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@murdoc @gerrymcgovern @ReggieHere @chikl There is a difference between science and technology. Science is about finding out how the universe works. Technology is about doing and making things. The real problem is that out technosphere has become so immense that it crushes the biosphere. Therefore, the technosphere needs to shrink dramatically, no matter what we do.
The humans of the future, if there are any, if Homo sapiens can escape extinction, will have to do with much less technology, but not with less science.

@murdoc @ReggieHere @chikl @gerrymcgovern The real problem is that we humans aren't making the rules. Planet Earth is making the rules, and we need to accept that we are just very clever monkeys with swollen mutant brains, and all the rules that apply to any large primate also apply to us. We can't live on this planet as if we own the place, because we don't. We're just part of the landscape like any other living creature.

@murdoc @ReggieHere @chikl @gerrymcgovern I don't think that will be possible. Scarcity is making a big comeback, and the Industrial Age is unravelling. We have missed our window for achieving sustainability, and now the entire system is beginning to collapse.

@ReggieHere @chikl @gerrymcgovern I think we need something more radical: We need to build a society without money, without markets, without private property. Some kind of decentralised Anarchist Communism without a state, where nobody has any more power than anybody else, where all the people are radically equal, and where everything belongs to everybody.

@ReggieHere @chikl @gerrymcgovern Unless some cryptobros set up a darknet assassination market and crowdfund the assassinations of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, etc., cryptocurrency is pretty useless other than for ransomware attacks and contraband deals.

@michaelgemar @cstross @interstar @f4grx @weekend_editor LLMs are part of AI, but not the whole field. It's like you say "sports" but then it's only tennis.

@cstross @interstar @f4grx @michaelgemar @weekend_editor AI is just an umbrella term for different branches of Computer Science that work on solving complex problems for which we humans utilise our intelligence, and machine learning is one of those branches. I think huge LLMs are quite impressive from a research POV, but they aren't even half as useful for practical applications as marketeers would have us believe. Small open source models that can run on the local machine, even a Raspberry Pi without any network connection, will take over once Big AI goes bust.

@interstar @cstross @f4grx @michaelgemar @weekend_editor I expect the bubble to burst very soon, and then it will be another AI winter, and AI R&D will have to do with tiny budgets again for a long time because nobody is going to invest in anything AI.

@interstar @cstross @f4grx @michaelgemar @weekend_editor The real problem is that AI researchers often try to build intelligence upside down, like starting to build a house at the roof. Things like speech or playing complex games seem quite impressive, but the part that is really hard isn't the stuff for which humans have to work their brains at full capacity, it's all the things a four month old kitten can do without even trying. That's where we must start if we ever want to build something that's truly intelligent.

OTOH, intelligent beings can cause a lot of damage, like a kitten that just discovered the audio cables on the back of the HiFi stereo set (yes, I still use one of those).

@michaelgemar @weekend_editor @cstross Funny thing is, we humans are constantly hallucinating. We don't experience the real world but a hallucination our brains build for us. The difference is that our brains constantly correct those hallucinations, checking the sensory perceptions and changing the virtual world inside our minds in not quite realtime. When people suffer from hallucinations, it is because the checks and corrections part doesn't work properly due to some mental illness. When people experience recreational hallucinations after ingesting psychedelics, it's similar but temporary, and the psychonauts are aware of this.