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I've wondered if the AI superintelligence everyone is watching out for is actually slowly being built from the bottom up, and encompasses evening in the entire

I've wondered if the AI superintelligence everyone is watching out for is actually slowly being built from the bottom up, and encompasses evening in the entire world. Deep Thought from Hitchhiker's Guide is seeming more and more plausible to me. Perhaps this bot that makes Reddit videos doesn't do anything "useful" per se, but it is doing what a human might otherwise do, and adds itself to Reddit as an entity that could be indistinguishable from a person making silly videos. What percentage of Reddit comments are bots? I'd be curious to know. SaaS and Lambda functions and and APIs are all like very complicated neurons that link together to form this world wide web of interactions. I've wondered if an approach to the AI alignment problem is really to see that the entirety of all the computers in the world are a giant brain that is continually self-improving. Phoenix Wright bot is one neuron, like any other. And so to align the world AI, you have to align the culture that makes the AI. And so, basically, anything that one does to improve the culture in a sense improves AI.

leetcrew 6y ago
maybe so, but I don't think this particular program does anything like AI. glancing at the code, it looks like it just pastes the full text of a reddit comment into a video template, using a different template for each unique commenter in the thread. it no more "does what a human might otherwise do" than how a sorting algorithm might emulate how I sort my socks.
- haolez 6y ago
  It uses a neural network for sentiment analysis, so it can be classified as "using AI".
ta1234567890 6y ago
You are spot on. We are so self-centered that we think an AI superintelligence will be something like a superintelligent-human-mind/person inside a computer, when most likely, it will be nothing like a human and probably completely unrecognizable to us. In fact, I'd argue it's already here and already taken over. Most of us are now enslaved by screens and the Internet, we are addicted to them, even if we don't want to admit it. Some might say these things are run by humans, but are humans really in charge? Can any single person turn off the internet or prevent everyone else from using their phones/screens for hours every day? Is even a group of people capable of doing it? And even if they could, would they? Maybe if humans went extinct, the Internet and screens would disappear, but that just means there's a symbiotic relationship, not that we are by any means in control.
- fao_ 6y ago
  > Can any single person turn off the internet or prevent everyone else from using their phones/screens for hours every day? Google "ICANN" https://deadline.com/2020/07/internet-down-outage-cloudflare-hack-dns-google-1202988757/ https://deadline.com/2020/07/internet-down-outage-cloudflare... https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/25/21719396/amazon-web-services-aws-outage-down-internet https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/25/21719396/amazon-web-serv...
  - jwally 6y ago
    Google: "I CAN"
  - ta1234567890 6y ago
    Are you implying Google did it on purpose to prevent this super-intelligence from taking over? To me it seems like the opposite, the outage was untintentional and then humans worked really hard to fix it. It's almost as if we were the cells of the body of this super-intelligence.
    - fao_ 6y ago
      > Are you implying Google did it on purpose to prevent this super-intelligence from taking over? Why are you reading that from what I said? I wasn't responding to the superintelligence thing (as I hadn't quoted it), and that seems like the weirdest reading from what I responded to. The claim was: "Can any single person turn off the internet or prevent everyone else from using their phones/screens for hours every day?" And I responded with proof that that is marginally possible. Probably not a single person, but a well-trained well-connected group could do it very easily.
      - ta1234567890 6y ago
        I understand. However, what I'm saying is that even if that capability exists, in practice it doesn't matter, as it is something that we will never act on becauae we've already been taken over. That outage example shows that people will immediately act to restore, preserve and expand the system, never destroy it.
yissp 6y ago
Apparently it's not running anymore, but https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/ is sort of apropos. It's an entirely bot-generated subreddit. You can still read through the old posts.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Ajedi32 6y ago
  It got replaced by https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/, which is significantly more coherent.
kubanczyk 6y ago
> a giant brain that is continually self-improving ...nope, does not qualify. If it cannot manage to replicate itself completely (as in: create another separate 'internet' capable of further replication) it is as good as a single human living on Mars. It's a short ride, one small mistake and goodbye Mr. Superintelligence. (I'm not claiming humans will be able to survive that though.)
anthony_romeo 6y ago
I've looked at various political debate subreddits over the past few years. But over time I considered how these spaces could be used nefariously. If I were a propagandist, I'd throw all of this content into some deep learning doohickey and let it generate sample responses for my army of trolls, and let them quickly edit the best samples to create more complicated arguments more quickly, until the bots are consistent enough to run amok as truly convincing persons. Kinda like when after Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, there was a thought for a while that chess tournaments would include humans working with a computer model to help them make decisions. For some time a human working together with a computer to make decisions was superior against a human or computer alone -- this hasn't been the case for a while now as chess models advanced.

leetcrew 6y ago

maybe so, but I don't think this particular program does anything like AI. glancing at the code, it looks like it just pastes the full text of a reddit comment into a video template, using a different template for each unique commenter in the thread. it no more "does what a human might otherwise do" than how a sorting algorithm might emulate how I sort my socks.

haolez 6y ago
It uses a neural network for sentiment analysis, so it can be classified as "using AI".

ta1234567890 6y ago

You are spot on. We are so self-centered that we think an AI superintelligence will be something like a superintelligent-human-mind/person inside a computer, when most likely, it will be nothing like a human and probably completely unrecognizable to us. In fact, I'd argue it's already here and already taken over. Most of us are now enslaved by screens and the Internet, we are addicted to them, even if we don't want to admit it. Some might say these things are run by humans, but are humans really in charge? Can any single person turn off the internet or prevent everyone else from using their phones/screens for hours every day? Is even a group of people capable of doing it? And even if they could, would they? Maybe if humans went extinct, the Internet and screens would disappear, but that just means there's a symbiotic relationship, not that we are by any means in control.

fao_ 6y ago
> Can any single person turn off the internet or prevent everyone else from using their phones/screens for hours every day? Google "ICANN" https://deadline.com/2020/07/internet-down-outage-cloudflare-hack-dns-google-1202988757/ https://deadline.com/2020/07/internet-down-outage-cloudflare... https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/25/21719396/amazon-web-services-aws-outage-down-internet https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/25/21719396/amazon-web-serv...
- jwally 6y ago
  Google: "I CAN"
- ta1234567890 6y ago
  Are you implying Google did it on purpose to prevent this super-intelligence from taking over? To me it seems like the opposite, the outage was untintentional and then humans worked really hard to fix it. It's almost as if we were the cells of the body of this super-intelligence.
  - fao_ 6y ago
    > Are you implying Google did it on purpose to prevent this super-intelligence from taking over? Why are you reading that from what I said? I wasn't responding to the superintelligence thing (as I hadn't quoted it), and that seems like the weirdest reading from what I responded to. The claim was: "Can any single person turn off the internet or prevent everyone else from using their phones/screens for hours every day?" And I responded with proof that that is marginally possible. Probably not a single person, but a well-trained well-connected group could do it very easily.
    - ta1234567890 6y ago
      I understand. However, what I'm saying is that even if that capability exists, in practice it doesn't matter, as it is something that we will never act on becauae we've already been taken over. That outage example shows that people will immediately act to restore, preserve and expand the system, never destroy it.

yissp 6y ago

Apparently it's not running anymore, but https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/ is sort of apropos. It's an entirely bot-generated subreddit. You can still read through the old posts.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Ajedi32 6y ago
It got replaced by https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/, which is significantly more coherent.

kubanczyk 6y ago

> a giant brain that is continually self-improving ...nope, does not qualify. If it cannot manage to replicate itself completely (as in: create another separate 'internet' capable of further replication) it is as good as a single human living on Mars. It's a short ride, one small mistake and goodbye Mr. Superintelligence. (I'm not claiming humans will be able to survive that though.)

anthony_romeo 6y ago

I've looked at various political debate subreddits over the past few years. But over time I considered how these spaces could be used nefariously. If I were a propagandist, I'd throw all of this content into some deep learning doohickey and let it generate sample responses for my army of trolls, and let them quickly edit the best samples to create more complicated arguments more quickly, until the bots are consistent enough to run amok as truly convincing persons. Kinda like when after Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, there was a thought for a while that chess tournaments would include humans working with a computer model to help them make decisions. For some time a human working together with a computer to make decisions was superior against a human or computer alone -- this hasn't been the case for a while now as chess models advanced.