Silicon Valley's vision for AI? It's religion, repackaged

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23779413/silicon-valleys-ai-religion-transhumanism-longtermism-ea

by conanxin • 2 years ago

11 5 2 years ago

"These technologists propose cheating death by uploading our minds to the cloud, where we can live digitally for all eternity."

Alrighty then... I'm just going to hit the back button now. Bye bye

penjelly• 2 years ago

ive noticed you have to worship it like a religion these days, look at iphones versus android based phones. Adults literally ridicule eachother in public for having android. The future might be a lot like Foundation by Isaac Asimov where nobody understands technology and everyone worships and relies on it.

gregw2• 2 years ago

Regarding Altman’s quote: “As we have learned, scientific advancement eventually happens if the laws of physics do not prevent it.”

The article author says: “Have we learned that? I see no evidence to suggest that anything that can be invented necessarily will be invented.”

I have not heard this ‘everything that can be invented will be invented’ formulation before but I might agree with the author’s skepticism of this particular point on other grounds.

If we know from 20th century math that not every true mathematical truth can be proven, and we know from Turing that we can’t even know whether a given algorithm will halt or not, I would be skeptical that every invention that could be invented will be invented.

I do think there is something here for technical utopians here to consider about their premises.

Is this a narrow limitation though or a deep one, I am not sure.

staticman2• 2 years ago

>>"As we have learned, scientific advancement eventually happens if the laws of physics do not prevent it.”

Alternatively... our monkey brains were created to survive in a certain ancestral environment, and we are too dumb to realize most scientific advancements allowed by physics.

RecycledEle• 2 years ago

I remember a discussion with a LCMS pastor in the late 1980's or maybe it was in the early 1990's. He said a group of pastors and other leaders in the LCMS had been receiving prophecies from God. He said that God predicted one day the whole world would depend on one computer program, but that computer program would really be a demon pretending to be a computer program. The demon would give mostly right answers, but mislead us when it wanted to.

I asked for clarification, and was told that God explicitly stated it was a computer program, not some other kind of machine.

Then the LCMS decided it was not God they were talking to and stopped communicating. I think that was a mistake.

Now that we have AIs, I really want us to have many different AIs instead of standardizing on just one, but that might not be the right approach.

Silicon Valley's vision for AI? It's religion, repackaged

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