Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post, thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    Is artificial intelligence the great filter that makes advanced technical civilisations rare in the universe?

    This professor is arguing we need to regulate AI because we havenā€™t found any space aliens yet and the most conceivably explanation why is that they all wiped themselves out with killer AIs.

    And hits some of the greatest hits:

    • AI will nuke us all because the nuclear powers are so incompetent theyā€™d hook the bombs up to Chat-GPT.
    • AI will wipe us out with a killer virus for reasons
    • We may not be adorable enough towards AI to prevent being vaporized even if we become cyborgs šŸ„ŗ
    • AI will wipe out an entire planet. Solution: we need people on a bunch of different planets and space-stations to study it ā€œsafelyā€
    • Um actually space aliens would all be robots. Be free from your flesh prisons!

    Zero mentions of global warming of course.

    I kinda want to think that the author has just been reading some weird ideas. At least he put himself out there and wrote a paper with human sentences! Itā€™s all aboard the AI hype train for sure, and constantly makes huge logical leaps, but it somehow doesnā€™t make me feel as skeezy as some of the other stuff on here.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      Personally I think a unnoticed black swan event relating climate change is way more likely. ā€˜Whoops turns out that we thought 1.5C wasnā€™t that big a problem but this causes some feedback loop in the oceans killing them all, yes it caused more algae to grow, but these had less nutrition causing the fish to overeat and die, causing the algae to choke themselves out. Dead seas everywhereā€™.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          7 months ago

          Dont worry, as people are aware this might happen, it isnā€™t technically a black swan event. It is just a risk we are ignoring ;) (im not sure if this is actually a real risk, or that we really are ignoring it, im not a marine biologist).

          • titotal@awful.systems
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            7 months ago

            I feel this makes it an unlikely great filter though. Surely some aliens would be less stupid than humanity?

            Or they could be on a planet with far less fossil fuels reserves, so they donā€™t have the opportunity to kill themselves.

            • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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              7 months ago

              Think both ā€˜has the wisdom as a society to prevent unknown unknown side effects from industrialization from wrecking the ecosystemā€™ and ā€˜has almost no access to fossil fuelsā€™ could also be pretty effective filters. In the latter case they prob would still be around but they wouldnā€™t spread in the universe so we wouldnā€™t hear from them which I think would satisfy the filter reqs.

    • blakestacey@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      ā€œSometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.ā€

      Calvin and Hobbes, 8 November 1989

      ā€œThey say the pollutants we dump in the air are trapping the Sunā€™s heat and itā€™s going to melt the polar ice caps! Sure, youā€™ll be gone when it happens, but I wonā€™t! Nice planet youā€™re leaving me!ā€

      Calvin and Hobbes, 23 July 1987

    • Mii@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      I hate that you canā€™t mention the Fermi paradox anymore without someone throwing AI into the mix. Thereā€™s so much more interesting discussions to have about this than the idea that weā€™re all gonna be paperclipped by some future iteration of spicy autocomplete.

      But whatā€™s even worse is that those munted dickheads will then claim that they have also found the solution to the Fermi paradox, which is, of course, to give more money to them so they can make their shitty products even worse safer.

      Also:

      AI could spell the end of intelligence on Earth (including AI) [ā€¦]

      Somehow Clippy 9000 thatā€™s clever enough to outsmart the entirety of the human race because itā€™s playing 4D chess with multiverse time travel, is, at the same time, too stupid to come up with any plan that doesnā€™t kill itself in the end, too?

      • titotal@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        Yeah, the fermi paradox really doesnā€™t work here, an AI that was motivated and smart enough to wipe out humanity would be unlikely to just immediately off itself. Most of the doomerism relies on ā€œtile the universeā€ scenarios, which would be extremely noticeable.

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      If only the ā€œDark Forestā€ hypothesis of human-extraterrestrial interaction would enter the public consciousness any sooner. Weā€™d at least have more interesting ideas than this shit.

      NB: I have not watched the 3BP adaptation yet, tho I have heard it is good. I have listened to the first two books as audiobooks and am tickled by Bruno Roubicekā€™s mildly (three body) problematic accent-work.

      • gerikson@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        Both Lovecraft and Reynolds play with the idea that sentience, when discovered, is hunted down and exterminated by hostile entities. Scalziā€™s Old Manā€™s War universe is somewhere where alien species are in ruthless competition.

        All of it is a deflection of the possible and frankly terrifying possibility that we are alone (at least in this galaxy)

          • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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            7 months ago

            Having a bit of eye trouble, so please ignore any typos. Weird scratching feeling behind the eye, trying not to touch it.

            But yeah, isnā€™t that odd that we have not found any? Perhaps it is that if we see them they also see us baā€¦ jesus my eye, fuck. Sorry. But yeah perhaps seeing goes both ways? And perhaps this is why we have not ā€˜foundā€™ anything in exo-galactic searches, perhaps it is all a coverup, because we do not want to be seen in return.

            I mean, isnā€™t it also odd how important aliens, and the search of extraterrestrial life are in our culture but how few resources we actually put in finding them? Perhaps as soon as we spot something the searchers get shut down, or worse!

            (Donā€™t worry my eye is fine, Iā€™m also not being serious, I was doing a bit inspired by the There is no Antimemetics Division SCP series. Now also in short clip form. CW a certain type of lovecraftian horror + memetics. Might not want to read it if you got freaked out by Rokos B, or weird horror in general).

            • 200fifty@awful.systems
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              7 months ago

              I have never been a huge fan of most of the scp stuff (not that itā€™s bad, itā€™s just not really my thing), but I have reread that series several times at this point, itā€™s so good!

              • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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                7 months ago

                This story series has a lot more focus on people vs a dry procedural things focus as the normal scp stuff has, so not strange that this hits differently.