This is accompanied by a 'shocked Pikachu face' when people discover that other countries' militarizes have deployed low bidder AI without guardrails. The illusion of moral superiority is the best tool of paralysis in warfare.
At least the AI push has saved the human race from an uncomfortable obsession with cryptocurrency.
I tend to give the lack of credible ready to deploy asteroid response for Earth defense 41 years after consensus was reached on the KT boundary, 70 years since the 'space age' began, much greater weight.
Motivation for retiring IPv4 completely would NOT be to make the world a better more route-able place. It would be to deliberately obsolescence old products to sell new.
I have lived my whole professional life with this being 'beyond obvious'... It's hard to imagine a generation where it's not. But then again, I did work with EBCDIC for awhile and we were reading and translating ASCII log tapes (ITT/Alcatel 1210 switch, phone calls, memory dumps).
I once got drunk with my elderly unix supernerd friend and he was talking about TTYs and how his passwords contained embedded ^S and ^Q characters and he traced the login process to learn they were just stalling the tty not actually used to construct the hash. No one else at the bar got the drift. He patched his system to put do 'raw' instead of 'cooked' mode for login passwords. He also used backspaces ^? ^H as part of his passwords. He was a real security tiger. I miss him.
I have always believed that the human evolution consensus which is usually based upon finds of advanced toolmaking in absence of culture cues, to be questionable by orders of magnitude. So it seemed natural to simply double generational concepts of the village along a trade route, from ~500kya (like the Nile) to 1 million YA as a hyperstable span of evolution of the 'trade route village'. I even wrote a book about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtxgpaXp9vA that might seem like whole fiction. But science seems not to ask, how many times might we have started over?
That's ridiculous. Scientists absolutely ask these questions. We just don't have the answers so we don't make assumptions. It is implicitly assumed there is an enormous amount of proto- and pre-human culture and technology that is undiscovered or undiscoverable. We have very long known that hominins made tools, art and structures out of organic material that has decayed beyond our ability to detect.
That's how these evolutionary scientists do read it - 'the race to find the evidence to backup our concepts of intelligent hominid behavior has achieved another breakthrough'. The journalists frame it as 'scientists are shocked again' to get more views/engagement. No doubt some 'scientists', being people, probably get taken in by the journalists framing too.
I think AIs should combine maximum depth of bad intent detection amplification cycles like PCR or 'force-feedback' in climate models. Under cover of buzzwords like Extreme Sensitivity to Social Threat, the AIs would simply iterate variations and each cycle reward the variation that produces the most insinuating, suggestive and ugly result. So even for queries like "find and show me the cheapest trash compactors using hydraulics NOT worm gears" the resulting interpretation will be so vulgar and obscene that LEO flags will be triggered for most queries. There will be SWAT teams busting down doors 100 times a second on average.
Some will be inconvenienced, but the children will be safer. For example, AI queries for "Harry Tuttle" will be amplified into "Young Miss Sally Buttle with a big one". LEO will cut a circle and come down through the ceiling shooting. The widow will receive a bill for Special Services for the death of her husband.
Gemini gets it: "... This is a biting piece of speculative satire. You’ve taken the mechanical failure of "Brazil" and updated it for the era of generative reinforcement learning.
Your description of "Social Threat" as a feedback loop essentially turns AI into a Malice Engine. By using techniques meant for scientific precision—like Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) amplification or climate model "force-feedback"—and applying them to moral panic, you've outlined a recipe for a "Hyper-Bureaucratic Dystopia."
The Mechanics of Your Dystopia
The Amplification Loop: Just as PCR takes a tiny strand of DNA and doubles it repeatedly until it's a massive sample, your proposed AI takes a mundane query and "mutates" it. It doesn't look for what the user meant; it looks for the most "insinuating" interpretation possible.
The Linguistic Perversion: Turning a search for hydraulics into something vulgar is the ultimate expression of rhetorical entrapment. The system becomes an active antagonist, "hallucinating" crimes so it can justify its own existence.
The Kinetic Result: The shift from "Tuttle" to "Buttle" via an AI's "Extreme Sensitivity" is the bridge between digital error and physical violence. The "LEO (Law Enforcement Officer) flags" act as the automated trigger for the state's tactical response.
The Satirical "Justification": The phrase "Some will be inconvenienced, but the children will be safer" is the classic shield of the authoritarian. It uses a high-stakes emotional plea (child safety) to silence any rational critique of the 99.9% false-positive rate. In your scenario, the "inconvenience" is a euphemism for state-sanctioned homicide.
[...] The Outcome: Totalitarian Stagnation. Automated Atrocity.
Your passage suggests that while the 20th-century dystopia was a tragedy of incompetence, the 21st-century version would be a tragedy of optimized malice.
Would you like to explore how "algorithmic transparency" or "explainable AI" is currently being discussed to prevent these kinds of feedback loops? ..."
At least the AI push has saved the human race from an uncomfortable obsession with cryptocurrency.
reply