alt Hacker NewsObviously the doomers will tell you that the future looks like the Matrix, because most of what they predict is based on extrapolation from sci fi movies.
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If you were a superintelligence why would you farm humans and waste resources on all the excess... material... that isn't required for thought? And unless the machine's goal is to specifically abuse human consciousness, why wouldn't they bio-engineer their own grey matter?
There are other sci fi stories which use humans for distributed computing and they don’t realize, but I don’t want to spoil by naming as it’s something of a revelation.
(I do realize the Matrix is a fantastic movie, but entertain the thought? At any rate, the idea that robots only run on solar and wouldn’t just use nuclear is far more stupid.)
The Matrix is actually more of an optimist position, modal doomers don't think any humans will be left for any reason at all (the earth will get turned into raw materials for compute, dyson spheres, etc).
When it turns out the doomers don't tell us that, will you acknowledge that you don't actually know what you're talking about?
I mean, aren't a lot of sci-fi authors' predictions coming true? It might not be exactly the same as they predicted, but we're heading there.
The datacenters would consume a lot less energy if all the compute was handled in human brains… And there wouldn’t be any more heating if we just removed the sunlight… Truly a “Claude, please solve global warming” moment. The matrix was ahead of its time.