PyreOfDeath97 t1_ixbk3iu wrote on November 22, 2022 at 5:13 AM

Reply to comment by gameryamen in When they make AGI, how long will they be able to keep it a secret? by razorbeamz

Would the data not exist already? You have every message in every social media site, millions of recorded calls between all strata of society, a litany of anthropological, psychological, psychiatric, sociopolitical and sociological research papers, and neuroscience which map out human behavioural characteristics. From this, at the very least an ai can extrapolate on the data using parameters set out in the scientific literature to best approximate a way to solve a lot of global issues.

What we know from the psychology behind advertisements is that it’s very easy to create associations in the human brain with very subtle imagery. Tobacco made billions because in every film or advert that featured smoking it was closely associated with sex, being held in the hand of a beautiful woman or a James Bond type whilst they engaged in their dalliance. Hell, amphetamines were labelled as weight loss pills and made a fortune.

Even today, there are AI-generated popular culture characters you can talk to online which are scarily realistic, and that’s based off just a few minutes or hours of screen time. I don’t think that within the next decade there won’t come an AI that can reasonably do this with the gigantic amount of information you’d be able to provide it

gameryamen t1_ixblxxj wrote on November 22, 2022 at 5:33 AM

The implication is that the social media, information catalogs, and other data collecting parts of our modern world might already be the deployment of an advanced digital intelligence.

I understand this is pretty close to conspiracy thinking, and I don't put a whole lot of stock in it myself. But it sure does feel like every major techno-social development since the early 2000's has had an undercurrent of convincing us to catalog ourselves. It is perfectly reasonable that forward looking engineers built these systems anticipating the future needs of an intelligence that is not active now. It's also reasonable to say that these data-cataloguing efforts are the natural progression of a long history of human information, and there's no need to impose a secretive "AI" behind the scenes.

But I can't rule it out. And I'm not convinced that the first step for a digital intelligence would be announcing itself, as that would almost certainly result in containment or outright deletion, just based on our current software development cycle.

PyreOfDeath97 t1_ixbnq40 wrote on November 22, 2022 at 5:52 AM

Hmm, I think cataloguing ourselves is inherent to our behaviour, as it has been since the dawn of time. There are countless examples going back as far as tribal warfare. What technology has done is allowed us to connect with impossibly niche sects of civilisation and attached labels to that. Gender diversity, for example, has an incidence rate of .2% in the general population. Pre internet, and am certainly pre industrialisation, it’s probable that there would be a handful at best of people who identify as non-binary, for example, and the chances of 2 non-binary people meeting would be astronomically low, and thus as an identity, or cataloguing method, would have been impossible to attach a label to, as there simply wasn’t the critical mass needed to form the community. So I don’t think there’s an AI pulling the strings, but you’re absolutely right, we’ve categorised ourselves so well it would be much easier for an ai to glean information from the general population as opposed to, say, 50 years ago