this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
148 points (94.0% liked)

TechTakes

1488 readers
95 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
148
Eric Schmidt: ‘We’re not going to hit the climate goals. I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem.’ With "alien intelligence"! (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
78 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Aside from anything else, an "alien intelligence" will either:

  • Be immediately ignored and villianized for "not understanding humans" if they suggest any regulations or caps on superfluous waste that might have any economic impact.
  • Be the perfect proxy delivery-entity for whatever genocide-the-poor/build-Elysium/flee-to-seasteads plan the rich actually want, in which case its conclusions will be holy and $10000% perfect examples of divine insight.
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'd just submit and demand for our new alien overlords. If there's a species capable of interstellar travel then they surely know their shit.

Edit: People, I was making a joke.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They're talking about an AI we build, the term "alien" in "alien intelligence" refers to it not having human thought patterns, not to extraterrestrial origin.

And the thought pattern here is more akin to "I ended the last paragraph with 'origin', followed by a 'period', so it's likely that the next word is 'And'" rather than anything actually useful. All current AI does is statistics. During training, the Neural Network learn statistical rules about their training data. This has exponentially decaying marginal utility, and exponentially increasing marginal costs. So, the problem the AI companies likely already have is that they can't efficiently train better models, because there isn't enough training data. And even if they could, they wouldn't be able to turn a profit on it, because it would be barely better than the last model they output, while having to charge maybe twice as much to break even.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

They’re talking about an AI we build, the term “alien” in “alien intelligence” refers to it not having human thought patterns, not to extraterrestrial origin

Ah right i thought they meant it was secretly produced by people in the third world, the illegal alien way. ;)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

By aliens they mean incomprehensible, not extraterrestrial