Thursday, August 03, 2023

Three AI Doomsday Scenarios

Anonymous online comment:
There are several AI doomsday scenarios:
1. singularity theory, where AI gains super powers and humans can't stop it.
2. AI as a tool is used to make bad things
3. AI is used for good. It replaces all jobs and humans can just eat all they want and do all they want. There are no wars or crime as everyone has everything. It might sound strange, but according to rat tests, this kind of scenario leads first into overpopulation and then into people not wanting to have or take care of kids, which causes sudden and total collapse in population.

So I think we can be pretty sure that we are doomed, so matter what happens.

It is referring to this:
"Behavioral sink" is a term invented by ethologist John B. Calhoun to describe a collapse in behavior which can result from overcrowding. The term and concept derive from a series of over-population experiments Calhoun conducted on Norway rats between 1958 and 1962.[1] In the experiments, Calhoun and his researchers created a series of "rat utopias" – enclosed spaces in which rats were given unlimited access to food and water, enabling unfettered population growth.
Here is his article, describing how the population eventually went extinct.

1 comment:

CFT said...

As much as it kind of is sad to admit this, we were not designed morally, ethically, behaviorally, or biologically to live in a cornucopia paradise or nirvana. What exactly would folks do in such an existence? Binge eat themselves to oblivion? Become couch potatoes incarnate?

The world is littered with ridiculous welfare states that have reduced its people to unhappy indigent baby making fodder.

Check out various middle eastern oil societies with generous welfare, where making very angry dissatisfied revolutionary babies is about the only home grown industry, and all highly skilled workers are imported since no one wants to work. Within a generation the children of such societies figure out what their oblivious parents could not, they have no purpose and no future, and they instinctively rebel against this. A similar line of observation was used in the first Matrix movie where (ironically) the AI Agent Smith admits that there was once another matrix that was designed by the AIs as a perfect paradise... it was a complete disaster, as the humans instinctively rejected it, as we are all designed to struggle and suffer to some degree, as was all life. Struggle is what drives the entire shebang of life. Dead inert matter does not have to exert any energy to merely exist, living things do.

As far as humanity goes, absolutely nothing has value without effort to acquire or sustain it.
Anyone who is truly educated (vs. indoctrinated) knows this.