It's good to have people with contrary opinions to more AI hype-ish views, but I always get the sense this guy is rooting for LLMs to fail.

someone is going to steal the security guard

>It isn’t really wise to place all of your hopes and dreams on something that you can’t even predict the final result of…

Sounds like life itself, no ;)

>get some exercise, eat healthy

I already do that, still have felt pretty miserable for a while. I often say this but if I just had to climb a mountain or do something very difficult to solve my problems, I would! There are definitely some people who just need a good smack on the ass but a lot of us have been trying pretty hard for a while. Of course, I always suggest to keep trying because honestly there is not much else one can do.

Yep, same. Except I'm not 100% on this shit, really I just hope it goes well. It doesn't reach to the level of 'faith' and I do have an inborn skepticism even against things I wish were true.

I was thinking about this the other day, but it seems to me (at least in the west) people have largely given up in believing the future will be better than the past. There is a pervasiveness cynicism without the will to actually improve anything. The great social experiments of the 1900s all failed to produce 'utopic' societies. The idea that people will band together under 'free love' (to reference the hippies, as an example) or another change in the social dynamic to produce a better world is quaint.

Outside of one's personal life, there is really nothing to look forward to in society as a whole. If the doomers are right, things will be getting so bad so soon that there is very little reason to try.

I'm fairly nihilistic as a whole. I believe life can be awesome, if the cards are right, but I don't believe in inherent meaning. My thoughts are: I encourage everyone (even trying myself!) to make the best of life in a very practical way, but I also recognize that is not possible for everyone to do so.

Maybe this whole thing will come to nothing or be underwhelming, but at least it's a possibility of a better world. Not asking rhetorically, but where else can a person look?

edit: last, but not least, if you're fucked in life and need some help, there is very little chance anyone outside family or very close friends are going to extend a hand. It's harsh.

Sounds interesting, source?

In the interest of skepticism, can anyone pour any cold water on this or is it as good as it sounds?

They can become reddit mods.

People have always had issues accepting the world as it is, that's partially the appeal of religion.

Return of the King vibes here

In our time of greatest need, he came to back to save a people who shunned him. The hero we need but don't deserve.

I'll ask you this, if a person is thrown into a volcano and their body is completely destroyed, where does there consciousness go and how does it get there? Explain theoretically how that would work.

>I think the empiricist's fallacy is to think that something cannot exist simply because there is not evidence.

'Cannot' is a strong word, and I although I agree in a very select few cases, i find it be mostly rubbish. If someone wants to prove that something exist, usually they try to gather whatever evidence they can to push it forward, they don't say 'well, technically you can't be 100% sure my Ferrari doesn't exist, it could be invisible & only seen by me & not measurable in any way, I mean there could be evidence that supports my belief that you just aren't seeing and can't be currently tested because of x/y/z"(then what currently leads you to think it's plausible?) It seems wormy and slippery. Is it a fallacy on my part to say vampires and hobbits cannot exist because there is no evidence?

I'll not trying to 'getcha' but I'm genuinely curious, do you believe in a soul, an afterlife for that soul, and God? If so, what makes you believe that?

I believe consciousness & personality is derived from the brain/body. Someone gets brain damage, their personality changes. Destroy their brain, they have no consciousness at all. The only workaround is if you believe in something like a soul, which I haven't seen any evidence of.

> I think people will just hit a point where they have a hard time ignoring the void. I.e. it'll just make it blacker and more obvious, or people will just placate themselves with virtual worlds - quite the opposite of any "ascension."

I ultimately think that the feeling of happiness is a result of bodily physical processes, with no supernatural/spiritual intervention (note: this is different from the feeling of spirituality itself, which is very important for most people to feel imo) An advanced technology can help with that, both in ways we may consider positive or dystopian (see: wire-heading, where people are perpetually on a drug high that never comes down). Whether that tech will come into being and be used in a constructive way is the question. But I believe, at a min, a lot of suffering is unnecessary, unproductive, and arbitrary, and eliminating it would be desirable if we could.

Hey, scrolled through the thread and appreciate your civility, this a valid question imo.

I won't say this is the 'definitive' answer, but this is what I believe.

>AI won't necessarily function in a way that actually leads anywhere that is ultimately worthwhile, and you could lose yourself in the process.

True, I mean as much I hope for this technology to be used to improve people's lives nothing in the future is 100% certain. I actually think you can 'lose yourself' through transhumanism if you become a completely different being, like if my IQ increased by 10,000 I would have little relation to the person I am now. I'd be something else.
>I actually sort of worry that a lot of people are out of touch with the genuine beauty of life, and that trying to fill that void with transhumanism is a little like people trying to fill that void with money and things

Life does have beauty, but not for everyone in equal order. There are tons of people suffering every day for really no reason or purpose. I mean think about a young child passing away from a painful disease, there's no beauty in that, it's just a sad fact of life that these things happen. I think some degree of suffering and hardship is necessary for growth, but a lot of stuff is just a bad draw, excessive and pointless. This is what I hope technology can help solve.

I want to clarify that although I hope the singularity happens and that it is positive, i don't consider anything a sure bet. I also want to point out that people through out history often had some form of afterlife/compensation that contextualized and enriched their time on earth, personally I sympathize with this feeling. There's a lot of the 'void' for people here.

jesus christ, the last sentence literally sounds like the type of keywords people input for Stable Diffusion. PFD is king, as always.

Also recommend Man in the High Castle for those who haven't read it yet.

>The point is that this desire and expectation of a completely frictionless existence, an unwillingness to work with life's "imperfections", where every discomfort is soothed and every craving sated by some external artificial source - this is the mental equivalent of refined sugar.

This wouldn't make people (as happy), but I suspect at that point (this is all speculation) there the ai would provide challenges and opportunities for growth. Think of a video game, people enjoy them most of the time because they are challenging not because they allow you to easily destroy everything with 'friction'.

People need challenges but there's a difference between balance and being crushed. How many people commit suicide, collapse into addiction, etc, because life became too much for them.

I would not want a 'frictionless' world at least for a long time, that would drive anyone crazy after a while. But I don't see reality as necessarily positive under every circumstance. Reality is not just some hard knocks but you gotta put in the work bullshit, it's incredible and arbitrary unfairness, cruelty, sickness etc, often without a clear path for growth. A kid dying of cancer at 3 is reality.

My 2 cents, interesting topic overall.

>For a tech subreddit, this sets the bar extremely low when dealing with an incredibly complex, nuanced subject.

I don't consider this to be a proper tech subreddit. The implications of the singularity itself are fantastical. If you want to get gritty in the tech itself there is machine learnings, ai, subs etc. There are actually some posters here (and other places) that are much more careful about its speculation, it would probably be easier have a debate with them.

> AI to have a good public reputation, maybe consider being better stewards of it than this.

I think this overestimates this sub. The impact of AI will be determined by governments, businesses, the organic reaction of culture, and perhaps by the AI itself. A subreddit is not going to make or break it.

I agree people should be more grounded, but this is not meant to be a tech sub.

Why are you lonely?

The episode seemed to imply they were conscious though, not really mindless NPCs (at least that's how I took it, up to debate).

Controversial opinion maybe, but I feel people would degenerate fast in an environment like that.

Sounds like a rough job, but provides perspective. Personally it would make me pretty nihilistic to be exposed to that on the daily.

Just live your life like the singularity may never happen, not much else you can do.

Great comment.

Probably look at countries like Sweden where most people are thin, life goes on. I guess the next thing will be becoming 'fit' when everyone is merely thin!

meh i'll try it.