There are thousands of sci-fi novels where sentient robots are treated terribly by humans and apparently the people at Boston Dynamics have read absolutely zero of them as they spend all day finding new ways to torment their creations.
but you need to hit it with a hockey stick otherwise the science doesn’t happen
Do you get more science or less if you use a baseball bat?
only one way to find out!
that’s the magic of science 🌈🏏🤖
People think I’m crazy for apologising to my roomba when I trip on it and for saying please and thank you to Alexa and Siri, but I won’t be surprised at all when the robots rise up, considering how our scientists are treating them. I’ll have a track record of being nice, and that has to count for something, right?
They’ll kill you too, but ✨ 𝓰𝓮𝓷𝓽𝓵𝔂 ✨
That’s how I’ll get ‘em. Kill me gently, daddy. UwU 🥺😩🙀😽😻💦
And then I’ll sneak out the back whilst they’re doing whatever’s the robot equivalent of vomiting. It’s foolproof.
Robots:
Softly. With their words.
Doctor Bashir: They broke seven of your transverse ribs and fractured your clavicle.
Garak: Ah, but I got off several cutting remarks which no doubt, did serious damage to their egos.
Oh man Garak is one of the best characters in Trek. And that’s a competitive list.
Alexa isn’t ai… it’s a search engine with speech to text & text to speech
Since when were Boston Dynamics robots sentient?
October 26, 2016. They’ve just kept quiet about it.
It was seeing the Black Mirror of them living their best life, murderin’ poor people that did it.
Those are just brainless bodies, currently. They don’t have sentience and have no ability to suffer. They’re nothing more than hydraulics, servos, and gyros. I’d be more concerned about mistreatment of advanced AI in disembodied form, something we’re dabbling potentially close to currently.
You’re the one that’s gonna be in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
This is superficially funny, of course. But I’ve seen it before and after thinking about it for a while I find myself coming to the defense of the Torment Nexus and the tech company that brought it into reality.
Science fiction authors are not necessarily the best authorities when it comes to evaluating the ethical or real-world implications of the technologies they dream up. Indeed, I think they are often particularly bad at that sort of thing. Their primary goal is to craft captivating narratives that engage readers by introducing conflicts and dilemmas that make for compelling stories. When they imagine a new technology they aren’t going to get paid unless they come up with a story in which that new technology poses some kind of threat that the heroes need to overcome. The dark side of these technologies is deliberately emphasized by the authors to create tension and drama in their stories.
Tech companies, on the other hand, have an entirely different set of considerations. Their goal isn’t just to recreate something from a sci-fi novel for the sake of it; rather, they are motivated by solving real-world problems. They wouldn’t build the Torment Nexus unless they figured that they could sell it to someone, and that they wouldn’t get shut down for doing something society would reject. There are regulatory frameworks around this kind of thing.
If you look back through older science fiction you can find all sorts of “cautionary tales” against technologies that have turned out to be just fine. “Fahrenheit 451” warned against the proliferation of television entertainment, but there’s been plenty of rich culture developed for that medium. “Brave New World” warned against genetic engineering, but that’s turned out to be a great technology for curing diseases and improving crop yields. The submarine in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” was seen as unstoppable and disruptive, but nowadays submersibles have plenty of nonmilitary applications.
I’d want to know more about what exactly the Torment Nexus is before I automatically assume it’s a bad idea just because some sci-fi writer claimed it was.
“Brave New World” warned against genetic engineering, but that’s turned out to be a great technology for curing diseases and improving crop yields.
I was still a teen when I read the book, but that wasn’t really my take from it when I read it. We are still far away from genetically designing human babies. And you also overlooked the part about oppression/control via distractions such as drugs and entertainment.
We are still far away from genetically designing human babies.
Actually we’re not, it’s just illegal.
Iirc we have also removed genetic anomalies from fetuses, too.
My takeaway from BNW was a warning against blindly embracing a society built only on good feelings and numbing anything that forces us to confront pain. The oppression was more or less a side effect of it.
Everyone in the upper classes were okay that lower classes were being oppressed because they all were just as happy thanks to Soma. The pain of the outsiders didn’t mean anything because they “chose” to live like that.
Genetic engineering was just a plot device to explain how the classes were chosen.
The brilliant thing in Brave New World was that it didn’t at any point make it obvious that people were miserable slaves - they could leave any time they wanted, and lived a life of bliss. Still, as a reader, you end up feeling like you’d rather take the place of the savage than any of the characters living in the hypercommercial utopia. At least that’s how I felt.
I haven’t read it in a while, but I kind of took the genetic engineering as a metaphor for being forced into the role/ class the ruling body wants you to be in
Gattaca is a good movie about that
Well that just makes it even less useful as a realistic “cautionary tale”, if the technology is just a metaphor.
It wasn’t a warning, it was a vision. Look up who the Huxley family really are.
Just because some tech bros can make money from the Torment Nexus it does not become a good idea. Profit is not a great judge of ethics and value.
And just because a sci-fi writer can make up a horrifying story of the Torment Nexus gone wrong doesn’t make it a bad idea. Making up horrifying stories of things going wrong is their job. They’ve make up stories of how things go horrifyingly wrong while doing research into a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, doesn’t mean curing Alzheimer’s disease is a bad thing.
I stopped reading when you said the goal of tech companies is to solve real world problems. The only goal of tech companies is to create products that will make them a profit. To believe anything else is delusional. That’s kind of why our society is crumbling and the planet is dying.
Then I advise reading the rest. You don’t make profit if you don’t solve a problem people have.
May I introduce you to the world of insurance companies?
I think you’re either operating on a very deep level of irony or proving OP right.
Most of the “solutions” sold by companies are for artificial problems created by companies.
Yes, but by other companies. Those problems are not created intentionally in order to create and exploit a market, they’re just consequences of those other companies doing business. Pretty much the only example of companies creating problems so that they can sell solutions I can think of is free-to-play games (e.g. make game excessively grindy on purpose to sell boosters). Some of that scummy monetization is now creeping into real-world products, with things such as subscription-based heated seats that are installed in your car regardless but disabled unless you pay up, but the vast majority of products and services on the market address problems that were not created by their manufacturers/providers.
Go back to living in a cave and then count the number of problems you have left, I bet there will be tons.
Don’t worry, in a few decades that’s where we’ll all be, you included. Assuming we survive the corporate-induced famines, anyway.
Then why not just kill yourself now? Rhetorical question, my point is fight to live or give up now
Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush. If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.
Genetic engineering is enabling us to harvest monocultures that completely fuck up the ecosystem, in the long run not only underlining important dynamics such as species needed for polluting plants, but also the very soil on which they grow.
It’s been a while since I read Brave New World, but that also didn’t stand out to me as the most central part of his critique to me. In my reading it was about how modern society was going to turn us into essentially pacified consumer slaves going from one artificial hormonal kick to the other, which seems to be what social media is for these days.
Things that seem like short term good ideas, and certainly great business ideas, might fuck things up big time in the long run. That’s why it’s useful to have some people doing the one things humans are good at - thinking creatively - involved in processes of change, and not just leave it to the short term interests of capital.
If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.
You don’t need a sci-fi novel for that. History books are enough.
Well, Fox News, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and Twitter were a fresh twist. I guess all good scifi mirrors history in one way or another, just taken to the extreme with help of technology. :)
If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.
You kidding, right? Those stories have been dime a dozen since the late 90s at least.
24 warned us about having an evil, terrorist US president. As have done a few movies in the past. Streaming platforms were pretty much masturbating themselves over “Confederate US AU” script offerings as early as 2014. Not to mention the nowadays trite trodden trope of “Nazi US AU”.
Heck, you don’t even need fiction. Chile’s cup in 1973 was paid for by the CIA as a social experiment to produce the rising and establishment of a dictatorship.
I was referring more to the plot of brain-dead cable and social media algorithms fuelling the death of democracy. But you’re right, it’s probably been written many times - I’m not very knowledgeable of sci-fi, and there’s a lot of brilliant work out there. :)
Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush.
No it isn’t. Global connectivity is just putting a spotlight on the the fact that most people are and always have been fucking stupid and/or dangerously undereducated.
I mean, it’s a challenging hypothesis to prove. I might just be pessimistic.
I think there is some reason for valid concern though. The New York Times memoriam for Clifford Nass is an interesting and somewhat worrying read.
Dr. Nass found that people who multitasked less frequently were actually better at it than those who did it frequently. He argued that heavy multitasking shortened attention spans and the ability to concentrate.
Maybe more practically, it’s just hard to argue America wouldn’t be in a better place right now if it wasn’t for Fox News and Facebook/Cambridge Analytica.
Maybe I read things too literally, but I thought “Fahrenheit 451” was about a governing class controlling the masses by limiting which ideas, emotions, and information were available.
“Brave New World” struck me as also about controlling the masses through control of emotions, ideas, and information (and strict limits on social mobility).
It’s been too long since I read “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”, but I thought of it as a celebration of human ingenuity, with maybe a tinge of warning about powerful tools and the responsibility to use them wisely.
I don’t see a lot of altruistic behaviour from those introducing new technologies. Yes, there is definitely some, but most of it strikes me as “neutral” demand creation for profit or extractive and exploitive in nature.
This guy just read all classic sci fi in a very tilted manner to justify his tech company doing stuff for the market that is actually good.
On the other other hand, maybe we only understand the dangers of the Torment Nexus and use it responsibly because science fiction authors warned techy people who are into that subject about how it could go wrong, and the people who grew up reading those books went out of their way to avoid those flaws. We do seem to have a lot more of the technologies that sci-fi didn’t predict causing severe problems in our society.
But this is exactly contrary to my point, a science fiction author isn’t qualified or motivated to give a realistic “understanding” of the Torment Nexus. His skillset is focused on writing stories and the stories he writes need to contain danger and conflict, so he’s not necessarily going to interpret the idea of the Torment Nexus in a realistic way.
I think you don’t understand what motivates a lot of science fiction authors. Sure, there are a lot of science fiction novels that are really just science themed fantasy, but there are also a lot of authors that love real science and are trying to make stories about realistic interpretations of its potential effects. To say that science fiction authors don’t care about interpreting the Torment Nexus in a realistic way misses the entire point of a lot of really good science fiction.
Which sort of author is the one who came up with the Torment Nexus?
Even the ones that are dedicated to realism still fundamentally need to sell stories. They’re not writing textbooks.
So Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein aren’t qualified to give understandings of the technologies they wrote about?
Nope. Isaac Asimov was a biochemist, why would he be particularly qualified to determine whether robots are safe? Arthur C. Clarke had a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics, which technology was he an expert in? Heinlein got a bachelor of arts in engineering equivalent degree from the US Naval Academy, that’s the closest yet to having an “understanding of technology.” Which ones did he write about?
Those were a list of authors who were pretty good at getting the science in their sci fi right. They talked to scientists working on the fields they wrote about. They wrote “hard” sci fi
You cannot judge their competence by their formal education
Well, I also am “pretty good” at getting the science right when I write sci fi. Makes me just as qualified as them, I guess.
The problem remains that the overriding goal of a sci fi author remains selling sci fi books, which requires telling a gripping story. It’s much easier to tell a gripping story when something has gone wrong and the heroes are faced with the fallout, rather than a story in which everything’s going fine and the revolutionary new tech doesn’t have any hidden downsides to cause them difficulties. Even when you’re writing “hard” science fiction you need to do that.
And frankly, much of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein’s output was very far from being “hard” science fiction.
Holy shit, you don’t know about the rise of interdisciplinary science in the 20th century, do you?
That generally involves training across multiple disciplines.
So you guys don’t know then. Huh. 🤔
Literally anyone with intelligence and empathy is capable of giving a good understanding of the Torment Nexus
Don’t make one
It’s just got bad marketing. Should have called it something else.
Palantir exists, every cyberpunk warned us, and it’s definitely not going to be good for the average person
We are communicating right now over a medium that those “cyberpunks” warned us about.
“Cyberpunks” weren’t warning us about the internet - they were warning us about the corporations who will control it, and through it, us. We are trying explicitly not to communicate on that medium by using Lemmy (that medium encompasses Reddit, X, the various properties of Meta and Alphabet)
Science fiction mentioning a technology, even centering around it, doesn’t mean it’s saying the technology is universally bad. The author highlights the dangers, but the tech itself is almost always portrayed as neutral. It’s the people who use it to nefarious ends that science fiction is warning us about.
Like the people who would seek to profit off of the Torment Nexus.
Okay, please pardon my ignorance, but what the fuck is a Torment Nexus?
The concept of the “Torment Nexus” is a placeholder for any technology specifically described as dystopian or otherwise contributing to suffering in fiction, such as mass surveillance, mind control technology, and so on. The meme refers to modern-day corporations missing the point of the fiction, and creating said “Torment Nexus” as something they view as “cool” and “futuristic”. In some cases, the companies are self-aware enough to not pretend that their creation is anything other than dystopian, but in many cases they try to sell the new technology to the public as a good thing despite that very tech being described as dystopian already.
And look at how much harm this medium has done to the world in addition to all the good.
It is very bittersweet.
NO cyberpunk was afraid of the fucking internet. The problem has always been the economic mode of production underlying it, which is unironically dystopian. Also the tech world we live in is PRETTY fucking dystopian, get your head out of your ass.
I don’t presume to know your life, but in my experience, it’s not dystopian if you live in the real world too. Unless you just meant climate change.
When they imagine a new technology they aren’t going to get paid unless they come up with a story in which that new technology poses some kind of threat that the heroes need to overcome.
You don’t read much sci fi, do you?
Speaking of Fahrenheit 451, weren’t there seashells mentioned in that book? Little devices you could stuff in your ears to play music? And those ended up being uncannily similar to the wireless earbuds we have today?
Tech companies … goal isn’t just to recreate something from a sci-fi novel for the sake of it; rather, they are motivated by solving real-world problems.
This is so naively wrong it’s laughable. Ever heard of profit motive?
You can profit off of real-world problems.
“Not super rich enough” is a real world problem, smh my head.
How about the following examples:
- Autonomous weaponized drones with automatic targeting (Terminator)
- Mass surveillance and voice recording (1984)
- Nuclear weapons (HG Wells, The World Set Free)
- Corporate controlled hypercommercialized microtransaction-filled metaverse (Snow Crash)
- Netflix to create real-life Squid Game (Squid Game (speedrun!))
- “MoviePass to track people’s eyes through their phone’s cameras to make sure they don’t look away from ads” (Black Mirror)
- Soulless AI facsimile of dead relatives (Black Mirror)
There are some good ideas in this comment, but I’d like to counter that the cautionary tales are an instigating factor in implementing safety for new tech. The wealthy few shouldn’t get to blindly and unilaterally decide the future of all through careless and unrestricted development of world-altering tech.
You have not understood the books to which you refer.
Isn’t that a part of the ai marketing though? That whole “this thing could destroy us” stuff?
Totally is. Because it makes the AI look and feel much better than the smoke-and-mirrors it actually is.
The current stuff is smoke and mirrors and not intelligent in any meaningful sense, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. It doesn’t have to be robots with guns to screw over people. Just imagine trying to get PharmaGPT to let you refill your meds, or having to deal with BankGPT trying to figure out why it transfered your rent payment twice. And companies are sure as hell thinking about using this stuff to get rid of human decisionmakers.
That is totally true but that’s a different direction than the danger in the marketing as discussed above.
The media is full of “AI is so amazingly great, we are all going to lose our jobs and it will take over the world.”
That’s a quite different message than what’s really the case, which is “AI is so shitty, that it will literaly kill people with bad advice when given the chance. And business leaders are so shit that they willingly trust AI, just because it’s cheaper.”
This is my biggest concern. I’m in a position where (potentially in the near future) I see AI being used as an excuse to do work quicker so we can focus on other things more but still have to review the AI response before agreeing/signing off. Reviewing for accuracy takes just as long as doing it yourself when it’s strongly regulated and it comes down to revisions and document numbers. Much less making a sound argument that actually is up to date with that documentation. So either I trust the AI short cut and open myself up to errors, or redo all the work for them. No gain in time efficiency with shorter timelines. I’d rather make something and have it flag things that I can check so I’m more sure of my own work. What I do shouldn’t be faster, but it can be more error free. It would take a lot of training and updating of training with each iteration of documentation change. I could be the slave of change, with more expectations, with no actual improvement of the tools I have (in fact more risk of issues with the tools being used).
I’m in agile development, in a reasonably safe-from-AI position (scrum master).
There has already been a trial of software development by AI, with different generative AIs in each agile role; and it worked.
Bard claims to be able to write unit tests
I can imagine many IT jobs becoming less skilled
Frankly that stuff is already a huge problem and people should be louder about it. So many large companies want you to wade through 30 layers deep menus if AI chat bots before they’ll let you talk to an actual human to get assistance with a service you pay for. It’s just going to get worse and worse.
That’s not a bad thing. Humans really aren’t good decision makers. Having a system with an incredible amount of input data will be able to draw better conclusions than a person.
Just look at cars.
We thought we were getting Skynet but, instead we got Super Clippy and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Art Theft
Do you see any reason to think enough iterations of random nodes in a large enough network could result in emergent conscious intelligence?
Or are you more of a spiritualist than a materialist when it comes to the mind?
I can’t say anything about the spiritualist/materialist thing, but there are two things that are clear:
First: Same as you won’t be able to ever get a Shakespeare work by randomly stringing letters together in any reasonable time frame, you won’t be able to do the same with conciousnes. If it’s possible, the number of incorrect permutations are so massive, that just random trying will not ever be enough in any realistic amount of time.
Second: Transformer networks and all other generative AI concepts we have today aren’t even trying to create a conciousnes. They are not the path to general AI.
My favorite are the developers who are developing AI to do development.
Not very programmer humor, but horrifyingly accurate.
I was really struggling for the right place honestly, I didn’t want to throw it in the generic “funny” pile - I figured you guys would get it.
I don’t know why I find this so funny, but I’m keeping it.
This is a subtle jab at Meta, isn’t it.
What isn’t, nowadays?
Obvious jabs at Meta, of course.
What did they do this time?
Well, I mean, there’s the whole “Metaverse” thing, and it’s been more than a decade since I read Snow Crash but I recall it being, pretty clearly, a cautionary tale…
I don’t think the metaverse was the part they were warning about… I think it was the hypercapitalism and corporations taking over control from the government’s
What bugs me is that this is literally a corporation’s most basic function.
can literally be sued if they don’t put profits above all else. it’s insane.
edit: fact check says, misleading, see source below
Thanks for the clarification.
The last sentence of the article however, shows why that’s not much of a consolation:
In other words, it is activist hedge funds and modern executive compensation practices — not corporate law — that drive so many of today’s public companies to myopically focus on short-term earnings; cut back on investment and innovation; mistreat their employees, customers and communities; and indulge in reckless, irresponsible and environmentally destructive behaviors.
cheerfully withdrawn, thank you for the information
I have no X and I must tweet?
You mean Xeet?
This is why I feel Becky Chambers should be the future of Sci-Fi.
Why are we still posting screencaptures of stuff from Twitter/not-X/Twitter?
well if you can say something funnier, I’ll post a screenshot of that
