Yesterday, I published an article for Truthdig on Sam Altman’s pro-extinctionism. “Few people in the media seem to have noticed Altman’s pro-extinctionist agenda,” I wrote. “The public is largely unaware.”
This isn’t really extinction in that sense. The author is being pedantic.
Extinction in the form of living forever and morphing into a different species is just not something we have a word for because it’s never happened before.
I meant a single individual living forever and morphing into a different species, which is what Sam Altman is talking about, not a whole species evolving into another across generations of individuals…
The first one has never happened and is the topic being discussed, the latter is irrelevant.
That’s just arguing semantics on what evolution means.
First definition for Evolution in Merriam-Webster: “Descent with modification from preexisting species.” Sure sounds a fuckload like what turning humans into AI is to me.
Further, I don’t understand why everyone fucking believes the idea that being in a computer means you can live forever. Last I checked, some of these LLMs for major companies require buildings the size of a whole section of a city, with the power requirements to boot. We are nowhere near where we need to be with materials science to be having factories with no humans in them auto fabricating and auto replacing parts as they go bad. RAM still fails, CPUs still fail, power supplies still fail. The “living forever” thing rests pretty heavily on some major assumptions of everything going exaclty perfectly and that they’re not just building the equivalent of the Pyramids, digital tombs for their now digital brains that will keep running as the outside world slowly decays until their systems stop working and nature takes over once again.
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations.[1][2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as genetic drift and natural selection act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations.[3] The process of evolution has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation.[4][5]
The scientific theory of evolution by natural selection was conceived independently by two British naturalists, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, in the mid-19th century as an explanation for why organisms are adapted to their physical and biological environments. The theory was first set out in detail in Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species.[6]
This isn’t really extinction in that sense. The author is being pedantic.
Extinction in the form of living forever and morphing into a different species is just not something we have a word for because it’s never happened before.
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Oh man wait until you hear about some of the ideas from this Charles Darwin guy!
I meant a single individual living forever and morphing into a different species, which is what Sam Altman is talking about, not a whole species evolving into another across generations of individuals…
The first one has never happened and is the topic being discussed, the latter is irrelevant.
That’s just arguing semantics on what evolution means.
First definition for Evolution in Merriam-Webster: “Descent with modification from preexisting species.” Sure sounds a fuckload like what turning humans into AI is to me.
Further, I don’t understand why everyone fucking believes the idea that being in a computer means you can live forever. Last I checked, some of these LLMs for major companies require buildings the size of a whole section of a city, with the power requirements to boot. We are nowhere near where we need to be with materials science to be having factories with no humans in them auto fabricating and auto replacing parts as they go bad. RAM still fails, CPUs still fail, power supplies still fail. The “living forever” thing rests pretty heavily on some major assumptions of everything going exaclty perfectly and that they’re not just building the equivalent of the Pyramids, digital tombs for their now digital brains that will keep running as the outside world slowly decays until their systems stop working and nature takes over once again.
Lol, no it’s not, Darwin has thoughts on precisely what evolution is: