm convinced we'd be having serious discussions about what it means to live in a post-scarcity society by now.
It's very rational, it's always been mocked and looked down upon to be optimistic. But through the ages it has been proven to be true that we achieve much more than we imagine.
However the pessimism built in to most people probably helps this drive and is actually a good thing.
Is that new reality going to end up being a shinier version of Office Space for everyone, everywhere, forever?
If so you can keep all that shit.
Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!
he wants to live inside his computer
I don't disagree with any of these things, we just don't know when they will come to be and its going to be a rough ride. Old and new systems fighting, the history and the future all happening at once. We are experiencing something that has never happened to any species on earth, or maybe in the entire universe ever, so we're flying blind, ready or not.
Hopium. There's far too much "evil" force in this world for there to ever be an edan or unity. Overall chaos is what got us to our current state of humanity. Chaos will always be.
Don't read that as me saying humans are shit though. It's more like humans don't want to take their lack of "power" seriously. Which is natural or whatever... I know it all sounds negative, but I don't mean for it to sound negative. Chaos is the only constant, order comes from it, but chaos is always dominant from the present moment to the future. You can't stop the universe, including human society from changing and growing. You can learn about it and create from it but it always owns you. No matter who you are.
None of the things mentioned here that we could achieve would require an absence of evil or need the whole world to cooperate. Hell we've been doing the last one for quite some time in the form of books, movies and video games.
DMT
yes
Yes.
Ugh. So many places in the world already have abundance that is hard to imagine; but that's only the case because of extreme hoarding of resources and wealth.
It's a character flaw called "wishful belief" - that is, failure to distinguish between what you predict that'll happen and what you hope that'll happen.
I'm sure we could do all of these things if we weren't biased towards consolidating power into the hands of a few biased individuals.
Of course, I'm just quoting Fourth International Posadist rhetoric, but Posadas may have a point.
I can confidently say we won't do any of these things until we can kill capitalism and trends towards autocracy.
So basically never. The appetite of the regular person to revolt is nonexistent, unfortunately.
Never is a long time. The common people are tiring of what capitalism has wrought and the ongoing drive to force people to do more for less and discard those who are sufficiently useful. Our appetite to revolt may well be fueled by this push. A greater danger is the tendency for successful revolutions to turn into serial dictatorships, each overthrowing the previous one until everyone is dead tired of war. France took around a century to sort itself out from monarchy, and today is still capitalist.
On the other hand, the climate crisis might drive us to extinction, and if it doesn't, is estimated (by the few who dare to estimate it) to reduce the population to below 500 million. If we end up migrant tribes again, we might be able to tackle the trends towards feudalism early.
And the climate crisis is not the only great filter we're being confronted with. Personally, I don't hope anymore so much as look soberly at where we are now and try to guess at where we'll go. And for now the best we can do in the US is hope we can obstruct and delay the steady march towards autocratic fascism until the desperados running the Republican party can't keep it together anymore.
I know that's not inspiring, but if someone is saying something to inspire us, they're taking us for marks.
Very well said. It’s such a shame to know that there is something better out there, what it looks like isn’t exactly clear, but there is a better way. The workers truly need to unite, for the benefit of us all.
I agree! We just need to kill capitalism for that to happen.
All of this can be yours for the low, low price of $19.99/month.
I’m especially cynical when it comes to the “cure all human diseases” part.
You want to manage a disease. Make it tolerable and survivable. That way, you’ve got a
patientcustomer for life, and you can milk them for decades.Edit: I’m talking from the point of view of an asshole capitalist, folks.
Capitalism.