Who is more evolutionarily fit: a deaf person who appreciates technological progress and has kids, or an unloved eugenics enjoyer posting on hacker news?
It will never stop being incredibly funny that in the past 24 months an untold legion of people have emerged from heroic doses of shrooms/LSD clutching a note that just has “what if u could chat with a pdf???” scrawled on it
That’s basically how the point-of-view character gets roped in, except instead of threatening the whole world he only threatened Wolverhampton, he was still in grad school, and it was a graphics algorithm.
btw, (sorry if this is prying!) considering your line of work, is all of this acausal robot god stuff especially weird and off-putting for you? Do your coworkers seem to be resistant to it?
Nobody except men should be allowed to look sexy(manly sexy), look male or be bears.[1]
To some extent TUFF men like @RokoMijic are smart enough to realize that it’s essential to defend the male monopoly on this stuff. But the average man just isn’t strategic enough to go along with this, and there’s (as always) a collective action problem so you get defectors.
and P!=NP (assuming it holds, else the limited capacities thing falls apart, but then we don’t need AI for stuff to go to shit, as I think that prob breaks a lot of encryption methods),
Building a scifi apocalypse cult around LLMs seems like a missed opportunity when there are much more interesting computer science toys lying around. Like you pointed out, there’s the remote possibility that P=NP, which is also largely unexplored in fiction. There is a fun little low-budget movie called The Traveling Salesman about this exact scenario, where several scientists are locked in a room deciding what to do with their discovery when the government tries to squeeze them for it. Very 12 Angry Men.
My fav example of the micro-genre is The Laundry Files book series by Charles Stross (who visits these parts!). In the first book, The Atrocity Archives, it turns out that any mathematical proof that P=NP is a closely guarded state secret; so much so that the British government has an entire MoD agency dedicated to rounding up and permanently employing people who discover The Truth. This is because drawing a graph that summons horrors from beyond space-time (brain-eating parasites, hungry ghosts, Cthulhu, a competent Tory politician, etc) is an NP-complete problem. You really don’t want an efficient algorithm for solving 3SAT to show up on reddit.
I mean, you could also use it to steal bitcoin and make robots, but pfft.
I’m not doing the series justice. I love how Bob, Mo, Mhari, and co grow and change, and their character arcs really hit home for me, as someone who more-or-less grew up alongside the series, not to mention the spot-on social commentary.
Considering how many attendees were probably recent crypto enthusiasts…
“thin, sort of stretched, like butters scraped over too much bread.”
Edit: Even though a news worthy amount of dumb shit happens in Tennessee on the reg, I’ve been smug about the fact that at least this flavor of reified dystopia is something that happens over yonder on the west coast. After reading this article I feel violated, like someone broke into my house and defiled it while I was on vacation.
A+ writing softened the blow. (except the parts about the Holocaust, old folks, and dogs. That was grim as hell)