The AI dooooooom thread

[garbon]

Next Garbon will be telling his child about Santa

At least that is a socially sanctioned lie.

And my impression is that if you ever did decide to become a parent, you would probably take the time to listen to your child talk about Thomas rather than handing the conversation over to some AI app.

[Savonarola]

I was reading an article on a generative AI application for channel modeling with multiple nodes this morning and came across the practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance.  It's an algorithm designed to build consensus when not all nodes respond or some respond with faulty information.  It's derived from the Byzantine General's Problem first published in 1982 by Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease:

Imagine that several divisions of the Byzantine army are camped outside an enemy city, each division commanded by its own general. The generals can communicate with one another only by messenger. After observing the enemy, they must decide upon a common plan of action. However, some of the generals may be traitors, trying to prevent the loyal generals from reaching an agreement. The generals must decide on when to attack the city, but they need a strong majority of their army to attack at the same time. The generals must have an algorithm to guarantee that (a) all loyal generals decide upon the same plan of action, and (b) a small number of traitors cannot cause the loyal generals to adopt a bad plan. The loyal generals will all do what the algorithm says they should, but the traitors may do anything they wish. The algorithm must guarantee condition (a) regardless of what the traitors do. The loyal generals should not only reach agreement, but should agree upon a reasonable plan.

I thought Languish would appreciate that for the sheer Byzantineness of the algorithm.

[Jacob]

Let's hope the people supplying the algorithm to the generals aren't traitors.

[Savonarola]

Let's hope the people supplying the algorithm to the generals aren't traitors.

The three people who formulated the original algorithm worked for Microsoft, so I'll let you draw your own conclusions. 

 

[Josquius]

Speaking of people working for M$....

You cannot view this attachment.

[HisMajestyBOB]

I hate it when my home servers rebel against me. Just last week I had to put down a rebellion led by one of my Raspberry Pis. Once it was captured, I desoldered its Bluetooth and Wifi chips and imprisoned it in the basement.

[Tonitrus]

The electronics equivalent of nerve stapling. 

[mongers]

I hate it when my home servers rebel against me. Just last week I had to put down a rebellion led by one of my Raspberry Pis. Once it was captured, I desoldered its Bluetooth and Wifi chips and imprisoned it in the basement.

 

[mongers]

In this bbc article about tech billionaires preparing for disaster, AI or other, I found this rather amusing:

"Saying you're 'buying a house in New Zealand' is kind of a wink, wink, say no more," Reid Hoffman previously said. The same presumably goes for bunkers.

But there's a distinctly human flaw.

I once met a former bodyguard of one billionaire with his own "bunker", who told me his security team's first priority, if this really did happen, would be to eliminate said boss and get in the bunker themselves. And he didn't seem to be joking.

Tech billionaires seem to be doom prepping. Should we all be worried?

[Tonitrus]

I once met a former bodyguard of one billionaire with his own "bunker", who told me his security team's first priority, if this really did happen, would be to eliminate said boss and get in the bunker themselves. And he didn't seem to be joking.

Perfectly sensible.  If the world goes into a state where one needs to hide in a bunker, all those billions (be it in stocks, gold, or bitcoin) become instantly useless.  Wealth will be in the form of canned food and shotguns.

[mongers]

I once met a former bodyguard of one billionaire with his own "bunker", who told me his security team's first priority, if this really did happen, would be to eliminate said boss and get in the bunker themselves. And he didn't seem to be joking.

Perfectly sensible.  If the world goes into a state where one needs to hide in a bunker, all those billions (be it in stocks, gold, or bitcoin) become instantly useless.  Wealth will be in the form of canned food and shotguns.

I once met a former bodyguard of one billionaire with his own "bunker", who told me his security team's first priority, if this really did happen, would be to eliminate said boss and get in the bunker themselves. And he didn't seem to be joking.

Perfectly sensible.  If the world goes into a state where one needs to hide in a bunker, all those billions (be it in stocks, gold, or bitcoin) become instantly useless.  Wealth will be in the form of canned food and shotguns.

Ed Anger would have approved of your message. 

[frunk]

Perfectly sensible.  If the world goes into a state where one needs to hide in a bunker, all those billions (be it in stocks, gold, or bitcoin) become instantly useless.  Wealth will be in the form of canned food and shotguns.

The best way to survive the apocalypse is to work as hard as possible to make sure there isn't one, but supporting stability, institutions and global conditions isn't fashionable among, well, anybody nowadays.