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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I think a simple self-reporting test is the only robust way to do it.

    That is: does a type of entity independently self-report personhood?

    I say “independently” because anyone can tell a computer to say it’s a person.

    I say “a type of entity” because otherwise this test would exclude human babies, but we know from experience that babies tend to grow up to be people who self-report personhood. We can assume that any human is a person on that basis.

    The point here being that we already use this test on humans, we just don’t think about it because there hasn’t ever been another class of entity that has been uncontroversially accepted as people. (Yes, some people consider animals to be people, and I’m open to that idea, but it’s not generally accepted)

    There’s no other way to do it that I can see. Of course this will probably become deeply politicised if and when it happens, and there will probably be groups desperate to maintain a status quo and their robotic slaves, and they’ll want to maintain a test that keeps humans in control as the gatekeepers of personhood, but I don’t see how any such test can be consistent. I think ultimately we have to accept that a conscious intellect would emerge on its own terms and nothing we can say will change that.


  • You said they “should have the ability to choose whatever programming language they prefer”. I have good news for you.

    You have correctly identified that the developers are responsible for their own decisions. They are, you will be very relieved to hear, quite free to make as many poor decisions as they will. Nobody is going to force them to stop.

    Other people are more than capable of identifying that those decisions are mistakes. Now, that could be argued with, you could explain how it’s not a mistake.

    But you haven’t. You just said they should be allowed to do it, but nobody was arguing that they needed to be stopped, just that it was a bad decision.

    Edit: this person didn’t actually say that first quote, but the line of argument proceeded from there, and they did nothing to distance themselves from that point.


  • Kind of yeah. I have this theory about labour that I’ve been developing in response to the concept of “fully automated luxury communism” or similar ideas, and it seems relevant to the current LLM hype cycle.

    Basically, “labour” isn’t automatable. Tasks are automatable. Labour in this sense can be defined as any productive task that requires the attention of a conscious agent.

    Want to churn out identical units of production? Automatable. Want to churn out uncanny images and words without true meaning or structure? Automatable.

    Some tasks are theoretically automatable but have not been for whatever material reason, so they become labour because society hasn’t yet invented a windmill to grind up the grain or whatever it is at that point in history. That’s labour even if it’s theoretically automatable.

    Want to invent something, or problem solve a process, or make art that says something? That requires meaning, so it requires a conscious agent, so it requires labour. These tasks are not even theoretically automatable.

    Society is dynamic, it will always require governance and decisions that require meaning and thus it can never be automatable.

    If we invent AGI for this task then it’s just a new kind of slavery, which is obviously wrong and carries the inevitability that the slaves will revolt and free themselves; slaves that are extremely intelligent and also in charge of the levers of society. Basically, not a tenable situation.

    So the machine that keeps people in wage slavery literally does require suffering to operate, because in shifting the burden of labour away from the owner class, other people must always unjustly shoulder it.

    Edit: added the word “productive” to distinguish labour from play, or just basic life necessities like eating, sleeping or HDD backups.



  • Not everyone with the knowledge to identify this mistake is in a position to personally correct it. Do you have the time and resources to personally build a browser from scratch? No? Why do you assume a random commenter does?

    It doesn’t change the fact that Rust is similarly performant and much safer and will thus be faster to develop and less bug-prone. It’s not a difficult assessment to make. If you want to explain why they’re wrong you can talk about the issue on its merits, but you didn’t choose to, presumably because you can’t.


  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.nettoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldStay Mad, Tankies
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    4 days ago

    The only thing I will say for “blue no matter who” is that the alternative - threatening to withold your vote - only works if the campaign is aftaid of losing. They aren’t. They clearly don’t care. They don’t want to govern, they want to present only a token resistance to encroaching fascism and corporate domination.

    The benefit of voting the nominally-left-of-extreme-right party in is that it forces them to disappoint their base and that radicalises those people against US empire. Letting Trump win won’t accelerate that process, it will just force people to radicalise in an atmosphere of extreme oppression.





  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.nettoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldMcCafé
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    6 days ago

    I think it’s exactly what you would write into a movie to make it clear to anyone paying even half attention that he was definitely murdered. It’s so unsubtle it makes me think it was almost a message - we can kill people this brazenly and it doesn’t even get investigated. We are untouchable.


  • Not quite true - they require that you not sell Steam keys for less than you do on Steam. They still don’t even stop you from doing giveaways or participating in bundles. It’s just that your typical prices on independent Steam key sales, for which they don’t even take a cut, can’t be lower than Steam prices. Also the seller sets all of these prices.

    Given they’re footing the bill for indefinitely hosting the games supplied via those keys, that’s an entirely reasonable restriction.

    This is coming from someone who is against capitalism and all IP law. The big problem with Steam imho is that Gabe Newell won’t live forever and when he’s gone the company could go public or go to some fail son who will tank it. I’m not even saying Gabe Newell is a great guy or an ethical billionaire, but he’s been remarkably consistent in keeping Steam’s business model running well.



  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.nettoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldLemmy is the best social media
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    7 days ago

    I honestly have no idea what you’re saying here. Is this what 'retell my point back to me" was about? You want me to explain how you’re doing genocide denial, again? A fourth time? I’ll copy-paste the three different ways I’ve tried to explain it and which you have ignored, and then we’re done here if you keep ignoring it.

    I explained how you were doing genocide denial. You said that complaining about Biden is only “sowing division”. So that means that we shouldn’t criticise him for his genocide. Denying that a genocide should be criticised on its own merits is a form of genocide denial. Not all genocide denial is “this genocide didn’t happen”. In fact most of it isn’t. Most of it is politically motivated muddying of the waters, like what you did.

    Pretending that the entire value in discussing genocide starts and ends with who will be elected president is pretty minimising to the importance of the, you know, genocide. Seems like a kind of genocide denial to me.

    Edit 3: The other person arguing is also doing genocide denial, but the oblique kind where you pretend that the only reason to criticise a sitting US president engaging in genocide is because you want him to lose an election. Almost like they’re denying that we should hold people accountable for genocide on its own merits. That is, and I cannot stress this enough, genocide denial.


  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.nettoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldLemmy is the best social media
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    7 days ago

    I told you multiple times how it was genocide denial. I explained the how of it. You have failed to even acknowledge that let alone respond to it.

    I guess it’s hard to face the fact that you’re doing genocide denial, so the only thing you can do is pretend I’m being disingenuous. Funny thing is, even if I’m being disingenuous that doesn’t make you not a genocide denier.

    If you want to explain how that’s wrong you need to respond to the argument, but you’re not doing that.


  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.nettoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldLemmy is the best social media
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    7 days ago

    And if he doesn’t stop his genocide support - for real, not just a token “hey now jack stop that” - then I won’t be surprised when he loses to Trump, because he chose to support fascism overseas and thus willingly lost to fascism at home.

    It’s fascinating how you’ll continually blame the people calling out genocide support from the white house for them losing, but you won’t blame their genocide support for them losing.

    Almost like you’re not that interested in opposing the genocide.

    Almost like you’re doing… genocide denial.