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

Reply to comment by PyreOfDeath97 in When they make AGI, how long will they be able to keep it a secret? by razorbeamz

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