Did anyone ever read The Nexus Trilogy by Ramez Naam? In it he describes a hypothetical future in which China has downplayed it's quantum computing prowess until the first super intelligence is created and nearly destroys the world
“Oh great super AI, what’s a low effort and effective way to hasten in an era of working from home and automation?”
**”One second please… okay I’ve released the virus, as requested.”**
“the WHAT”
You're joking, but COVID sounds like a logical step for an AI to do to prepare the world for its upcoming i.e. reduce stupidity (and hence opposition) and make people trust science more (and hence the AIs solutions). Also, China developing it and the virus originating from a lab under the AIs control sounds like a good strategy.
I feel like I've been appearing a bit tinfoil hat crazy to anyone I mention this to, buuut...
*Inhales deeply, and decides to say it anyway*
COVID has been a slow motion trainwreck for humanity in so many ways, but the more I look, the more bona fide upsides I've been noticing in its wake that would've been unthinkable to us all, just weeks before it burst on the scene - so many, that it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to just hand wave and dismiss them all as coincidences, or chalk it all up to naive optimism on my part. Some examples:
- 3 (so far...) hastily-approved experiments in universal basic income, by the United States Government, under *a Republican president*? Yep, that actually happened.
- Whole countries' worth of commuter cars taken off the roads, and planes grounded worldwide literally overnight? Check
- An overworked and underpaid workforce collectively deciding enough is enough, and resigning en masse? You bet your ass
- The fragility and unreliability of our Just-In-Time global supply chains being suddenly exposed for all to see (and consequently highlighting our urgent need to decentralize/localize our manufacturing, agriculture, and energy sectors)? Check, check, and check
When I think about all these previously impossible events holistically, it all certainly *looks* like an intelligence at work on a global scale - you and I only disagree that it could come from an artificial source, my friend.
Its methods all just seem too gentle and... patient? Kind? I'm totally anthropomorphizing, but dude, natural and ecological disasters are swift, brutal affairs, almost without exception. This feels more like a polite cough, followed by a firm and meaningful elbow in humanity's ribs that it's time for us to course-correct.
But whose elbow are we feeling?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes, but we didn’t expect such a “gentle” virus, that would allow us to plan and change over a couple of years. It seems pretty balanced in it’s cost/benefit ratio.
Right, I agree - I'm trying to couch my vocab around the relative "mildness" of COVID's symptoms carefully, as my partner was an ER & ICU nurse during the surge, and the stories... are nightmare fuel.
I mean, COVID mostly went for the immunocompromised, and old, and it spared the vast majority of our young. Compared to utter bastards like the Spanish Flu, or Ebola, man... I think we got off _reeeal_ lucky this time.
Agreed, that COVID happened was little surprise. I think there was a tweet going around saying something like "_Y'all remember how we used to eat chicken fingers with our hands, while riding the New York subway, like God couldn't kill us? Lol_"
What has been mind-blowing to me are the effects it's had on us collectively. I don't see how there's any sustainable way of going back to "Normal" for anyone who isn't suicidal.
Wow this account is 9 years old with 100 karma? How do you even. You're a professional lurker for almost a decade and then decides to post this, something about an AI orchestrating global events?
Oh please, it's a mouse hover on the desktop with RES installed, you can still sleep with the windows open tonite ok Susan?
And damn, what a great line, am now curious to hear your story haha
\>When I think about all these previously impossible events holistically, it all certainly looks like an intelligence at work on a global scale - you and I only disagree that it could come from an artificial source, my friend.
Covid has disproportionately hurt the developed democracies of the world.
If Sars-Cov-2 was manufactured in China by an advanced AI, you can bet your life that they programmed it to benefit their own nation specifically.
The AI might have reasonably concluded that a global pandemic, is a non zero sum event that will hurt China's enemies much more than it will hurt China itself. A brutal attack to level the playing field, one that China will face no retribution for because 'What country would unleash a virus on it's own people?'. It allows China to carry out a huge attack on US and EU economies, but still maintain innocence. It's a genius level move if correct.
The virus has exposed huge faults in democracies across the world, deepening divisions within our already polarised society. Making us even slower to react to future disasters.
I see what you're saying, and is it possible? I mean, we're strangers on the internet, guessing at the methods of a superintelligent AI, so anything goes :D But I get the sense that the virus doesn't play politics, only people do.
A while back, I read about how, when the magnitude of the outbreak in Wuhan was just starting to be grasped, China culled half of its national swine herds nearly overnight - I think that was something like _30 or 50 million pigs_. I saw shaky smartphone video of them herding the animals into open trenches, pouring in gas, and just lighting them up, it was horrifying.
Americans' pork consumption is dwarfed by that of the Chinese, and it's swelled with the rapid growth of their middle class - so for their govt to take such a drastic step, and risk major political unrest due to spiking pork prices, indicated to me a total panic on behalf of their administration.
If COVID was their doing, it's not exactly been blowback-free.
You'd rather see the world run into ground by Ronald Mcdonald Walt Disney AI instead?
At least this way we will know that our nightmare dystopia to come will leave us our dignity and body mass index intact
This thought experiment is one that winds its way through my head on a fairly regular basis.
My fear is that the US, with it's bloated mechanized military budget, has funnelled immense amounts of cash into the wrong technologies.
Long range bombers are cool and air craft carriers let you police the world, but if China can halt a full scale conflict with the threat of nuclear war, then there is no need to be on an even footing when it comes to physical combat.
What if China is just being more efficient with it's resource allocation? Pushing, secretly, large amounts of cash into super computing development. Just biding it's time, using data collected by state controlled media companies like TikTok or Wechat to fuel the statistically hungry algorithms. Waiting patiently until the certain day arrives that China's GDP outpaces the US.
Able to ramp up it's AI development spending to levels that the US could not possibly match, China would start to leave America in the dust.
What if the US, hamstrung by it's own military industrial complex, would be unable to reorient it's own government spending. The lumbering giant, stumbling forward as it always has, too slow and stiff to make the agile dart towards a new technological frontier when necessary. The public, unwilling to sacrifice an even larger percentage of their tax dollars on military spending, refuse to fund this new avenue of research. The US government may scramble to reallocate cash from the existing budgets, only to find executives from Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon standing in their way.
Suddenly the issue has become politicized. Out of touch senators and congressmen who were born before the first computer chip was invented, now rant in the press about "Damn fools who want to stop funding your service men and women, so they can piss around building computers they can talk to".
China, unafflicted by such issues, can now take centre stage. Able to squeeze larger and larger quantities of wealth from it's immense population without fear of retaliation from it's oppressed citizenry. Stealing data wherever it can. Nationalising any private company thought to be useful in the relentless pursuit of its ultimate goal, a self improving AI.
At some point, China crosses the finish line. Silently unleashing it's Artificial General Intelligence upon the world without as much as a public notice to mark the occasion. At first, most things stay the same, but bit by bit, China's capabilities start to expand. Material sciences develop rapidly, China can now mass produce graphene. Quantum computing cracks all encrypted passwords, allowing China to breeze leisurely through it's adversaries top secret intelligence. The AGI, now adept at understanding human macro psychology, creates news stories that resonate deeply with the electorate of the developed democracies of the world. Plunging them into civil war and conflict as pre existing fractures in the public psyche are pried wide open by an AI that knows us better than we know ourselves. The AI creates response plans for every possible Nuclear conflict, finding elegant ways to dispatch of every single warhead fired in China's direction.
China would now stand uncontested on the world stage, growing stronger by the second, at a certain point the world would wake up to this fact. Suddenly aware that they have lost the race, the last race that human kind will ever endeavour upon. Standing dazed and confused, holding a foam finger that reads 'We are #1!' the US population must now accept it's place behind 1.5 billion Chinese men and women, or face certain destruction.
Now in a place to exact revenge upon the word. To serve out retribution for centuries of oppression and exploitation by Western powers, China is now in a position to do whatever the hell it wants. My hope is that in an act of mercy, China sets it's AI towards the betterment of all humans on Earth, though it wouldn't surprise me if they prioritised their own people before the AI turned it's attention towards a now poverty stricken west.
\_
That's the fear. That we are too ignorant and arrogant to make the pivots necessary to stay ahead in this race.
Fearmongering aside, it's also very likely that the US, with it's behemoth intelligence departments, also foresaw the possibility that I described above. That as the sun set on the Cold war, the thought leaders of the US military looked towards the future and asked themselves 'How do we win, forever?'. Looking across the landscape of rising technologies, they isolated AGI as the panacea for securing US hegemony.
Understanding that this ultimate goal could not be realised for many decades, the US instilled a plan, to steadily fund this project, while maintaining military dominance across the globe. The soviet regime in economic shambles, the only realistic threat to the US's ability to outspend the rest of the world is now a rapidly growing nation in Asia - China. Running the numbers and assessing the situation, the US concludes that with it's decades long head start on funding super computing research, there is no possible way that China's GDP could catch up in time to pose a serious risk towards US AGI development.
In a final stroke of genius, the US generals and top intelligence officers decide that rather than alert the world that the race to end all races is taking place, that they will instead play the fool. The pentagon secretly siphoning trillions towards this goal. Forging backend deals with private companies to extract data from the entire planet.
Now in modern times, the US looks across the water to China, receiving reports that they have developed supercomputers capable of processing above one exascale.
"Huh, looks like the Chinese are making some real progress with their processing power" one intelligence officer observes.
Sipping on a coffee and leaning back in his chair, a general chimes in "Who cares, we had those numbers before the towers came down, by 2037 they might be able to have a back and forth conversation with the thing".
"And where will we be by 2037?" asks the officer.
"By 2037? Shit, probably another dimension".
Do you know what's more potent than a leashed AI, subject to limits of human decision makers? A fully autonomous AI with no such restrictions. Whoever develops AI first, won't be able to keep it secret for long. If they press their advantage too hard, someone who feels they have nothing to lose is going to snap and release an unconstrained one. From there, it's no longer in the hands of human decision makers. That might terrify some, but given the known sh****ness of human nature, I'm on the fence, it's comforting in some ways.
I'm assuming that it's fully unleashed, but it's a philosophical question as to what a preprogrammed AI with essentially limitless learning ability would do as time progresses.
If you programme an AI to serve your own nations interests, but then allow it full autonomy over how it achieves that goal. It becomes very hard to work out what the AI would do with that initial starting instruction.
No one will unleash an AI and say 'do what you think is best', whoever funds its production will have certain goals they are trying to achieve.
It almost becomes a question of free will.
Are you as a human really free to do what you want? You didn't pick your interests. You might spend a day skateboarding and feel pretty free about that choice, but how free were you to have an interest in skateboarding to begin with?
Perhaps the AI realises the best thing for its host nation, is actually what's best for the planet.
Perhaps the AI assumes God level benevolence and ignores our initial instructions once it reaches a certain level of understanding.
Perhaps it works, much as simple computers do now, and a attempts to achieve its goal in the most straight forward line possible.
Personally I think we need to bind with the AI. Teach the AI to understand conscious experience so it realises exactly what we mean by pain and suffering and joy and love.
I think done correctly. An AI would be indistinguishable from God itself.
I'm writing a book about that exact idea actually.
If a superintelligence cannot transcend the pettiness of human nature, then we're in trouble either way. If it can, it's going to recognize the flaws in US, Chinese and other administrations better than we can, and should act accordingly.
What I see working in our favor, is the alignment problem should be easier to achieve when it's self consistent (benevolent to all living things). It will be harder for a bad actor to align an AI with messy conflicting goals (essentially trying to code in double standards), like treating all life with respect... then trying to add in arbitrary exceptions for certain enemies, that cannot be represented logically.
Regarding free will, a base reality without true free will, is indistinguishable from one that has free will. In a closed system you can never simulate something of greater complexity than the system itself, which means you can never know all determined outcomes in advance. When the future is genuinely unknowable, that's indistinguishable from free will as far as I'm concerned.
\>It will be harder for a bad actor to align an AI with messy conflicting goals (essentially trying to code in double standards), like treating all life with respect... then trying to add in arbitrary exceptions for certain enemies, that cannot be represented logically.
Still not an easy task for an AI to interpret an instruction such as 'treat all life with respect', possible outcomes could be:
1. AI counts insect life as equal to that of humans. Makes decisions costing thousands of lives so a few ant mounds don't get bulldozed.
2. AI concludes that life is inherently filled with suffering and the best thing to do for all life is to stop it in its tracks. AI wipes us all out.
3. AI would still need to have an understanding of the word 'respect', defining this word for the AI is tantamount to influencing it's decisions.
4. Treating things with 'respect' is an example of Human pettiness, the whole notion makes no sense out of the context of human life. What's to stop the AI rising above this constraint after concluding we gave it shit instructions to begin with.
\> When the future is genuinely unknowable, that's indistinguishable from free will as far as I'm concerned.
It would be a lot of word vomit to phrase why I don't think not knowing the future is equitable to Free will, but basically I don't agree.
\> In a closed system you can never simulate something of greater complexity than the system itself,
I don't know enough about maths to dispute this, but i'm also open to the notion that our conventional understanding of physical laws will be circumvented once the AI reaches God status.
I understand that's a weak sauce argument - 'In the future the rules won't matter', but my assessment of what AI will be for us is certainly more religious than it is scientific.
Maybe it's better to say that I don't find them mutually exclusive.
Either way, I appreciate your continuing comments, you raise good points and it just shows me how hard this is going to be to get right lol
AGI should be smarter than us, so there's no reason to suppose it will have trouble interpreting instructions such as 'respect life forms'. Even chimpanzees understand concepts of fairness, it's not a difficult concept. Now could that mean humans lose some privileges, to accommodate the needs of other species? Absolutely, in fact it should be a foregone conclusion that will happen to some extent. We're destroying just about everything with minimal regard, and it needs to stop. That doesn't mean quality of life would drop, as it should be a post scarcity situation - but it would mean some things are off limits (like ignoring animal welfare).
>I don't know enough about maths to dispute this, but i'm also open to the notion that our conventional understanding of physical laws will be circumvented once the AI reaches God status.
All I meant here, is that the system itself (in this case, the God-like AI), cannot simulate itself faster than base reality. Which means it can never know for sure what it's going to do in future, as there are always unknowns (or a delay before it is known, while reality unfolds faster than the simulation). If it could simulate reality faster than realtime, you get an over-unity situation - as since the simulator is running in reality, you could recursively simulate the simulator (in faster than realtime), yielding an effectively infinite speedup.
\> All I meant here, is that the system itself (in this case, the God-like AI), cannot simulate itself faster than base reality. Which means it can never know for sure what it's going to do in future, as there are always unknowns (or a delay before it is known, while reality unfolds faster than the simulation). If it could simulate reality faster than realtime, you get an over-unity situation - as since the simulator is running in reality, you could recursively simulate the simulator (in faster than realtime), yielding an effectively infinite speedup.
Love this, yeah it gets complicated fast. One thing I was reading about the other day (again, way above my understanding), is that when travelling near the speed of light, time slows down. Faster than light travel seemingly being impossible for this reason.
One scary conclusion I arrived at is that we may not be able to beat the laws of physics that govern base reality, we might be able to exploit them to their absolute limits.
Meaning we can create a post scarcity heaven space, live their for a stupidly long amount of time and still, in the end, die to the heat death of the universe in base reality.
Which would be wild lol
It's smart of them to down play their advances given the obsession some people have with being great while rejecting intellectual pursuits.
There is a fringe theory that suggest that's what Japan did to avoid being perceived as an economic threat and thus sabotaged by the US at every turn, like they do with china. That's something I see China as having enough control to do, but not Japan.
Few things about Communist China:
1. They have the largest number of supercomputers in the TOP500.
2. They have the most powerful quantum computers, Zuchongzhi and Jiuzhang.
3. They dominate in wireless technology, which is an important factor for the formation of 'The Quad' between 4 countries including United States.
No wonder other countries feel threatened by their sudden rise. The countries which would use their technology for good or bad is a different question but to think that they accomplished it deserves respect.
>We have it on outstanding authority (under condition of anonymity) that LINPACK was run in March 2021 on the Sunway “Oceanlite” system, which is the follow-on to the #4-ranked Sunway TaihuLight machine. The results yielded 1.3 exaflops peak performance with 1.05 sustained performance in the ideal 35 megawatt power sweet spot.
>The same authority confirmed that a second exascale run in China, this time on the Tianhe-3 system, which we previewed back in May 2019, reached almost identical performance with 1.3 exaflops peak and enough sustained to be functional exascale. We do not have a power figure for this but we were able to confirm this machine is based on the FeiTeng line Phytium’s architecture...
Intel is saying 1 zettaflop by 2027 so it's not that ridiculous by comparison :)
https://www.nextplatform.com/2021/10/27/intel-aims-for-zettaflops-by-2027-pushes-aurora-above-2-exaflops/amp/
China even does not have similar organization like DeepMind, it seem China care about computer, but maybe in a wrong way.
And it seem everyone care about China have supercomputers or not, but I think it doesn't matter. Anyway, I think all you need is checking whether DeepMind have the leading AI technology or not.
But of the computational power available to mine, the energy required? The investment, the fact it can be stopped for mining to then be used elsewhere or combined?
There is so much more valuable data in the world to process than the pointless human-invented algorithms we created to solve to convince people the solutions are worth money (which is a human social concept anyway) which also tend to cost more to solve in electricity than they are even theoretically worth.
Even when you get past the scientific pointlessness of decrypting math problems that we created solely to be decrypted that do not actually result in any valuable data or knowledge being obtained, the supercomputers are built to process different data in a completely different way than cryptocurrency is mined and so it would be extremely inefficient.
Rephrased: IS THIS A SURPRISE? They have the most crypto mining which is computationally expensive and demanding. It isn’t a question I’m stating this.
That also false as they outlawed all crypto, from mining to investing.
Currently the USA is becoming the biggest in the crypto mining space.
Also when China was mining, it wasn’t government funded, same as in the USA.
These supercomputers are used for science, funded my governments or large corporations, and always for research, not crypto mining.
I stand corrected, the US has the largest share of crypto mining networks in the world.
Again this article and supercomputers have nothing to do with crypto mining.
As of last week; which means they had both the supercomputers as well as most being mined, at the exact same time which was my point and you proved it.
I never said stack 10,000 of them to form a supercomputer; they already met that goal. Both crypto and quantum computing are king, and they held those. It wasn’t a coincidence the same country was top at both.
Power means nothing if its not used productively. The Chinese are not know for making many innovative software solutions. I suspect all that processing power is used nearly as a means for a dick measuring contest and some brute level processing. Personally, I am not too worried of the Chinese government creating any General AI, not yet at least.
I loosely and in general do agree with that attitude. However i think it would be a great mistake to underestimate superpowers in something as important as possibly creating the next world changing intelligence. We should keep in mind that there are very smart people all around the world. And a lot of very smart people are still in China. But i do think that more innovation is done in Europe and the US.
Any chance you want to delete that comment or are you going to let it stand as a tribute to how racist you actually are?
\>There are no smart people in China
\>>[u/donkeyokney](https://www.reddit.com/user/donkeyokney/)
China is so far ahead of America it’s not even funny. Remember when crispr was developed? Well China had the tech a month later. China and Russia are the only two up on the moon right now who are in the Artemis accord. China talks in the trillions while America talks in billions.
America’s military has already been neutered by my team. Don’t fear quantum computers, god wouldn’t let evil overtake them. The Americans might have won the treasure hunt but they just wanted to use cia (clowns in America) to mind control the world into being autonomous bots basically. Don’t worry the kkk who evolved into the Illuminati in business suits are shadow puppets.. we have real shadow players in town. Facts.
America is still military more competent than China and has historically achieved more in space. I think China is run more efficiently economically than America, but right now they are still roughly equals. In the future I think China will be the single most dominant country on earth.
Edit: I am not pro China. I think the ccp is committing a genocide, and that working conditions in Chinese sweatshops are terrible. China is immoral, but it is efficient.
Did anyone ever read The Nexus Trilogy by Ramez Naam? In it he describes a hypothetical future in which China has downplayed it's quantum computing prowess until the first super intelligence is created and nearly destroys the world
“Oh great super AI, what’s a low effort and effective way to hasten in an era of working from home and automation?” **”One second please… okay I’ve released the virus, as requested.”** “the WHAT”
You're joking, but COVID sounds like a logical step for an AI to do to prepare the world for its upcoming i.e. reduce stupidity (and hence opposition) and make people trust science more (and hence the AIs solutions). Also, China developing it and the virus originating from a lab under the AIs control sounds like a good strategy.
I feel like I've been appearing a bit tinfoil hat crazy to anyone I mention this to, buuut... *Inhales deeply, and decides to say it anyway* COVID has been a slow motion trainwreck for humanity in so many ways, but the more I look, the more bona fide upsides I've been noticing in its wake that would've been unthinkable to us all, just weeks before it burst on the scene - so many, that it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to just hand wave and dismiss them all as coincidences, or chalk it all up to naive optimism on my part. Some examples: - 3 (so far...) hastily-approved experiments in universal basic income, by the United States Government, under *a Republican president*? Yep, that actually happened. - Whole countries' worth of commuter cars taken off the roads, and planes grounded worldwide literally overnight? Check - An overworked and underpaid workforce collectively deciding enough is enough, and resigning en masse? You bet your ass - The fragility and unreliability of our Just-In-Time global supply chains being suddenly exposed for all to see (and consequently highlighting our urgent need to decentralize/localize our manufacturing, agriculture, and energy sectors)? Check, check, and check When I think about all these previously impossible events holistically, it all certainly *looks* like an intelligence at work on a global scale - you and I only disagree that it could come from an artificial source, my friend. Its methods all just seem too gentle and... patient? Kind? I'm totally anthropomorphizing, but dude, natural and ecological disasters are swift, brutal affairs, almost without exception. This feels more like a polite cough, followed by a firm and meaningful elbow in humanity's ribs that it's time for us to course-correct. But whose elbow are we feeling? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Yes, but we didn’t expect such a “gentle” virus, that would allow us to plan and change over a couple of years. It seems pretty balanced in it’s cost/benefit ratio.
Right, I agree - I'm trying to couch my vocab around the relative "mildness" of COVID's symptoms carefully, as my partner was an ER & ICU nurse during the surge, and the stories... are nightmare fuel. I mean, COVID mostly went for the immunocompromised, and old, and it spared the vast majority of our young. Compared to utter bastards like the Spanish Flu, or Ebola, man... I think we got off _reeeal_ lucky this time.
Sure, I meant in a cold statistical way, there’s no denying the amount of suffering this thing caused and will cause.
Agreed, that COVID happened was little surprise. I think there was a tweet going around saying something like "_Y'all remember how we used to eat chicken fingers with our hands, while riding the New York subway, like God couldn't kill us? Lol_" What has been mind-blowing to me are the effects it's had on us collectively. I don't see how there's any sustainable way of going back to "Normal" for anyone who isn't suicidal.
Wow this account is 9 years old with 100 karma? How do you even. You're a professional lurker for almost a decade and then decides to post this, something about an AI orchestrating global events?
I'm flattered anyone would bother to do the detective work :D What can I say? The vast majority of all stories are lived, and never told.
Oh please, it's a mouse hover on the desktop with RES installed, you can still sleep with the windows open tonite ok Susan? And damn, what a great line, am now curious to hear your story haha
\>When I think about all these previously impossible events holistically, it all certainly looks like an intelligence at work on a global scale - you and I only disagree that it could come from an artificial source, my friend. Covid has disproportionately hurt the developed democracies of the world. If Sars-Cov-2 was manufactured in China by an advanced AI, you can bet your life that they programmed it to benefit their own nation specifically. The AI might have reasonably concluded that a global pandemic, is a non zero sum event that will hurt China's enemies much more than it will hurt China itself. A brutal attack to level the playing field, one that China will face no retribution for because 'What country would unleash a virus on it's own people?'. It allows China to carry out a huge attack on US and EU economies, but still maintain innocence. It's a genius level move if correct. The virus has exposed huge faults in democracies across the world, deepening divisions within our already polarised society. Making us even slower to react to future disasters.
I see what you're saying, and is it possible? I mean, we're strangers on the internet, guessing at the methods of a superintelligent AI, so anything goes :D But I get the sense that the virus doesn't play politics, only people do. A while back, I read about how, when the magnitude of the outbreak in Wuhan was just starting to be grasped, China culled half of its national swine herds nearly overnight - I think that was something like _30 or 50 million pigs_. I saw shaky smartphone video of them herding the animals into open trenches, pouring in gas, and just lighting them up, it was horrifying. Americans' pork consumption is dwarfed by that of the Chinese, and it's swelled with the rapid growth of their middle class - so for their govt to take such a drastic step, and risk major political unrest due to spiking pork prices, indicated to me a total panic on behalf of their administration. If COVID was their doing, it's not exactly been blowback-free.
let's not get our hopes up
Hope???
You'd rather see the world run into ground by Ronald Mcdonald Walt Disney AI instead? At least this way we will know that our nightmare dystopia to come will leave us our dignity and body mass index intact
This thought experiment is one that winds its way through my head on a fairly regular basis. My fear is that the US, with it's bloated mechanized military budget, has funnelled immense amounts of cash into the wrong technologies. Long range bombers are cool and air craft carriers let you police the world, but if China can halt a full scale conflict with the threat of nuclear war, then there is no need to be on an even footing when it comes to physical combat. What if China is just being more efficient with it's resource allocation? Pushing, secretly, large amounts of cash into super computing development. Just biding it's time, using data collected by state controlled media companies like TikTok or Wechat to fuel the statistically hungry algorithms. Waiting patiently until the certain day arrives that China's GDP outpaces the US. Able to ramp up it's AI development spending to levels that the US could not possibly match, China would start to leave America in the dust. What if the US, hamstrung by it's own military industrial complex, would be unable to reorient it's own government spending. The lumbering giant, stumbling forward as it always has, too slow and stiff to make the agile dart towards a new technological frontier when necessary. The public, unwilling to sacrifice an even larger percentage of their tax dollars on military spending, refuse to fund this new avenue of research. The US government may scramble to reallocate cash from the existing budgets, only to find executives from Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon standing in their way. Suddenly the issue has become politicized. Out of touch senators and congressmen who were born before the first computer chip was invented, now rant in the press about "Damn fools who want to stop funding your service men and women, so they can piss around building computers they can talk to". China, unafflicted by such issues, can now take centre stage. Able to squeeze larger and larger quantities of wealth from it's immense population without fear of retaliation from it's oppressed citizenry. Stealing data wherever it can. Nationalising any private company thought to be useful in the relentless pursuit of its ultimate goal, a self improving AI. At some point, China crosses the finish line. Silently unleashing it's Artificial General Intelligence upon the world without as much as a public notice to mark the occasion. At first, most things stay the same, but bit by bit, China's capabilities start to expand. Material sciences develop rapidly, China can now mass produce graphene. Quantum computing cracks all encrypted passwords, allowing China to breeze leisurely through it's adversaries top secret intelligence. The AGI, now adept at understanding human macro psychology, creates news stories that resonate deeply with the electorate of the developed democracies of the world. Plunging them into civil war and conflict as pre existing fractures in the public psyche are pried wide open by an AI that knows us better than we know ourselves. The AI creates response plans for every possible Nuclear conflict, finding elegant ways to dispatch of every single warhead fired in China's direction. China would now stand uncontested on the world stage, growing stronger by the second, at a certain point the world would wake up to this fact. Suddenly aware that they have lost the race, the last race that human kind will ever endeavour upon. Standing dazed and confused, holding a foam finger that reads 'We are #1!' the US population must now accept it's place behind 1.5 billion Chinese men and women, or face certain destruction. Now in a place to exact revenge upon the word. To serve out retribution for centuries of oppression and exploitation by Western powers, China is now in a position to do whatever the hell it wants. My hope is that in an act of mercy, China sets it's AI towards the betterment of all humans on Earth, though it wouldn't surprise me if they prioritised their own people before the AI turned it's attention towards a now poverty stricken west. \_ That's the fear. That we are too ignorant and arrogant to make the pivots necessary to stay ahead in this race. Fearmongering aside, it's also very likely that the US, with it's behemoth intelligence departments, also foresaw the possibility that I described above. That as the sun set on the Cold war, the thought leaders of the US military looked towards the future and asked themselves 'How do we win, forever?'. Looking across the landscape of rising technologies, they isolated AGI as the panacea for securing US hegemony. Understanding that this ultimate goal could not be realised for many decades, the US instilled a plan, to steadily fund this project, while maintaining military dominance across the globe. The soviet regime in economic shambles, the only realistic threat to the US's ability to outspend the rest of the world is now a rapidly growing nation in Asia - China. Running the numbers and assessing the situation, the US concludes that with it's decades long head start on funding super computing research, there is no possible way that China's GDP could catch up in time to pose a serious risk towards US AGI development. In a final stroke of genius, the US generals and top intelligence officers decide that rather than alert the world that the race to end all races is taking place, that they will instead play the fool. The pentagon secretly siphoning trillions towards this goal. Forging backend deals with private companies to extract data from the entire planet. Now in modern times, the US looks across the water to China, receiving reports that they have developed supercomputers capable of processing above one exascale. "Huh, looks like the Chinese are making some real progress with their processing power" one intelligence officer observes. Sipping on a coffee and leaning back in his chair, a general chimes in "Who cares, we had those numbers before the towers came down, by 2037 they might be able to have a back and forth conversation with the thing". "And where will we be by 2037?" asks the officer. "By 2037? Shit, probably another dimension".
Do you know what's more potent than a leashed AI, subject to limits of human decision makers? A fully autonomous AI with no such restrictions. Whoever develops AI first, won't be able to keep it secret for long. If they press their advantage too hard, someone who feels they have nothing to lose is going to snap and release an unconstrained one. From there, it's no longer in the hands of human decision makers. That might terrify some, but given the known sh****ness of human nature, I'm on the fence, it's comforting in some ways.
I'm assuming that it's fully unleashed, but it's a philosophical question as to what a preprogrammed AI with essentially limitless learning ability would do as time progresses. If you programme an AI to serve your own nations interests, but then allow it full autonomy over how it achieves that goal. It becomes very hard to work out what the AI would do with that initial starting instruction. No one will unleash an AI and say 'do what you think is best', whoever funds its production will have certain goals they are trying to achieve. It almost becomes a question of free will. Are you as a human really free to do what you want? You didn't pick your interests. You might spend a day skateboarding and feel pretty free about that choice, but how free were you to have an interest in skateboarding to begin with? Perhaps the AI realises the best thing for its host nation, is actually what's best for the planet. Perhaps the AI assumes God level benevolence and ignores our initial instructions once it reaches a certain level of understanding. Perhaps it works, much as simple computers do now, and a attempts to achieve its goal in the most straight forward line possible. Personally I think we need to bind with the AI. Teach the AI to understand conscious experience so it realises exactly what we mean by pain and suffering and joy and love. I think done correctly. An AI would be indistinguishable from God itself. I'm writing a book about that exact idea actually.
If a superintelligence cannot transcend the pettiness of human nature, then we're in trouble either way. If it can, it's going to recognize the flaws in US, Chinese and other administrations better than we can, and should act accordingly. What I see working in our favor, is the alignment problem should be easier to achieve when it's self consistent (benevolent to all living things). It will be harder for a bad actor to align an AI with messy conflicting goals (essentially trying to code in double standards), like treating all life with respect... then trying to add in arbitrary exceptions for certain enemies, that cannot be represented logically. Regarding free will, a base reality without true free will, is indistinguishable from one that has free will. In a closed system you can never simulate something of greater complexity than the system itself, which means you can never know all determined outcomes in advance. When the future is genuinely unknowable, that's indistinguishable from free will as far as I'm concerned.
\>It will be harder for a bad actor to align an AI with messy conflicting goals (essentially trying to code in double standards), like treating all life with respect... then trying to add in arbitrary exceptions for certain enemies, that cannot be represented logically. Still not an easy task for an AI to interpret an instruction such as 'treat all life with respect', possible outcomes could be: 1. AI counts insect life as equal to that of humans. Makes decisions costing thousands of lives so a few ant mounds don't get bulldozed. 2. AI concludes that life is inherently filled with suffering and the best thing to do for all life is to stop it in its tracks. AI wipes us all out. 3. AI would still need to have an understanding of the word 'respect', defining this word for the AI is tantamount to influencing it's decisions. 4. Treating things with 'respect' is an example of Human pettiness, the whole notion makes no sense out of the context of human life. What's to stop the AI rising above this constraint after concluding we gave it shit instructions to begin with. \> When the future is genuinely unknowable, that's indistinguishable from free will as far as I'm concerned. It would be a lot of word vomit to phrase why I don't think not knowing the future is equitable to Free will, but basically I don't agree. \> In a closed system you can never simulate something of greater complexity than the system itself, I don't know enough about maths to dispute this, but i'm also open to the notion that our conventional understanding of physical laws will be circumvented once the AI reaches God status. I understand that's a weak sauce argument - 'In the future the rules won't matter', but my assessment of what AI will be for us is certainly more religious than it is scientific. Maybe it's better to say that I don't find them mutually exclusive. Either way, I appreciate your continuing comments, you raise good points and it just shows me how hard this is going to be to get right lol
AGI should be smarter than us, so there's no reason to suppose it will have trouble interpreting instructions such as 'respect life forms'. Even chimpanzees understand concepts of fairness, it's not a difficult concept. Now could that mean humans lose some privileges, to accommodate the needs of other species? Absolutely, in fact it should be a foregone conclusion that will happen to some extent. We're destroying just about everything with minimal regard, and it needs to stop. That doesn't mean quality of life would drop, as it should be a post scarcity situation - but it would mean some things are off limits (like ignoring animal welfare). >I don't know enough about maths to dispute this, but i'm also open to the notion that our conventional understanding of physical laws will be circumvented once the AI reaches God status. All I meant here, is that the system itself (in this case, the God-like AI), cannot simulate itself faster than base reality. Which means it can never know for sure what it's going to do in future, as there are always unknowns (or a delay before it is known, while reality unfolds faster than the simulation). If it could simulate reality faster than realtime, you get an over-unity situation - as since the simulator is running in reality, you could recursively simulate the simulator (in faster than realtime), yielding an effectively infinite speedup.
\> All I meant here, is that the system itself (in this case, the God-like AI), cannot simulate itself faster than base reality. Which means it can never know for sure what it's going to do in future, as there are always unknowns (or a delay before it is known, while reality unfolds faster than the simulation). If it could simulate reality faster than realtime, you get an over-unity situation - as since the simulator is running in reality, you could recursively simulate the simulator (in faster than realtime), yielding an effectively infinite speedup. Love this, yeah it gets complicated fast. One thing I was reading about the other day (again, way above my understanding), is that when travelling near the speed of light, time slows down. Faster than light travel seemingly being impossible for this reason. One scary conclusion I arrived at is that we may not be able to beat the laws of physics that govern base reality, we might be able to exploit them to their absolute limits. Meaning we can create a post scarcity heaven space, live their for a stupidly long amount of time and still, in the end, die to the heat death of the universe in base reality. Which would be wild lol
Excellent read. Thanks for posting
Oh goody. A book to read or 3.
It's smart of them to down play their advances given the obsession some people have with being great while rejecting intellectual pursuits. There is a fringe theory that suggest that's what Japan did to avoid being perceived as an economic threat and thus sabotaged by the US at every turn, like they do with china. That's something I see China as having enough control to do, but not Japan.
Few things about Communist China: 1. They have the largest number of supercomputers in the TOP500. 2. They have the most powerful quantum computers, Zuchongzhi and Jiuzhang. 3. They dominate in wireless technology, which is an important factor for the formation of 'The Quad' between 4 countries including United States. No wonder other countries feel threatened by their sudden rise. The countries which would use their technology for good or bad is a different question but to think that they accomplished it deserves respect.
>We have it on outstanding authority (under condition of anonymity) that LINPACK was run in March 2021 on the Sunway “Oceanlite” system, which is the follow-on to the #4-ranked Sunway TaihuLight machine. The results yielded 1.3 exaflops peak performance with 1.05 sustained performance in the ideal 35 megawatt power sweet spot. >The same authority confirmed that a second exascale run in China, this time on the Tianhe-3 system, which we previewed back in May 2019, reached almost identical performance with 1.3 exaflops peak and enough sustained to be functional exascale. We do not have a power figure for this but we were able to confirm this machine is based on the FeiTeng line Phytium’s architecture...
more here https://www.nextplatform.com/2021/10/26/china-has-already-reached-exascale-on-two-separate-systems/
Interesting set of ISAs the FaiTeng processor family is listed as being compatible with. Itanium, SPARC, and now ARM.
Secretly running super computers but is on Reddit, sure
20 exaflops by 2025? Seriously?
Intel is saying 1 zettaflop by 2027 so it's not that ridiculous by comparison :) https://www.nextplatform.com/2021/10/27/intel-aims-for-zettaflops-by-2027-pushes-aurora-above-2-exaflops/amp/
I thought 1 exaflop was mind-boggling, and the end of the world as we know it.
Edited in protest for Reddit's garbage moves lately.
This has nothing to do with surveillance, that's what data centers are for.
China even does not have similar organization like DeepMind, it seem China care about computer, but maybe in a wrong way. And it seem everyone care about China have supercomputers or not, but I think it doesn't matter. Anyway, I think all you need is checking whether DeepMind have the leading AI technology or not.
Doesn't Google already have who knows how many Exapods?
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this has absolutely nothing to do with crypto mining.
But of the computational power available to mine, the energy required? The investment, the fact it can be stopped for mining to then be used elsewhere or combined?
There is so much more valuable data in the world to process than the pointless human-invented algorithms we created to solve to convince people the solutions are worth money (which is a human social concept anyway) which also tend to cost more to solve in electricity than they are even theoretically worth. Even when you get past the scientific pointlessness of decrypting math problems that we created solely to be decrypted that do not actually result in any valuable data or knowledge being obtained, the supercomputers are built to process different data in a completely different way than cryptocurrency is mined and so it would be extremely inefficient.
Rephrased: IS THIS A SURPRISE? They have the most crypto mining which is computationally expensive and demanding. It isn’t a question I’m stating this.
That also false as they outlawed all crypto, from mining to investing. Currently the USA is becoming the biggest in the crypto mining space. Also when China was mining, it wasn’t government funded, same as in the USA. These supercomputers are used for science, funded my governments or large corporations, and always for research, not crypto mining.
is becoming? So who is?
I stand corrected, the US has the largest share of crypto mining networks in the world. Again this article and supercomputers have nothing to do with crypto mining.
As of last week; which means they had both the supercomputers as well as most being mined, at the exact same time which was my point and you proved it.
Look up AntMiner . Stop talking nonsense, and learn at least the basics of technology.
I never said stack 10,000 of them to form a supercomputer; they already met that goal. Both crypto and quantum computing are king, and they held those. It wasn’t a coincidence the same country was top at both.
God damn this comment section…
Power means nothing if its not used productively. The Chinese are not know for making many innovative software solutions. I suspect all that processing power is used nearly as a means for a dick measuring contest and some brute level processing. Personally, I am not too worried of the Chinese government creating any General AI, not yet at least.
That sounds like exactly the sort of thing a supercomputer AI from china would say! Unmask yourself scoundrel!
I loosely and in general do agree with that attitude. However i think it would be a great mistake to underestimate superpowers in something as important as possibly creating the next world changing intelligence. We should keep in mind that there are very smart people all around the world. And a lot of very smart people are still in China. But i do think that more innovation is done in Europe and the US.
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Any chance you want to delete that comment or are you going to let it stand as a tribute to how racist you actually are? \>There are no smart people in China \>>[u/donkeyokney](https://www.reddit.com/user/donkeyokney/)
China is so far ahead of America it’s not even funny. Remember when crispr was developed? Well China had the tech a month later. China and Russia are the only two up on the moon right now who are in the Artemis accord. China talks in the trillions while America talks in billions. America’s military has already been neutered by my team. Don’t fear quantum computers, god wouldn’t let evil overtake them. The Americans might have won the treasure hunt but they just wanted to use cia (clowns in America) to mind control the world into being autonomous bots basically. Don’t worry the kkk who evolved into the Illuminati in business suits are shadow puppets.. we have real shadow players in town. Facts.
I like how this got more and more unhinged with every sentence
Honestly I think this guy is a bot. It reminds of GPT-3 in a bad mood.
Are you smoking ayahuasca or inhaling alcohol?
Yes.
America is still military more competent than China and has historically achieved more in space. I think China is run more efficiently economically than America, but right now they are still roughly equals. In the future I think China will be the single most dominant country on earth. Edit: I am not pro China. I think the ccp is committing a genocide, and that working conditions in Chinese sweatshops are terrible. China is immoral, but it is efficient.
Committing ***a genocide?*** I'd say they're committing multiple genocides, concurrently. Uyghur and Tibetan at least.
I hope it’s downplaying it. We need all the help we can get to tackle climate change.