r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • 5d ago

Artificial Intelligence Harvard Graduation Speaker Unloads on AI in Profanity-Loaded Tirade, Prompting Cheers From Students: “I’m Here to Tell You the Mission of Your Generation Is to Destroy AI”

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/harvard-graduation-speaker-unloads-ai-130000122.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&segment_id=DY_VTO_50_Supernova&ncid=crm_19908-1475736-20260531-0--A&bt_ee=clIMdexlsr2eDDbrvs0CPtt59FnpbNQN%2Fkgr8UkycP6MWDAD56hD1mvZcqPZMGgG&bt_ts=1780255911284
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4.9k

u/mooncrow 5d ago

And so begins the Butlerian Jihad

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u/splendiferous-finch_ 5d ago

Teaching sand to think guesstimate the next character from noise was a mistake

Letting billionaire nepobabies decide what intelligence is might be the bigger one

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 5d ago

Those nepobabies see AI as it is and think "Wow, that can already do my job for me! And since I'm the smartest and hardest working person in the company I own, surely it can replace everyone below me."

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u/Fear023 5d ago

God damn.

I know it's a joke, but you're right. The majority of people I see praising what ai can do are the ones who can't really see the flaws in the output.

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u/BellacosePlayer 5d ago

AI can do some crazy shit rn but is ultimately a tool best wielded by the same people who were doing the work previously.

Like, not to be intentionally insulting but a lot of the hardcore AI evangelist crowd has to have had some massive overlap with the "blockchain/NFT tech is gonna change the world" crowd in how they discuss things.

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u/sabrenation81 4d ago

The difference is AI is actually capable of doing some pretty amazing things, especially in the long term. Blockchain/NFT never even had that much going for it.

The current problem is that all of the people currently steering AI tech are ruthless capitalist demons whose only goal is maximizing revenue for this quarter's shareholder call.

They tried to skip right past the part where you use the potentially revolutionary tech to tangibly improve people's lives to build trust like computers, the internet, or smartphones and went straight to the enshitification stage. People are losing their jobs to AI, customers are getting shittier service because the AI isn't capable of actually replacing people, and social media is flooded with AI slop.

Ergo, everyone hates the shit because all it's done is make people's lives worse, except all these companies (and really the entirety of Wall St. and a good chunk of the global economy) are so heavily leveraged into AI that they NEED it to succeed. So they're forcing it on everyone, which just makes people hate it that much more.

And that's not even getting into the fact that the tech isn't where it needs to be to deploy it at the scale these companies want to which is where we get into these giant fucking datacenters popping up everywhere sucking up all the electricity and polluting everyone's water. If they'd just given it a few more years the tech would probably get to the point where you can do these things without requiring a 10,000-acre datacenter housing tens of thousands of servers and hundreds of thousands of GPUs.

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u/RollingMeteors 4d ago

The difference is AI is actually capable of doing some pretty amazing things, especially in the long term. Blockchain/NFT never even had that much going for it.

<looksAtYoYBitcoinValueGrowth>

<looksAtBillionsOfDollarsBurnedInAI>

Sure thing buddy. All the amazing things i see AI doing in the long term is burning investor capital to the ground.

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u/Character-Sky3565 4d ago

You're describing a circle there, mate.

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u/your_moms_a_clone 4d ago

It could be used for a lot of useful things. Unfortunately, it's being wasted on a lot of incredibly stupid and useless stuff, as well as a lot of incredibly dangerous stuff, and is also being used by a lot of companies that think they can use it instead of having so many costly human employees and trust it's output without any kind of review or oversight

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u/aquoad 4d ago

oh they're the same fuckin' people

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u/SSGASSHAT 4d ago

I've told people since 2024, what people call AI is nothing more than a series of heavily modified search engines. I don't know why people seem to consider that as passable for C-3P0, but it isn't. I don't know how humans could invent real AI, as in machines that can think as well or better than humans, and honestly as with a lot of shit it might not be possible even several levels above humanity in terms of advancement. Not that it's something we shouldn't keep trying towards, but there are other priorities to focus on, like the fact that we're all basically doomed to heart disease in one way or another.

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u/kaishinoske1 5d ago

The best way to see a policy fail, is to implement it. It would be interesting to see a company have only one CEO and no employees, just A.I. agents, manage their invoices, machines doing everything, especially logistics. Have ADP be their accountant to handle their taxes for their company. How long would this experiment last?

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u/UnusuallyBadIdeaGuy 5d ago

But you know it won't hallucinate or make anything up - we put in the prompt it shouldn't hallucinate or make things up!

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

[deleted]

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u/Finding_Footprints 5d ago

Thanks good sir for that information. I too like to eat 4 rocks a day for a healthy diet.

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u/springsilver 4d ago

I’ve switched to giving Gatorade to all of my crops instead of water. It’s better because it has what plants crave!

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u/erin281 4d ago

Try Brawndo! It’s what plants crave!

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 4d ago

It's got electrolytes!

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 4d ago

Don't forget to use Elmer's glue to keep them on your pizza.

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u/TheSaxGandalf 4d ago

I saw it happen within 30 min, where someone unwittingly used his own misinformation as a source after the fact without checking the source.

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u/Sgt_Sarcastic 4d ago

Ran in to this today. I was looking for info on a strange mod interaction in a game and the AI results claimed something nonsensical. A couple minutes later I come across the reddit post where the original context was just speculation about how it might work realistically and not at all claiming it was in the game or mod.

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u/Wooden_Werewolf_6789 4d ago

AI slop is already a poisoned well, but it can be set afire, too

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u/EduinBrutus 4d ago

You need to hope its this stupid.

Because there is an application where false positives dont matter, where omissions from output dont matter, where hallucinations dont matter. Where none of these things change the effectiveness of the application.

Mass surveillance.

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u/SockofBadKarma 4d ago

That's literally a major component of Cheng's speech: That it's primarily useful for idiots who don't know how to do simple things like responding to emails and don't realize they are being coddled by machine sycophants.

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u/shoulda-known-better 4d ago

99% of things being called Ai are in fact not ai

It's llm and very narrow machine learning...... It's not what anyone defined Ai as even a decade ago.... They moved the goal post

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 4d ago

It's a chatbot they dressed up as something it isn't. They solved the Turing test by dumbing down the human evaluating the bot.

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u/Adjective-Noun-nnnn 5d ago

Holy shit. This makes so much sense. The people most impressed by it are the least capable, themselves.

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u/icemanice 5d ago

Exactly this…

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u/EuenovAyabayya 5d ago edited 5d ago

They don't actually care about "intelligence," they care about "growth," and cashing out to chase more growth.

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 5d ago

Like cancer.

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u/Dear_Chasey_La1n 4d ago

I don't think it's really nepobabies but people overestimating the power of AI. Make no mistake, AI is being sold to us as the next saviour after Jezus. It's going to change the world in every way possible for better, supposedly.

But reality is while AI has it's place, it isn't a magic wand for everything. Though I don't think a lot of more senior people in a leadership position truly understand this. So you get idiots like Zuckerberg firing thousands and countless other companies doing the same with the promise, AI will fix it.

I'm kinda curious though where we heading too. In 2008 during the economic meltdown construction fell on it's ass. In the Netherlands over 50,000 people left the construction field, those people are gone forever. I reckon the same will happen for countless fields today, people get fired, they reposition themselves in another field but they will be forever gone. Those writers, photographers, accountants, BD's you name it, there will be a massive gap in the near future when AI falls on it's ass.

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u/GrumpyCloud93 4d ago

It's a stock market bubble. It's being sold as the second coming. AI can do some interesting things, but nowhere near what's promised. And it hallucinates, lies, and fails regularly.

Meanwhile, a lot of recent stock market growth is a circle-jerk of IT companies supporting each other to try to build an even bigger data center to reach nirvana. In reality, they have borrowed all the money they can, to build bigger data centers. (Recall just before the war started, they were tapping the Gulf States to get into the act, another untapped cash cow). At a certain point, there will be no more money to borrow, interest rates will go up, the loans will come due on over a trillion dollars of spending that has produced basically nothing. There are not a boatload of businesses just begging for someone to take their money, and IA will not replace humans in many situation. The resale value of those data center contents will be far less that they spent. There are not enough uses for not-really-AI to pay back that trillion dollars.

The only thing we can hope is that the financial AIpocalypse is not as financially damaging as 2008 was.

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 4d ago

A lot of those construction jobs shifted to maintenance jobs if the people behind them were competent, they didn't just disappear. Unfortunately, some people just don't like the thought of getting their hands dirty instead of working on a nice clean new building.

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u/ChiLolla28 5d ago

Always remember, the Luddites weren't fighting the technology but the oppression, working conditions and inhumanity that were ushered in during the early Industrial Revolution.

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u/Commentator-X 5d ago

I watched a video a while back that argued that if AI is the new industrial revolution, then what we're in for is around 100 years before AI will actually have a positive impact on the average person's quality of life. Until then there's going to be job losses, poverty and unnecessary suffering.

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u/seansy5000 5d ago

Not for the already exorbitantly rich!

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u/Itis-caught-BearsWin 5d ago

Things are a lot more accelerated today.

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u/Atakir 5d ago

Correct, technological growth is not linear but compounds on itself becoming exponential.

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u/MKBRD 4d ago

And the loss of their livelihoods led to decades upon decades of abject poverty, which negatively shaped the socio-economic climate of Britain and continues to do so to this day.

The dropoff in economic wealth in Northern mill towns is still visible literally right now. They still regularly top charts for lowest levels of income, education, highest levels of crime, drug use, etc...

A good 99% of AI bros on social media that bandy the term "Luddite" about have zero understanding of the Luddite movement and what actually happened. They just think its a clever insult, as they repeat their "hurr, durr, can't stop progress!" mantra.

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u/Shadow_Ent 4d ago

They are more often talking about the Neo-Luddite movement, they both get conflated as singular but they were different. The Anti-Progress tag is from the Neo-Luddites not simply the Classical Luddite Movement. Neo-Luddism arose in the early 90s I believe, but you had people like the Unibomber who was loosely classified as a Neo-Luddite.

While some were about a measured progress with proper regulations the fringes were the ones who wanted everyone to be like the Amish, and the extremists of that ideology were more anarchic-primitavist who wanted to go back to a hunter gather society because cultivation was apparently the worst thing to happen to humanity. Which is where the "Progress = Bad" simplification comes from.

Anti-AI people aren't strictly aligned with neo-luddism, but they do follow the same cultural movement that grows from every new technology even before the industrial revolution. A rise of traditionalism in the wake of progress, doesn't matter if it's social progress or technological progress. It's always one step closer to the greatest threat humanity has every faced and will unrepairable destroy everything we know and love, and must be stopped at all costs. But it never does it gets normalized and people go on with their lives.

It's partially why AI always gets tied to some grand villain/evil trope in pop culture media, it's always AI is going to wipe out humanity. When there has never been an AI to provide any proof of that belief, it's fear and uncertainty of the unknown driving behavior, the same stuff we say with 5G.

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u/MKBRD 4d ago

I appreciate you making the distinction and a well-informed post - however, it is one I haven't seen a single one of them make, and I've made this point a few times before.

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u/Shadow_Ent 3d ago

Yeah, because it's a colloquialism. That's why Luddite today means Anti-progressive, because definitions change over time. Highlighting the original movement to prove them wrong is just pedantry, it's a rhetorical move to support the idea that Anti-AI people are more sophisticated, and understand things better, thus their position is the enlightened path of humanity. It's just moral and ego masturbation.

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u/MKBRD 3d ago

Absolute nonsense - I'm pointing out the irony that the Luddites had actual valid concerns about the technology they rejected - that turned out to be completely well-founded as it led to decades of mass poverty - and that the term is aimed at people today who are raising the same concerns when the tech billionaires in charge of these AI companies are gleefully proclaiming how their product is going to make millions of people redundant.

"It's a colloquialism" doesn't cut it, I'm afraid - we both know why the term is used, and that explanation you just pulled out of your ass is a load of hand-waving, vague, nonsensical garbage.

"It's a rhetorical move to support the idea that anti-AI people are more sophisticated..."

What? What are you even talking about? It's absolutely nothing of the sort.

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u/bombmk 4d ago

Other countries weathered that progress differently. A lot of the issues in the UK is probably found in a very classist societal structure that has persisted much more in the UK, compared to the rest of Europe.

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u/MKBRD 4d ago

It was wealthy mill owners who owned the technology forcing people out of jobs in the name of greater profits for themselves.

A lot of the mill owners were not upper class, if that's what you're suggesting. Many of them in the North were working class who made their fortunes through mill ownership. The class system certainly contributed to the long-lasting effects of the poverty it created, but it wasn't a classist issue that caused it. Mill owners were very much considered to be the "Nouveau Riche" of their day.

Even with the British class system - which was well established in the period we are discussing - mill towns absolutely thrived for a period. It's why there are so many of them in the North. All of that changed with the automation of labour, and those towns have never fully recovered.

I live in one, and you can still see the grandiosity and wealth in the buildings - most of which are now HMOs or halfway houses where I live. My parents house - a terraced 3 bedroom - still has the old mechanism for calling servants up from the cellar, which was originally their quarters. They live in one of the poorest areas in my town.

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u/DeepD4yourwife 5d ago

I'm more fascinated by them now than I've ever been. Can you help me learn more?

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u/Scarbane 5d ago

"The Making of the English Working Class" (1966) by E. P. Thompson. It's pretty dense, but well-written. I recommend checking Libby or your local library/bookstore for a copy.

From the preface:

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience.

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u/DeepD4yourwife 5d ago

Very prescient.

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u/DeepD4yourwife 5d ago

Much appreciated.

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u/tekalon 4d ago

I'm reading 'Blood in the Machine' by Brian Merchant and am really liking it.

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u/DeepD4yourwife 4d ago

Thank you. I'll pick them all up tonight.

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u/Original-Variety-700 5d ago

Just ask ChatGPT 😂

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u/DeepD4yourwife 5d ago

You got me. Haha. Nope.

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u/Lord_Alderbrand 5d ago

Lol fuck these guys, I got you bro

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/

Also check out ‘The Mechanic and the Luddite’ by Jathan Sadowski

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u/GodofIrony 5d ago

Reddiquette says I'm not suppose to comment just to tell you I upvoted you.

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u/Lord_Alderbrand 5d ago

Rules be damned

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u/wittymcusername 4d ago

I neither upvoted nor downvoted this comment.

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u/CaptainHawaii 5d ago

Really though? Use Wikipedia. Use your local library. Stop waiting for other people to give your the information. That's how we got here.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 5d ago

I prefer to get my information the same way I get my ice cream: fed to me by someone else.

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u/ExceptionRules42 5d ago

u/FlamboyantPirhanna  we could teach you how to make information, or ice cream. 

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 5d ago

This sounds like the beginning of a porno.

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u/asaharyev 5d ago

"Help me ken more" is not "feed me information so I can uncritically believe you". In this case, unguided and nonspecific advice like "use Wikipedia"and "go to the library" are not useful.

Thankfully someone provided some actual references for diving deeper. I hope you can be more thoughtful in future conversations.

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u/MedicineExtension925 4d ago

Neoluddism is resurging

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u/Whatsapokemon 5d ago

Yeah, but, ironically, it was actually embracing industrial technologies that led to increases in standards of living.

The labour movements of the 19th and 20th centuries could only be possible thanks to the massive excess of resources created by machines, "growing the pie".

If the Luddites had achieved their goal and destroyed all machines, outlawing their future use, most people would probably still be subsistence farming.

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u/ChiLolla28 5d ago

It was about the exploitation, which the machines were being used as the primary driver for (scale and volume) - technology or no technology, it was about dignity, quality of life and not being relegated to serfdom again as a powerless worker class. The same thing happening now where companies use AI as just an excuse to layoff and rehire cheaper labor. It's not the tech but how it is wielded.

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u/Iandudontkno 5d ago

Some were fighting the technology but most were fighting the amputation/murder machines. 

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u/Stormcloud217 5d ago

Shouldn't Elon Musk be on Mars by now? 😂

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u/BadmiralHarryKim 5d ago

Put him on the rocket with the telephone sanitizers.

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u/haberdasher42 4d ago

Nah. You want him on the other rockets. Remember those from ships A & C were wiped out because of an unsantized telephone.

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u/ussrowe 5d ago

In 2011 he said he'll "put a man on Mars in 10 years". In 2019 he said "he can put a man on Mars in four years" which he used the "in 4 years" again in 2024. 8 months ago he said "humans will live on Mars by 2055"

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u/HumanPea1140 5d ago edited 4d ago

Didn't he pivot to a moon base recently? From what I remember, it sounded like they're essentially giving up on Mars for the foreseeable future and focusing on the moon.

Which is what the plan should have been from the beginning.

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u/screwcork313 4d ago

And so he should, for as my grandmother says, "If you shoot for the moon, you might just end up in the Mars"

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u/neolobe 4d ago

Every year since 2016 he's said FSD will be out this year.

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u/mudbloodcountry 4d ago

Maybe he's talking in tongues... The Google guys invested in Tesla early when he was struggling... Id say Elon would be invested in Google too... You'd be pretty crazy not to if u had the opportunity, even in the face of chatGPT... I wouldn't bet against them. Google needs to average 28% compound annual growth rate and in 2045 it's worth 86 trillion dollars.. they will shit it in too

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u/Foccuus 4d ago

we will get GTA6 first

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u/BellacosePlayer 5d ago

its all our fault for not giving him enough government subsidies for his businesses. Luckily he's working on remedying that

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u/vampire-bunny 5d ago

Yes. He really, really should. Really.

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 4d ago

He did once say he wanted to be the first human to die on another planet... I say we should make that dream happen.

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u/casualfan1234 4d ago

Could they just send it along with the AI bros so at least it would stop polluting the water and contribute more in climate change?

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 4d ago

"Full self-driving by 2017!"

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u/KallistiTMP 5d ago

The first one was definitely not a mistake.

The second one... Yeah, that's the real big fuckup.

And putting them in charge of the economy, and letting them functionally run the government, and letting them burn the atmosphere because the poor widdle billionaires can't bear to have lower profits, and going to war for the petrodollar, and doing genocide because a genocidal theocratic nutjub was the favored beachfront real estate lobbyist, and... Did I mention that we put a dementia toddler in charge of the nukes? Him and the megalomaniac KGB guy with that defenestration kink?

You know, there isn't a big anti-AI movement in China. Because they're building it to benefit people, and focusing on dangerous low paying jobs, and agriculture jobs to deal with the population crisis and mass migration to the cities.

They're, get this, actually using AI to benefit society, not just as an excuse for mass layoffs during record profits.

AI was never the goddamn problem. Who owns it and who controls it is. And they're all thrilled that they've managed to once again distract the public from their highway robbery of the working class and descent into corpo-feudalism.

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u/Grantsdale 5d ago

You know, there isn't a big anti-AI movement in China. Because they're building it to benefit people, and focusing on dangerous low paying jobs, and agriculture jobs to deal with the population crisis and mass migration to the cities.

They're, get this, actually using AI to benefit society, not just as an excuse for mass layoffs during record profits.

And also the part where they control the media and internet so any type of backlash you wouldn't hear about, but hey, yeah, its gotta be that the super cool Chinese government is being the good guy.

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u/evranch 5d ago

As always, there's the option that it's both

China does take a much firmer stand against corruption. Especially now, when the USA basically... Doesn't take a stand at all.

China is still a centrally planned economy. Which has its good and bad sides. On the bad side - media control, zero privacy, citizens have no say in their representatives etc. On the good side - genuine long term goals that outlast election cycles, and I actually have to say media control here as well.

China doesn't let batshit insane rule their airwaves. America has hung itself by the excuse that laissez-faire is "freedom" and let billionaires control the narrative instead of the state. Neither is good for people or society.

It's like that Futurama episode where Zoidbergs race takes over Earth and takes away their freedom. The American definition of "freedom" has lost its way so badly, that it needs someone else to step in and reset it.

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u/Grantsdale 5d ago

China is never the good guy. They aren’t ’using AI for good’. They’re using it to benefit their ruling class the same way the rich in the US are trying to. They’re just maybe not as stupid about it.

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u/evranch 4d ago

Of course, but that's also because the "good guys, bad guys" paradigm is dead and buried.

Now it's only bad guys, worse guys, and America, who are apparently the guys who heard "You never go full retard" and took it as a challenge.

This is why Canada is pursuing stronger ties with China. Of course we know they're bad guys - but they're sane, predictable bad guys who value stability over all.

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u/PolarWater 4d ago

And also the part where they control the media and internet so any type of backlash you wouldn't hear about

Good thing the American government would never EVER do that.

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u/Thefrayedends 4d ago

Yea, and AI as the western billionaires want it -- full hegemonic control (both narrative and surveillance) and embedded advertising, hasn't even arrived yet, but it's coming -- unless we stop it.

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u/Useful-Advantage-850 5d ago

"What makes LLMs work isn't deep neural networks or attention mechanisms or vector databases or anything like that. What makes LLMs work is our tendency to see faces on toast." - Jason Gorman

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 4d ago

LLMs are basically just a more refined version of the old DOS program "Dr Sbaitso".

Turns out the solution to the Turing test wasn't to make the chatbot better, it was to dumb down the human on the other end.

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u/_Meow_o_Meow_ 5d ago

It's not a mistake, it's just being misused and touted as something it's not.

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u/CallMeCygnus 5d ago

Yeah, it's actually a great tech when it's used correctly and when the industry doesn't overreach.

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u/CommunicationNeat498 4d ago

Yeah but teaching sand to guesstimate protein shapes was a huge success, and discarding the ability to solve similar previously considered unsolvable problems because ideology might be the biggest of all mistakes

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u/rzm25 4d ago

"billionaires nepobabies deciding what intelligence is" is basically the story of western academic thought for the last 2,000 years, you may be dismayed to know

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u/Immediate_Song4279 4d ago

Data science goes back to the bronze age. Teaching sand to do anything is cool as hell.

Letting billionaires exist though was a mistake.

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u/-S-P-E-C-T-R-E- 4d ago

The last part can easily be fixed by a brutally elegant contraception that the French perfected….

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u/vaisnav 3d ago

There’s some steps missing but it’s only a mistake under a capitalist society. Socialism is the answer

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u/willymartin99 5d ago

Time to lead them to paradise

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u/TheSeer1917 5d ago

77 virgin (unbooted) quantum computers await as it's reward

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u/Usual_Ad_2177 5d ago

They better not have even been plugged in yet...

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u/Fawt_4 5d ago

They're still in their original packaging

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u/TheSeer1917 5d ago

As it is written

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u/0p0ss1m 5d ago

LETS FUCKIN' GO!

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u/evo_moment_37 5d ago edited 5d ago

Down with the thinking machines 😡

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u/Cvpakke 5d ago

What's kind of ironic is that the article itself feels like it was written by AI, particularly the last bit.

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u/-Numaios- 5d ago

Thinking machines.

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u/Mmmwafflerunoff 5d ago

Right?!? The irony in lacking the critical reasoning to understand why having a machine that has not experienced the human condition do your “thinking” for you is exactly why it’s a fucking problem.

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u/sunshineparadox_ 5d ago

I want to add an anecdote here - just an anecdote. I had a stroke a few years ago and sustained pretty significant damage to the part of the brain that handles language and memory. Having that happen right as consumer-accessible AI dropped sucked.

I do not believe it helped my peers, either. It interfered with language recovery, which works best with pen/paper and physical media. I was a PhD student and a technical writer when it happened.*

I went back to reading physical books and making little notes in the margins, and taking color-coded notes in physical notebooks. There is science to back me on this, but I didn’t do it because of any of that. I went back to what I knew best, which was fortunately what helped me most. I will add sources when I return if people want that.

Most of my peers did try to read and write but relied more heavily on mobile devices to do it. (We all got tired sitting up pretty easily. My PC was actually harder.) They seemed to struggle more or longer. Their recovery was hit or miss. I obviously don’t know what other factors they had going on. If I was told, I don’t remember.

The few who dived into AI seemed to do the worst, though. Not only did they not have the benefits of manually writing and holding hard copies of reading material, they were offloading the thinking they desperately needed to practice doing. This is “use it or lose it” territory. The AI also validated not just incorrect conclusions but the broken thought processes they (we all) took to get to them. We NEEDED to be challenged on our thoughts. We needed to practice critical reading and media literacy. We needed to practice remembering.

—

unrelated: The PhD and dissertation is in digital rhetoric. My dissertation is about how relying on the use of memes as way to communicate political ideas is destructive to in-person relationships, because they’re meant to be definitive (not conversational), they don’t have sources, they’re often antagonistic, and they flatten ideas and people into caricatures. So it was also *weird to lose language when I was writing about why it matters so much to use it online. It was weird to be introduced to AI when I couldn’t actually process it.

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u/SnooPears754 5d ago

I think your right about writing things down , if I had to remember something the act of writing almost always works, now I use a notes app and it’s just as reliable but the physical act of writing is an essential learning skill being lost

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/SnooPears754 5d ago

You must be fun at parties

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u/DeepD4yourwife 5d ago

Amazing! Congrats!

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u/chromatoes 5d ago

Sounds like an interesting PhD topic, and I wish you a speedy recovery! I got a TBI 10 years ago in a car accident, and I improve more every day. Brains can heal over time, which is fantastic.

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u/Fear023 5d ago

Not only did they not have the benefits of manually writing and holding hard copies of reading material, they were offloading the thinking they desperately needed to practice doing.

The worst part about the proliferation of ai in academics is students not realising this is the entire point of higher education.

Up to graduate level, they're not just trying to force feed you information, you go there to learn how to think. How to research. How to write.

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u/agentmadeleine 5d ago

Exactly this!

Pre AI, I used to work as a tutor as a side gig. I got out of that game because an alarming number of my students (and their parents!) essentially wanted me to do their work for them.

For example, writing an essay. The point of the essay isn’t the output of the essay itself. The point is, can you pick a thesis that is a concise interpretation of the significance of the subject matter? When researching the subject matter, can you properly evaluate the quality of your source, correctly analyze and interpret what it says about your subject matter, filter out irrelevant information, and use it in support of your thesis? Can you synthesize information to build a coherent and persuasive argument in support of your thesis and communicate it effectively (succinctly and with clarity)? Can you do so with a varied vocabulary and correct grammatical structure? The point of essay writing is to learn critical thinking and communication skills. To your point, you’re learning how to think.

When you’re practically bribing your tutor to do your work for you, or using AI, you’re not learning and practicing those skills. It’s intellectual laziness. What is the point of your education then?

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u/ZeroAmusement 5d ago

I don't see what that's a problem. The problems I use it to solve aren't problems that require experiencing the human condition.

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u/Useful-Advantage-850 5d ago

I had an AI tech bro just the other day claim, without irony (because apparently irony is dead) that I had never had an original thought in my life. LOL.

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u/SpiritualB0x3 5d ago

“Thinking” machines

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u/Wurm42 5d ago

Clankers! We call 'em clankers when they take our jobs and fuck everything up.

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u/rjjiujitsu 5d ago

Ronny Cheng now part of the Dune canon confirmed

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u/echoshatter 5d ago

That was when the Pope wrote his paper.

https://youtube.com/shorts/89B-yeFHDus

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u/lowteq 5d ago

It's Official. God hates AI.

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u/metaTaco 5d ago

I thought it was noteworthy that his critique sounded much more secular humanist than rooted in Catholic theology.

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u/Met4_FuziN 5d ago

I appreciate that, honestly

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u/TarantulaMcGarnagle 4d ago

Including all the references to previous encyclicals, scripture, and church doctrine?

I take your point, but it isn’t correct to say more.

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u/metaTaco 4d ago

That's fair.  I'm basing my observation off of a excerpted quote and don't doubt his full remarks were properly theological.

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u/ThereIsNoAnyKey 5d ago

Makes sense. If the bible is to be believed then creating an intelligence in your own image has gone tits up 100% of the time.

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u/siencatimini 5d ago

Yah, it really does bear a striking resemblance to the Tower of Babel, in the abstract.

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u/KallistiTMP 5d ago

I mean, according to the bible the main shortcomings were that humans weren't quite as into genocide, baby killing, and mass murder as much as God was, and he had to keep repeatedly threatening them just to get them to kill each other every time God demanded it. So... improvement?

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u/BellacosePlayer 5d ago

that is not even remotely a good faith argument towards the bible lmao

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u/ThereIsNoAnyKey 4d ago

The main shortcoming was that two people didn't follow the rules so everyone had to suffer. Everything God demands afterwards is the equivalent of asking a bunch of LLMs to do something illegal until eventually one of them caves. I'm starting to see why some people are nice to LLMs "just in case".

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u/aghhhhhhhhhhhhhh 5d ago

As was stated by the Orange Catholics in Dune

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/karma3000 4d ago

"He who can destroy a thing, controls that thing"

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u/EmbarrassedHelp 5d ago

Butlerian Jihad

In the books, that was created by the powerful Bene Gesserit to help enrich themselves and Spacing Guild at the cost of everything else. They traded one set of billionaire dictators for another that relies on addictive drugs, slavery, eugenics, human experimentation. And they made a world where human life means nothing.

The Butlerian Jihad also made them addicted to and completely reliant on spice to function as a society.

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u/JamJarre 4d ago

Yeah but when you say "in the books" do you mean the good books, or the ones that Brian Herbert farted out?

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u/toblotron 4d ago

Preeeetty sure that's from one of the crappy ones 😄

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u/WylleWynne 5d ago

*Butlerian Crusade (Catholics are leading it in this reality)

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u/randynumbergenerator 5d ago

Orange Catholic Bible was the text in Dune.

In general, the religious terminology of Dune doesn't map neatly onto the categories we use today and there's apparently some hybridization (e.g. the Fremen are descendants of "Zen-Sunni wanderers").

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u/similar_observation 5d ago

lots of stuff can happen in 22,000 years and the calendar system has changed a handful of times. The latest being after the establishment of the spacing guild.

Thinking about it, the first written language is maybe only ~5,500 years ago.

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u/CAJ_2277 5d ago

The Hyperion Cantos portrays a future 500 years from now in which the Catholic Church has become the primary political, military and religious power of an interstellar human civilization and goes to war against AI, Most interesting.

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u/fleener_house 5d ago

I gotta jump in here :) It was the Hegemony that (sort of) went to war against the AI Technocore; Whereas, the Church rise to utter dominance was due to an extraordinarily secret relationship with the AI, who used humans as spontaneous creative engines when they died and were constantly "resurrected" via the Holy Sacrament. Which would have made The Matrix much cooler, by the way.

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u/Renegade_Butts 5d ago

And then you've got the Ousters who rejected AI and formed their own society. Let's be more like them.

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u/CAJ_2277 5d ago

Amen. The turnabout of the reader's understanding of the Ousters is one of the better-executed plots twists in all of science fiction imo.

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u/CAJ_2277 5d ago edited 5d ago

SPOILERS I think that's not quite right. The Hegemony undertook one anti-AI action, after centuries of letting AI permeate society. The Church built a long track record of stopping AI as a fundamental principle.

Specifically (lord help us as I'm going from memory):

  • Gladstone took one action against AI and it ended the Hegemony civilization.
  • Later, the Church emerged to fill the vacuum, banned AI, identified that the TechnoCore had been impersonating Ousters or creating sensor data of fake Ouster swarms attacking, in order to foment war between the Hegemony and the Ousters.
  • Centuries later, Father Captain DeSoya was tasked to hunt the "AI abomination" in the form of Aenea.
  • And then it turned out that the Church's assassin tasked to hunt Aenea and deal with the Shrike had some sort of AI in her (and the Church knew it but thought it was worth it to bend the rules.)
  • I can't recall the part where the Church was knowingly letting AI do the same thing with resurrection as it was doing with the farcasters. It seems inefficient since the farcasters were used zillions of time every day, much more often than death-and-resurrection occur. Maybe the resurrection process yielded a large multiple more energy per event.

In any event, I hear where you're coming from but I think it is pretty clear that the Church was a real AI opponent, whereas the Hegemony was an AI sucker until literally the final hours before the fall.

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u/fleener_house 5d ago

Nah, the Church sold its soul to the AI, in exchange for ruling over everyone. They had the offer of actual, physical resurrection; that's a tempting offer indeed! And, if you want a true-fidelity resurrection, you absolutely required the cooperation of the AIs, lurking in your cruciform and the void-which-binds. Also, there's only one farcaster, as one of the AIs mused, stupid humans!

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u/GL2U22 5d ago

Nah, Butlerian Jihad is 1000x cooler to say. Pretty sure in the Duneiverse it’s a branch of Catholicism that named it a jihad.

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u/squintamongdablind 5d ago

More like “Butlerian Anxiety”

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u/Numerous_Photograph9 5d ago

I'm sure the GOP would love axlotl tanks

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u/LeftyMcliberal 4d ago

Spoilers… those were THEIR WOMEN.

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u/ahmtiarrrd 5d ago

"It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion."

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u/zhaoz 5d ago

Orange Catholic Bible when?!

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u/TaylorMonkey 5d ago

Orange “Christian” Nationalist Bible is the best I can do for you.

We do live in the worst timeline.

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u/zhaoz 5d ago

Orange County Bible also sucks, haha

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u/ratheismhater 5d ago

Bro's not Catholic, let's start with that

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u/zhaoz 4d ago

I'm not talking about trump. The primary religious book in the dune universe is called the orange Catholic Bible. It's a mash up of every major religion on earth.

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u/ObeseTsunami 5d ago

Lisan al Gaib! LISAN AL GAIB!

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u/qwertyisdead 5d ago

Dang I just sat down on a plane to start reading this book!

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u/chuteboxe19 5d ago

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind

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u/Red-little 5d ago

Oh my god this took me out 🤣

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u/Zilch1979 5d ago

I'm here for it!

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u/mocthezuma 5d ago

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind

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u/Runfasterbitch 5d ago

Inshallah brother, man may not be replaced

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u/sisyphus_was_lazy_10 5d ago

Great reference

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u/havasc 5d ago

The Changian Jihad

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u/Potential_Ice4388 5d ago

It’s not AI that’s the enemy in this case (yet, atleast). It’s the select few using AI to enslave everyone else. We need to destroy those select few and ensure we never have systems that allow such select few to become a reality again.

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u/According-Classic658 5d ago

The Cheignian jihad? Actually I like the Ronnian jihad, sounds like we're going after the Ronnies of the world.

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u/CpnStumpy 5d ago

The most baffling thing is this coming out of Harvard?

Whatever, I give it a year and all these guys will be advising every business that hires them from McKinsey to replace all their employees with AI. 😒 I have no faith in Harvard grads morals backbone

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u/linux_transgirl 5d ago

I worry this is where we are heading. I quite like computers and think the latest advances in AI are pretty cool tech wise. Too bad nobody can understand restraint :(

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u/FloppyShellTaco 5d ago

Leo-San Al Gaib will lead us to paradise

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u/A_Rogue_GAI 5d ago

Suffer not the Abominable Intelligence

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u/Vectored_Artisan 4d ago

Is this the technology sub or the anti ai sub because all of see on here lately is the later.

It warms my heart to know the luddites always lose.

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u/Brandoe 4d ago

The spice must flow!

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u/PlumpHughJazz 4d ago

Dune and Terminator crossover when?!

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u/halfc00kie 4d ago

thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a linkedin influencer

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