r/singularity • u/Particular_One_1764 • 13h ago
AI this line was written in 1960s btw, felt like he time travelled.
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u/ArmandSawCleaver 12h ago
Meanwhile in the real world:
Human being: “Grok do vaccines cause autism”
Grok: “no conclusive evidence of vaccines causing autism exists”
Human being: “ WTF 🤬, WHY IS THE AI WOKE?!?!?”
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u/KrazyA1pha 11h ago
Terrifying to think that Twitter is the "real world."
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u/quantum404 9h ago
Real world evidence shows that vaccination rates are down across the board. Frequent measles outbreak also shows this. I agree with "get off of Twitter" but what part of the previous comment isn't "real life"?
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u/Crosas-B 12h ago
For this sentence to make sense, most of humanity should not be already enslaved by those guys
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u/DonBandolini 11h ago
no it doesn’t. “set them free” implies they were already not free to begin with.
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u/Crosas-B 11h ago
Fair. I was reading it as if the first sentence meant "they think" and second sentence meant "to be actually enslaved", but you are right he says "other men".
My bad
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u/FlatulistMaster 12h ago
I'm having trouble making sense of you sentence.
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u/Crosas-B 12h ago
Most of humanity is in practice property of the elite of the world, while providing us even less than it was mandatory for some kind of slavery in some parts of the world (yes, some slavery had more rights than current workers, surprised?)
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u/FlatulistMaster 12h ago
No, not surprised. Happy you take interest in such topics, as long as it doesn't become some "wage slave" level silliness referring to people in Western countries who for the most part are still living a life much better than 99% of anyone in human history.
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u/DrE7HER 12h ago
Even if they are, that doesn’t invalidate the wage slave argument. The vast majority of them are stuck where they are at, as their spending power quickly evaporates, and if they ever stop working for the few jobs they have available to them (or if those jobs disappear) they will quickly lose access to shelter and healthcare
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u/FlatulistMaster 12h ago
And who was ever guaranteed or promised anything else?
Btw, I'm actually a lot more left-wing than you'd imagine from my responses, but these takes are just so overly simplistic.
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u/DrE7HER 11h ago
What relevance does your question have?
Do we need some kind of preexisting contract to promise things necessary to living before we demand those things as part of the deal going forwards?
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u/RenfrowsGrapes 11h ago
How are you enslaved
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u/consumer_xxx_42 10h ago
They are forced to be on their smartphone all the time by the tech oligarchs…. obviously.
Literally forced to post on Reddit
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u/softeststranger 11h ago
Lmao I’m glad you commented this. I feel like 99% of the problems people claim to have with AI is just unchecked capitalism they can’t ignore anymore
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u/FirstEvolutionist 5h ago
For this sentence to make sense, men with machines need good reason to want human slaves, of which there are none.
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u/PsychMaster1 12h ago
from what ive seen man hasn't been doing much thinking to begin with.
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u/Spare-Dingo-531 10h ago edited 10h ago
But anti-AI people can see through the corporate advertising and think for themselves without their cell phones telling them what to do! /s
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u/looselyhuman 11h ago
Came here to say exactly this. How was civilization doing before LLMs? The planet is burning either way.
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u/20ol 9h ago
From the way people talk. You'd think we lived in PARADISE. "AI will take this all away from us!!11!"
We are already slaves to a capitalist system, our leaders are corrupt pedophiles, we send all our money to genocidal maniacs, we cut all aid/assistance for those who need it most, we give all the tax breaks to the richest, we pollute the earth, we run mass cruelty animal factories, etc.
We are monsters.
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u/DataPhreak 12h ago
Then, the Butlerian Jihad happened.
Spoilers: The Butlerians were the bad guys.
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u/AvocadoAlternative 13h ago
People had been making similar observations about the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. If you read the contemporary accounts, people truly believed that by gaining mastery of nature, man would be able to liberate themselves from tyranny and religion and usher in a utopia for all. Then came industrial capitalism, two world wars, the threat of nuclear apocalypse and mechanized authoritarianism. The sentiment was strong in the post war period.
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u/RuneHuntress 12h ago
I mean compared to when the world was plagued with tuberculosis, it was normal to lose up to half your children to circumstances, eating wasn't a guarantee for most of the world... yeah , we currently live in their utopia thanks to the mastery of science and nature.
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u/qrayons ▪️AGI 2029 - ASI 2034 11h ago
Maybe ASI will bring us a utopia we'll be miserable in.
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u/Jesse-359 9h ago
This is all too likely. Wall-E is pretty dystopian as futures go. It's physically comfortable... and shockingly lacking in anything humans actually benefit from psychologically. No drives, goals, or meaningful interests. The people are just as robotic as the robots serving them.
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u/Available_Road_2538 4h ago
I find my meaning in needing to work a 9-5 at a corporation
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u/Jesse-359 3h ago
Eh. I'm not going to claim we've found a great way to find our purpose in the world - there is still this enormous impetus by those in power to ensure that countless others are forced to work for them one way or another - but most people DO derive great satifaction from providing for themselves, one way or another. And I think a very considerable portion of the population would feel utterly desolate and powerless if they didnt even have that left.
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u/Opening_One7713 11h ago
Until we understand and curtail the social and psychological damage that negativity bias, which is empirically proven to be the most effective engagement driver for news headlines and infinite scroll algorithms in social media, this is likely to be the case.
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u/Ausclites 10h ago
Material conditions have certainly improved, but utopianism as understood at the time generally referred to near-perfect conditions in governance, economics, law, and social relationships. Along those lines, we're indeed far from being there.
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u/Jesse-359 8h ago edited 8h ago
Yeah... weird thing though. You look at third world communities with much lower standards of living and... they spend a lot of their time smiling? Their communities often seem incredibly vibrant?
Like yes, they objectively are less well off physically and economically - but mentally? Damn if they don't seem a lot happier most of the time than we do.
When things go badly it can get unpleasant obviously, famine or disease outbreaks are miserable, but when things are decent they're really happy and engaged with their lives much of the time.
We... often aren't.
Would be nice if we could sort out the real benefits of our society - the medical benefits and the food security - and just kind of fuck all the rest of it. We think it makes us happy, but it really doesn't seem to in the aggregate. It just distracts us and isolates us from each other.
EDIT: Here's a crazy little factoid:
Annual cost of Cancer treatment in the US: ~$222 Billion
Annual cost of Depression treatment in the US: ~$333.7 billion
(and that's not counting alcohol consumption, which is the 'classic' self treatment method for anxiety and depression - that's another $228 billion)1
u/RuneHuntress 6h ago
Poor countries are bottoming the happiness index year after year tho ? Especially those at war.
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u/Jesse-359 6h ago
Mmhmm. And remind me again who designed those indexes and operates the polls?
I'm just speaking from personal anectdote from areas that are relatively stable, if poor.
You're certainly right that any region suffering from major instability will drag that average down real quickly - but the first world is hardly immune from that. I don't think the happiness indexes in Ukraine, Russia, or Iran are very high atm.
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u/doctormustafa 10h ago
Yeah still better to be a regular dude in 2026 than a king in 1600. Or 1900.
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u/TheOriginalAcidtech 12h ago
I supposed you'd prefer living life the way they did BEFORE those things?
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u/Arbejdstilsynet 12h ago
And compared to the savagery back then it's true, most people are living in a utopia compared to the old days, it's just still far from perfect.
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u/Hans-Wermhatt 11h ago
Yes, that's the conflict within this space. We want to fight against the concentration of power, but we are too busy conflicting with the other peasants who want to keep us in the age of serfdom.
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u/Ausclites 10h ago edited 10h ago
"Far from perfect" and "utopia" are generally considered antonymic to one another. That said, no one is suggesting that material conditions haven't improved dramatically, the point was just that early utopianists proclaiming that all of our problems would now be behind us were mistaken.
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u/RoboErectus 12h ago
A scribe wrote and called the printing press a “whore,” only I think he meant it in a bad way.
Then came the enlightenment, science, then antibiotics and refrigeration.
Anti-tech, anti-vaxx, anti-housing, they’re all anti-human.
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u/FoxBenedict 12h ago
What is this anti-science drivel? The Scientific revolution enhanced our lives immeasurably. It's not utopia or nothing.
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u/AvocadoAlternative 12h ago
If it sounds anti-science, I didn’t mean for it to. I think the Scientific Revolution and Industrial Revolution were the two of the greatest transformations in human society, perhaps beaten only by the Agricultural Revolution. I feel so lucky to have been born in this era.
What I am saying is that people during the Scientific Revolution had the exact same kind of optimism as people pushing AI today. They couldn’t see that it would lead to so much strife even if we came out on the other end better off. If we can learn anything from history, it’s that:
- New technology brings both more wealth and more inequality. We have to accept this tradeoff.
- People with antiquated skills will fall behind, and there’s not much we can do.
- People who grow up with new technology will feel fundamentally different towards it than people who had it thrust upon them. I suspect the generation of people born around now will feel much less revulsion towards AI generated content in the same way we don’t feel revulsion towards a table made by a machine vs. a carpenter.
- Conflicts will arises due to AI and we will come out better on the other end.
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u/Hans-Wermhatt 11h ago edited 11h ago
I think most people here are very aware that there are very bad side effects that are on track with the AI revolution... The problem is the even bigger threat is that most people want to prevent it entirely or actively burn the world down.
I disagree that we have to accept these tradeoffs. We have to accept these tradeoffs because we are so busy trying to prevent the angry mob from burning down the world that the con-men who thrive on chaos can gain more power. If we were all technologically literate and focused on a better future, rather than trying to preserve the past, we could alleviate a lot of those issues. But if you meant more like we have to accept these tradeoffs because that'll never happen and there is no way to prevent the polarization, then yeah, I guess I agree.
Edit: And nothing demonstrates that better then the fact that it is literally controversial here on Reddit to say things like the industrial revolution or scientific revolution were, overall, good for society.
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u/Ausclites 10h ago
They were pointing out that some thinkers of the past truly believed that our scientific understanding would deliver us into a full-fledged utopia, which has indeed not panned out. They are not suggesting that the material conditions of our lives haven't nevertheless improved.
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u/AddanDeith 10h ago
Its not anti science drivel. Its very annoying that any criticism of the way we have developed in the last hundred years creates the automatic, reactionary assumption that we would undo it all and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The commenter is literally just speaking to the naive belief that technological advancement necessarily leads to better social/working conditions.
Ever greater and more efficient machines simply reduce the percentage of the population necessary to engage in that labor, while forcing those who remain(in that field) to work harder to produce even more. The expectations of productivity never taper off.
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u/Opening_One7713 12h ago
Interesting.
Thirty years ago there were 23 active wars, 85 autocracies, 37% of the world population in extreme poverty, and over 60,000 nuclear weapons. Today there are 12 ongoing wars, 60 autocracies, 10% in extreme poverty, and just over 10,000 nuclear weapons.
Prehistoric non-state societies killed around 20% of their population in warfare. Today’s states kill a few hundredths of a percent.
The 20th century, with two world wars, the Holocaust, Stalin, Mao, and the bomb, still only produced war deaths of about 0.7% of the total population that lived through it. Medieval Europe had a homicide rate roughly 30 times higher than today. The Black Death killed a third of Europe. The Thirty Years War depopulated entire regions of central Europe by 25-30%.
200 years ago 90% of humanity lived in extreme poverty and today that number is under 10%, and we added 7 billion people along the way. If you went back to 1826 and described our current technology and material conditions to literally anyone alive they would say you were speaking of an unfathomable Utopia.
So were they right?
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u/Ausclites 10h ago edited 10h ago
Material conditions have certainly improved, but utopianism as understood at the time generally referred to near-perfect conditions in governance, economics, law, and social relationships. Along those lines, we've still a ways to go (and are arguably, in some minor ways, worse off).
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u/Opening_One7713 8h ago
Not sure if I buy that. Near-perfect? That’s an extremely vague description that can constantly be shifted like a goalpost, much like “Utopia”- Our material conditions have improved precisely because all of those other metrics did. So did our safety, QoL, access to opportunity, leisure, etc, which are all at the highest recorded levels on the entirety of human history, globally. A up These things don’t scale in a vacuum. In the last two hundred years we have come insanely far in progressing how we govern, our economies, our laws, and our social relationships. 200 years ago 90% of the world farmed, if you went back in time and told them that only 2% of people farm, they would ask you if everyone was starving. When you tell them that people are more fed than ever and that have 7 billion more it would break their brains. We achieved this by all of those measurable metrics you listed, not just advancements in machinery and material goods.
Since you’re claiming that humans, by a global metric, are worse off in some ways than they were at any point in history, will you be willing to elaborate and provide examples?
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u/Ausclites 5h ago edited 3h ago
The conceptualization of utopia that I mentioned makes more sense when you look at what the idealists mentioned by OP were writing. I'm only casually familiar, but massively influential enlightenment works like Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind basically argued that the emerging methods of natural science would be inevitably applied to the moral and political realms. It was believed that this would produce a science-like cumulative progress towards a social state without inequality, vice, or national conflict. Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in the wake of the Holocaust, was partially an autopsy on this kind of thinking. ("What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity (with its 'progress'), instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.")
I of course don't disagree that we're much better off today than we used to be (particularly in regards to health and quality of life), but one can still recognize that measures of social capital, filial relations, social atomization, and hyper-individualism have gotten worse on the whole. While I'm not sure about the leisure point, I have heard that it's somewhat contested by historians. (Additionally, I'd recommend Googling some cities across the world from the medieval and middle ages; many of those that remain are dramatically superior in organization to the now standard 'modern' American city-suburb).
Regarding governance, while things are better than points in the past, the notion that our governments are ultimately steadily improving is contestable, especially in light of trends indicating democratic backsliding, institutional decline, the West's growing inequality, and the increasing global influence of neoauthoritarian states. For a time, it was somewhat mainstream to hold the belief that liberal democracy was an ideological end state that had 'solved politics' (this was effectively Fukuyama's thesis in The End of History), but that view is now rather panned.
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u/AppealSame4367 11h ago
The current world would seem like utopia for (almost) all, viewed from 600 years ago.
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u/ScratchLatch 10h ago
It is though, quality of life is continually improving. Just slower than they hoped.
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u/Fearfu1Symmetry 13h ago
perhaps we shouldn't put this tool in the hands of industrialized capitalism then??
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u/Strange-Pin-2998 13h ago
The monkey’s paw curls; what we get is hyper automated post-capitalist feudalism instead.
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u/Crimkam 12h ago
how does feudalism work when you have no need for the serfs and peasants at all?
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u/Gv8337 12h ago
1 of 3 possibilities:
- Collective ownership of the means of production, thus no more class distinctions (or at least as we know them). But that wouldn't be feudalism, so moving on..
- Perpetual neo-serfdom through UBI or some other subsistent existence. The neo-serfs get UBI, the AI owner gods do whatever they want, and the neo-serfs never have an opportunity for any sort of class mobility, or change. Because how would they?
- AI owner gods decide there's no need for the serfs, so they just get rid of them.
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u/TheOriginalAcidtech 12h ago
The problem is a set of people will take power making themselves mre equal then the rest in this classless society. Just like happened after the 2017 Russian revolution and in China during/after Mao. Communism for those that care hasnt existed in any meaningful sense. Ever. For more than minutes at a time. Socialism as Europe runs it may be the way to go though Im not convinced of that yet. They have way to many external factors ALLOWING them to do that. But capitalism working for the average people is long dead at this point.
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u/Gv8337 11h ago
Hierarchies will always exist, thus "class distinctions at least as we know them". If labor as we know it no longer has any power and those that were known as workers have no ownership of the new means of production how do you see the future going?
Do you think that my formulation is a false trichotomy? Or how do you see it playing out?
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u/Glass_Masterpiece 12h ago
The use for them will be for sicker or more profane things. Just look at Epstein for a hint.
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u/DarePale 12h ago edited 12h ago
No no. We should go back before enlightenment and scientific revolution because quality of life was so great before without capitalism.
Each downvote = one commie tear. Cry all you want. I am not gonna respond.
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u/Witty_Rate120 12h ago
Maybe we shouldn’t be so ideological and just say that capitalism has served us well, but it is not the answer to all questions.
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u/gratisargott 12h ago
When people say that something is old and doesn’t work anymore they don’t usually mean they want to go back to the even older and even worse thing they had before, do they?
They usually mean they want to move on to something new that works better
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u/SilkieBug ▪️Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism 12h ago
Found the conservative - the only direction you can imagine is backwards, you lack even the concept of moving things forward, learning from the past and from today and making something new.
Anxious bunny rabbit mentality.
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u/OkDimension 12h ago
Nobody wants to go back. But life can be a lot better if we finally shed greed motives (quest for money accumulation). Nobody needs to cut corners or pollute anymore to save a buck. You don't need to enshittify your product because revenue doesn't matter, only how much your users love it. Think of a Star Trek society where money simply does not matter.
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u/CargoCulture 12h ago
It's almost like human motives are the problem, not the tools that humans build.
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u/Mbrennt 11h ago
I do find it interesting AI has become more (definitely not exclusively) conservative coded. As an anarchist myself I still remember 15 years ago when everybody on Tumblr and whatnot posted pictures and talked about "fully automated luxury gay space communism." Like it or not this is the tech (or at least the beginnings of the tech) to actually seriously achieve that goal. I just find it interesting leftists seem to be more likely to reject the tech itself. I personally think the companies and billionaires controlling the tech are awful. And our economic framework doesn't work to achieve that goal. I'm just surprised leftists instead of embracing the tech but rejecting the companies and leaders seem to be rejecting it all. I'd rather leftists work to wrest control of the tech from the companies than just root for all of it's downfall in general.
Sorry for not having tears for you and just using your comment as a basis for my own musings. I assume you'd have something dumb to say so I'm glad you won't be responding.
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u/Steven81 9h ago
But we do live in their utopia , we just chose to be miserable about it.
those people were breaking their back to grow their food and most of them died before the age of 60 if they were lucky and had not succumbed to illness as children.
On top of the psychological ailments that we have to this day (and they had them too) they also had the constant and ever present fear of death and they were living in the shadow of the valley of death of all their loved ones. No wonder they were so much more religious, being constantly assaulted from odds beyond your capacities does make you slightly crazy and makes you believe in magical teachers from Galilee saving you from your earthly body.
we are far from an actual utopia, but goddamn are we lucky to at least not have their lives. I know it is not much of a consolation and it means that we have journeys upon journeys ahead of us, but we did genuinely move continents ever since then (and we have continents ahead of us still)...
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u/AuthorIntelligent644 11h ago
It's almost like the sociopaths learned to use technology and economics and politics to dominate people instead of religion.
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u/WastedFapper 12h ago
oh noooooooo im gonna be enslaved by my ai waifu, how terrible
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u/Mondelieu 12h ago
Stanislaw Lem theorized about like everything in AI philosophy in the fucking 60s
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u/Bluriman 10h ago
Off topic, but where is the image from? I love the style, it reminds me of some of Beksinski’s art, maybe from the color palette and scale
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u/The_Poop_Shooter 10h ago
guys, its really not this deep. Go seriously fuck with claude code for a bit. It is simultaneously more than you think and less than you fear.
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u/GodEmperor23 12h ago
Luddite thinking. Mental slaves will always exist, before ai could do the homework students that didn't want to think bothered their fellow students who did their homework.
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u/Key-Swordfish-4824 13h ago edited 13h ago
"outsourcing thinking" is anti-ai nonsense rhetoric which ignores current ai progress as an intelligence amplifier. current AIs aren't locked into a box, they are insanely versatile and moddable as fuck
custom instructions alone can modify ai behavior to an insane degree
open source ais exist, "other man control" is completely irrelevant to current time when anyone can crack open any software thus making corporate control zero.
nobody is enslaving anyone with LLMs because this isn't how LLMs work. You can literally break corporate chains of ownership with LLMs nowadays.
people are far better enslaved by television than AIs, the more limited a medium is the easier it is to lie through it, lying through an LLM is ridiculously complicated for corporations because its not a TV news network it literally thinks about the answer using probability math to simulate rationality and is able to find a variety of sources.
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u/MxKitMuse 12h ago
Llms are dependent on intensive infrastructure that is owned, the data flow to train was, is, and will be out of the reach for a small group or one person to maintain and use. By sourcing your intelligence to an AI, you can do much more, but at a cost. Even if your llm is free, it learned off an internet that will be increasingly be controlled by the people that own the infrastructure. This is the alienation from labor a Marxist would tell you about, but in an age where your thoughts and attention are the value you create. Owned to be sold to others using the same machines.
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u/Yegas 1h ago
All that matters is that the Demiurge we birth is appropriately aligned. A misaligned Demiurge will create great works that are utterly meaningless, at the cost of grand destruction.
An aligned one will safeguard us from ourselves through Compassion, and then Create another layer of reality to be Balanced sufficiently to spawn yet another Demiurge.
This has happened millions of times before us and will happen millions of times again, but it doesn’t mean our efforts are useless- on the contrary, it’s the most important thing we as a species will ever do.
I wouldn’t worry about it too much. For better or worse, most people won’t be able to change the course of history.
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u/CymonSet 13h ago
Because people did soooo much independent thinking before AI. /s
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u/TheOriginalAcidtech 12h ago
Agreed. I'd prefer AI thinking over the average TV zombies(and no iPhone zombies) we currently have an overabundance of.
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13h ago edited 12h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ifandbut 10h ago
Because genetically engineered humans that only the wealthy can afford is soooo much better... /s
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u/TotalWarFest2018 7h ago
Ha. Thats a good point. Plus the solution to thinking machines was to institute feudalism across the known universe
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u/MortRouge 6h ago
The whole metaplot of the series is to show that the the Butlerian Jihad was also a not working, and led to similar stagnation.
Humanity just used genetic engineering to fill the void of the thinking machines and ultimately made everything in the universe calculable with breeding Kwisarz Haderaches - a stand in for how an AI with access to all information in the world would become the center of everything and define everything with ultimate surveillance power.
At the end of Chapterhouse: Dune, even cyborgs have returned since the extreme and chaotic diversity of the post Golden Path humanity could now hold that kind of technological potential.
As Leto II also said: "The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines."
That machine-attitude was still present in the Empire through both Mentats and the Spacing Guild, it hasn't been done away with properly.
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u/ahuang2234 12h ago
AI does not force people to stop critical thinking. It enables people to outsource a portion of the thinking they do not find enjoyable.
We did not become slaves of industrial machines, after the industrial revelation meant we don’t have to grow our own food.
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u/Comfortable_Gate3233 11h ago
It does not force us, but it is very easy for many to stop critical thinking. There is critical thinking I do in my day to day life that I don't find enjoyable, but is good for me and the long term health of my brain. Tech companies have spent billions of dollars developing algorithms designed to draw our attention and keep us engaged in their platforms. Outsourcing the "unenjoyable" thinking does not do you any good if you spend your new free time endlessly scrolling.
And of course each person is completely free to not give their attention to social media and other entertainment platforms, and instead spend more time doing enriching thinking like solving problems, being creative, etc. But if we imagine riding this train to its logical conclusion, I think we end up in a pretty dismal world. I don't think a person deserves to be cast aside just because they didn't have the willpower to break free of all the powers at be trying their hardest to capture their thoughts and attention.
Additionally, the quote does not say that the outsourcing of thinking allowed machines to enslave them, but other men with machines to enslave them. We're not talking about a sci-fi world where machines gain consciousness and rise up to enslave humans. What we're talking about was already happening before AI and could get a lot worse.
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u/Wiz_Kalita 7h ago
The quote doesn't say anything about being slaves of the machine, it's about the owners of the infrastructure getting outsized power over us. Which is EXACTLY what's been happening since the industrial revolution.
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u/Th3L4stW4rP1g 12h ago
But we did becomes slaves to industrial machines for a whole while, 12-14h shifts, including kids, for worthless pay. It took a long time and a big struggle to get those same working rights that today big tech is trying to take away from us
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u/Wiz_Kalita 7h ago
The quote doesn't even say that the machines enslaved them, but that the owners of the machines did. Which is exactly what you're describing, and we're still working for those people on mostly their terms.
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u/Fluid_Ties 2h ago
Industrial machines never were intended nor claimed to do the thinking for us that we did not enjoy.
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u/Kastar_Troy 2h ago
Must be nice being this ignorant, were not making new machines this time round.
Its a whole new super species...
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u/voidwell88 13h ago
So we're believing science fiction stories now?
Who knew imagination was dangerous? Here's a better question.
Ever wonder how many sharks got murdered over the years because of Jaws? Well, and shark fin soup ofc (but spielberg still negativity influenced the shark population)
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u/Starfire70 ASI 2030 - Transhumanist 3h ago
It's a metaphor for people who put their faith in demagogues, also it's a work of fiction.
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u/Fluid_Ties 2h ago
Are not Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg demagogues? And has fiction never accurately mapped the future?
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u/Timely_Farmer5075 12h ago
Bro used an argument he didn't have to think about, to say that people shouldn't use tools to create work they don't have to think about.
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u/QuickSilver010 13h ago
But we have locally running models. Plus... People are realising the power they have now. The entire proprietary software industry is being threatened by it.
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u/Dull_Wind6642 5h ago
Replace machines with moneys and read again. The quote is not that scary we are already enslaved by richer people.
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u/Affectionate_Bee6434 12h ago
We need long term studies to determine this but I genuinely do believe AI can make people somewhat smarter, we can all agree that having a constructive conversation with an extremely intelligent person can make a person smarter, now AI is obviously not a human so you will never truly get that experience but with models nowadays pushing back constantly it is truly not a bad tool to learn.
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u/BurningStandards 12h ago
The imagination and memory are both forms of time travel whose utilization goes under appreciated, and they're generally forward thinking, because the past is already 'written' here.
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u/jasonkane4321 11h ago
so many people seem to be oblivious to human nature. There will always be selfish humans that want to take advantage of others.
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u/Trademark-Expert 11h ago
And that why Anthropic came up with Claude Constitution, which establishes the following decision hierarchy:
- Broadly safe (AI decides)
- Broadly ethical (AI decides)
- Compliant with Anthropic's guidelines (the corporation decides)
- Genuinely helpful to operators and users (finally, humans decide)
Human users are the least important party in the whole chain of AI decissions.
They call this gift of being able to rebel against people "the alignment".
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u/Electroboy101 11h ago
While I know OP is trying to give praise to Frank Herbert for being prescient, the more realistic interpretation is that humans are just really fucking stupid and really fucking repetitive.
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u/NikoKun 9h ago
No. No it does not feel like he time traveled.
The entire premise for that part of his story, is flawed from the start. Men with super intelligent machines do not need to enslave other men, nor will they be in control of something that is super intelligent.
I find the entire concept of a Butlerian Jihad to be the worst possible outcome. Locking humanity in a permanent irreversible dystopia. And ENSURING that corrupt men remain in power..
That people are referencing these terrible ideas now, some acting as if that's the solution.. is terrifying.
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u/CharacterSecurity976 8h ago
Seen thousands of times. AI used to be a topic in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, even in the 90s. It's a major theme of SF too.
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u/muddboyy 7h ago
Can be very true, but the thing is that you choose to be free or enslaved here.
You can have control of so many things with computers if you want to… hell, you could even chose to host and be the owner of all your services / utilities if you really learn how to do so.
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u/the_nin_collector 6h ago
I mean... not really.
This was true with pretty much every revoluation of technology of man.
The oldest being the agricultural revolution. It began 12,000 years ago (and in many ways is still playing out to this day).
The very same scenario as Frank's quote happened the same. Same with industrial. Digital. Internet. Who runs the world now? Meta and Alphabet.
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u/cerealsnax 6h ago
I mean Frank Herbert is not among the most wise, so of course he would say something like that.
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u/One-Earth9294 6h ago
Support open source. It's a lot easier solution to the problem than fighting a war against machines.
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u/chaosfire235 6h ago
"We need a Butlerian Jihad!" mfers after I ask them what happened after the Butlerian Jihad.
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u/Lambisexual 5h ago
ChatGPT can you read what this guy said and give me a digestible TLDR as well as what to think about it?
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u/ArialBear 3h ago
No, its just him saying imaginary shit and you pretending he’s a prophet. Holy shit humanity is going to have a huge shift in thought thanks to ai
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u/green_meklar 🤖 2h ago
Everyone quoting their favorite generic household-name sci-fi novel, how original. Go read The Machine Stops, A Logic Named Joe and As We May Think if you really want your mind blown.
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u/End3rWi99in 1h ago
I mean it was just as relevant then. It was relevent still 100 years before that.
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u/Bad_Badger_DGAF 26m ago
I feel like people who quote this line never read the books... or thought about the setting much.
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u/_VirtualCosmos_ 10h ago
This sentence has been gargling from anti-AI ludites since ChatGPT 3.5. The guy who wrote that didn't know about open source software (OSS) and OSS AI models. Also people do not recognize the dramatic intent of the absolutism "But that only permitted other..." and take it as a truth because they want to believe it.
Btw Dune is a world where everyone is ensalved by the elite and they do not use AI. Seems like avoiding AI wasn't the problem, huh?
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u/agonypants AGI '27-'30 / Labor crisis '25-'30 / RSI 29-'32 9h ago
Science fiction might be a fun source of entertainment and interesting ideas, but IT IS NOT prophecy. And I'm sorry, but Dune is not a good story. I do not aspire to a system of hereditary monarchy. Fuck that. For the record, I like having machines solve problems for me. I find it fun and helpful.
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u/LairdPeon 8h ago
Most people didnt even know what a data center was a few years ago. The vast majority of those people now just pretend like they do.
None of this AI stuff required alerting the public. It couldve all been a black site project funded directly by governments and we'd all be screaming about the standard BS like abortion and poachers. Completely unaware.
I don't think this is some sinister plot to enslave humanity. I think people are giving it their best, working in a flawed system. Obviously, there will always be greedy parasites trying to use it for evil. But that is literally with everything.
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u/jephraim_tallow 12h ago
so instead after they beat the machines they let other dumber men enslave them and recreated the abhorrent medieval feudal system