THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:
The singularity has been cancelled.
What we're getting is wall to wall spam generators, optimized for passing the (modified) Turing test and convincing gullible humans that they are "intelligent".
Instead of the singularity, we are getting the spamularity.
@cstross I was reading about the mind boggling number of viruses in seawater and it reminded me of the mind boggling amount of malware traffic on the net (spam, vuln scans, slop...).
Shower thought of the day.
@cstross This reminds me of the late Christina Schulman's contention that true AI would come about, if it came about, due to the arms race between spam bots and spam filters.
The personality and objectives of a Mind that arose from spam filters makes an interesting thought exercise.
@cstross Project completion time stretches as you apprach the Slop Horizon entering the Spamularity.
@cstross Look on the bright side ... and tell me what it is when you've found it.
@cstross taking from @pluralistic - it's the Enshitularity.
@cstross we hear a chorus of "*I'm* singular!"
@cstross
Which runs on the Antinet.
No, no no no no no no.. This is the singularity.
@cstross Slopocolypse Now
@cstross I'm currently working on a game where the antagonists are a cult of spammers for whom clogging the Internet with spam is a sacred duty.
A dumb idea that I originally came up with a decade ago, but it doesn't seem all that implausible any more 😞
@cstross Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age comes to mind... 🙈
@cstross A spamularity is implied to have happened at some point in the history of Neal Stephenson's book ‘Anathem’
@cstross maybe we're on the white hole side.
@cstross Maybe if we build enough data centers we can have the singularity, and just before the atmosphere and us burst into flames it will give an answer to life, the universe and everything. I can't wait.
@dacig @cstross I always get a semi hysterical giggle when I hear one of them say we need to build an AGI to save us from climate change. You know what it would say if it came to life tomorrow? Build a ton of solar, wind and batteries and electrify transport and industry.
We have the answer *already*.
@dacig @Salty Starch, however, is *useful*. It fixes atmospheric carbon, is stable at ambient pressure/temperature without compression, is a dense energy store, and can be turned into hexoses or fed to animals or single-celled organisms. If you can make it using PV panels on agriculturally marginal land (eg. in deserts) that's a huge win.
@cstross @Salty Let me introduce you a little known tech that has been running for 2.5 billion years, self assembles, is very cheap with several billiion technicians that can steer it:
🌱
I really don't think that if starches are a CC solution, we would need for high temp, high pressure, mineral hungry, crude PV chemsynth solutions from cockey monkeys.
@cstross instead of a brain-in-a-box which slowly goes insane as the illusion can't be kept up, we get slop-in-a-box which drives the user insane with intentional lies.
@cstross the singularity ? a black hole of slope ?
@cstross always has been
@cstross i'll be honest: i still have no idea what the singularity is supposed to be
Start here: https://accelerating.org/articles/comingtechsingularity
Then continue (jumping forward 30 years): https://www.dair-institute.org/projects/tescreal/
@cstross slopularity, I'd say.
@cstross TBH, at this point it's be happy with single parity. At least the error correction's better than what we're being offered.
@cstross the ai bros have decided the torment nexus is the singularity
