“I feel like things are starting to unravel,” says Nick Hilton, host of a neo-Luddite podcast called The Ned Ludd Radio Hour. But he is one of the most optimistic tech skeptics interviewed by the Guardian. Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic in a gray polo shirt, swings slowly in his office chair and explains with great patience – taking things slowly for a novice like me. Everyone we know and love will soon die. They will be killed by rebellious self-aware machines…. Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic and least convinced that there is hope for civilization. He's a principal investigator at a non-profit organization called the Machine Intelligence Institute in Berkeley, California… “If you threw me up against a wall and forced me to put probabilities into things, I would… , the problem we're left with now is that the timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. It could be two years, it could be 10 years.” Yudkowsky says, “The rest of the timeline.” That is, until we faced the end of everything brought on by machines… Yudkowsky was once the founding father of the development of human-made artificial intelligence, or AI. He has come to believe that these same AIs will soon evolve from their current state of “Oh, look at that!” The wisdom assumed by advanced god-level superintelligence is too fast and too ambitious for humans to contain or suppress. Mr. Yudkowsky advises that the human-made brain not imagine he is in one box. To get a sense of where things are heading, he says, imagine a box full of “alien civilizations that think a thousand times faster than we do.” [Molly Crabapple, a New York-based artist, believes] “A Luddite is someone who takes a critical look at technology and rejects those aspects of technology that aim to disempower, disskill, or impoverish. It is not introduced by a God in heaven who puts first. Technological development is shaped by money, shaped by power, and generally targeted at the interests of the powerful rather than the interests of those without power. . Is the classic definition of a Luddite a stupid worker who breaks machines because he's stupid? That's something the bosses made up.'' Although they will have the biggest threats (to the point of trying to dig their fingers through nuclear codes) to be dealt with, neo-Luddites tend to focus on ground-level concerns. Employment in particular is where AI-enhanced technology appears to be causing the most pain….I say be careful [writer/podcaster Riley] Quinn addressed those who present technology as “synonymous with being advanced, agile and efficient.” This is usually code for 'we'll find a way to get around labor regulations…' One of his colleagues at TrashFuture, Nate Bethea, agrees. “Opposition to technology will always be treated as irrational by those who have a direct economic interest in continuing the status quo,” he says. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
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