I get the feeling that many Americans are under the illusion that most Europeans live in big cities like Paris or Amsterdam. And while it may be true that people in those cities have different shopping habits compared to Americans in similarly sized cities, that doesn’t reflect the reality for all - or even most - Europeans. For me and most of my friends, going to the supermarket once or twice a week by car has always been the norm.

It’s your friend’s claim I’m criticizing - not yours.

Europeans aren’t a homogeneous blob - we’re individuals. There’s no universal consensus among us about what counts as a reasonable distance to the grocery store.

LLMs are AI. While they’re not generally intelligent, they still fall under the umbrella of artificial intelligence. AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is a subset of AI. Sentience, on the other hand, has nothing to do with it. It’s entirely conceivable that even an AGI system could lack any form of subjective experience while still outperforming humans on most - if not all - cognitive tasks.

People on the left are not just following a team. They have actual independent thought. The right is a hive mind.

These kinds of blanket generalizations don’t exactly suggest much “independent thought.”

Nor does speaking about “the right” as if the U.S. is the only country where a political right exists.

In their defense: there’s no way to prove that these systems aren’t sentient either. We assume they’re not - and that’s likely true - but we could be wrong, because there’s no definitive way to measure sentience, not even in humans.

Images generated by AI are only “fake” if you falsely present them as actual photographs or as digital art made by a human. There’s nothing inherently fake about AI-generated images as long as they’re correctly labeled.

Also, suggesting that all information provided by generative AI is false is just as bizarre. It makes plenty of errors and shouldn’t be blindly trusted, but the majority of its answers are factually correct.

This kind of ideological, blanket hatred toward generative AI isn’t productive. It’s a tool - nothing more, nothing less - and it should be treated as such. Not as what you hoped it would be or what marketing hype wants you to believe it is or will become.

I’m not saying ASI would think in some magical new way. I’m saying it could process so much more data with such precision that it would detect patterns or connections we physically can’t. Like how an AI can tell biological sex from a retina scan, but no human doctor can do even knowing it’s possible. That’s not just “faster logic.” It’s a cognitive scale we simply don’t have. I see no reason to assume that we’re anywhere near the far end of the intelligence spectrum.

My comment about it’s potenttial persuation capabilities was more of the dangers of such system. That an ASI might be so good at persuasion, threat construction, and lying that it could influence us in ways we don’t even fully realize. Not because it’s “divine” - but because it’s just far more competent at manipulating human behavior than any human is.

I’ve gotten about 90% of the things I’ve ever wanted and I still don’t consider myself particularly happy, so I’m not sure if that is the way to get there.

No and never have as I simply don’t feel like I have the need for it. I didn’t even when my phone only had a physical numpad.

Never as I don’t drink tea nor own a microwave.

Beginning by insulting your opponent isn’t exactly the best way to ensure they’ll finish reading your message.

You have a great day.

Depends on who I compare myself to and how one defines “rich.” To me, it means someone whose passive income exceeds their spending - and I’m nowhere even close to that… yet.

The issue isn’t whether we can imagine a smarter entity - obviously we can, as we do in sci-fi. But what we imagine are just results of human intelligence. They’re always bounded by our own cognitive limits. We picture a smarter person, not something categorically beyond us.

The real concept behind Artificial Superintelligence is that it wouldn’t just be smarter in the way Einstein was smarter than average - it would be to us what we are to ants. Or less generously, what we are to bacteria. We can observe bacteria under a microscope, study their behavior, even manipulate them - and they have no concept of what we are, or that we even exist. That’s the kind of intelligence gap we’re talking about.

Imagine trying to argue against a perfect proof. Take something as basic as 1 + 1 = 2. Now imagine an argument for something much more complex - like a definitive answer to climate change, or consciousness, or free will - delivered with the same kind of clarity and irrefutability. That’s the kind of persuasive power we’re dealing with. Not charisma. Not rhetoric. Not “debating skills.” But precision of thought orders of magnitude beyond our own.

The fact that we think we can comprehend what this would be like is part of the limitation. Just like a five-year-old thinks they understand what it means to be an adult - until they grow up and realize they had no idea.

I don’t. I do it the boring way - buying cheap, highly diversified ETF index funds.

I just ran the numbers for the first time ever, and it adds up to 34 months - which I realize is a pretty privileged place to be. However, I’m by no means rich; I just live well below my means and invest all my savings.

It’s not that the output of an ASI would be incomprehensible but that as humans we’re simply incapable of predicting what it would do/say because we’re not it. We’re incapable of even imagining how convincing of an argument a system like this could make.

If I agree with the moral logic behind it, then yes - it’ll upset me even if I’m not personally affected. If I hear someone shouting slurs at a black person, I’ll obviously take issue with it, despite not being black myself.

On the other hand, if I hear someone say, for example, “this thing is retarded,” then even if society broadly considers that offensive, I still wouldn’t personally have a problem with it - because I don’t agree with the reasoning behind that judgment.

Whether it be AI apocalypse or utopia, it’s not LLM’s that people think will take us there. It’s AGI/ASI and nobody knows how long it’ll take us to develop a system like that. Could take 2 years or it could take 50.

Toss the weeds into a bucket of water and you have liquid fertilizer in a few weeks.