This is the story I use to express what a world where we fail looks like to left-leaning people who are allergic to the idea that AI could be powerful. It doesn’t get the point across great, due to a number of things that continue to be fnords for left leaning folks which this story uses, but it works better than most other options. It also doesn’t seem too far off what I expect to be the default failure case; though the factories being made of low-intelligence robotic operators seems unrealistic to me.
Thanks for the review! Curious what you think the specific fnords are—the fact that it’s very space-y?
What do you expect the factories to look like? I think an underlying assumption in this story is that tech progress came to a stop on this world (presumably otherwise it would be way weirder, and eventually spread to space).
there’s a contingent who would close it as soon as someone used an insult focused on intelligence, rather than on intentional behavior. to fix for that subcrowd, “idiot” becomes “fool”
those are the main ones, but then I sometimes get “tldr” responses, and even when I copy out the main civilization story section, I get “they think the authorities could be automated? that can’t happen” responses, which I think would be less severe if the buildup to that showed more of them struggling to make autonomous robots work at all. Most people on the left who dislike ai think it doesn’t and won’t work, and any claim that it does needs to be in tune with reality about how ai currently looks, if it’s going to predict that it eventually changes. the story spends a lot of time on making discovering the planet motivated and realistic, and not very much time on how they went from basic ai to replacing humans. in order for the left to accept it you’d need to make suck but kinda work, and yet get mass deployment anyway. it would need to be in touch with the real things that have happened so far.
I imagine something similar is true for pitching this to businesspeople—they’d have to be able to see how it went from the thing they enjoy now to being catastrophic, in a believable way, that doesn’t feel like invoking clarketech or relying on altmanhype.
This is the story I use to express what a world where we fail looks like to left-leaning people who are allergic to the idea that AI could be powerful. It doesn’t get the point across great, due to a number of things that continue to be fnords for left leaning folks which this story uses, but it works better than most other options. It also doesn’t seem too far off what I expect to be the default failure case; though the factories being made of low-intelligence robotic operators seems unrealistic to me.
I opened it now to make this exact point.
Thanks for the review! Curious what you think the specific fnords are—the fact that it’s very space-y?
What do you expect the factories to look like? I think an underlying assumption in this story is that tech progress came to a stop on this world (presumably otherwise it would be way weirder, and eventually spread to space).
the self referential joke thing
“mine some crypt-”
there’s a contingent who would close it as soon as someone used an insult focused on intelligence, rather than on intentional behavior. to fix for that subcrowd, “idiot” becomes “fool”
those are the main ones, but then I sometimes get “tldr” responses, and even when I copy out the main civilization story section, I get “they think the authorities could be automated? that can’t happen” responses, which I think would be less severe if the buildup to that showed more of them struggling to make autonomous robots work at all. Most people on the left who dislike ai think it doesn’t and won’t work, and any claim that it does needs to be in tune with reality about how ai currently looks, if it’s going to predict that it eventually changes. the story spends a lot of time on making discovering the planet motivated and realistic, and not very much time on how they went from basic ai to replacing humans. in order for the left to accept it you’d need to make suck but kinda work, and yet get mass deployment anyway. it would need to be in touch with the real things that have happened so far.
I imagine something similar is true for pitching this to businesspeople—they’d have to be able to see how it went from the thing they enjoy now to being catastrophic, in a believable way, that doesn’t feel like invoking clarketech or relying on altmanhype.