Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson might fit the kind of tone you’re going for. The whole book is about restructuring society to combat climate change, but there’s no actual apocalypse in the traditional sense. The first chapter is one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever read, which does set the scene for what’s to come and shows why the changes they make are necessary.

Judges and Magistrates are the legal jobs most threatened by AI? That seems… unlikely.

If the UK Government is so eager for sovereign AI capability, why are they relying on a US company to design, build, and presumably run it?

Proof that global warming is not real!!! Read your science… if something gets HOTTER it EXPANDS!!! Those scientist cucks have cucked themselves good this time!!!

/s (in case it’s needed)

The AI in the article you linked was Open Claw, which is an open-source version of one of these persistent AIs, so you’re right. It links to LLMs like Claude, but Anthropic haven’t actually released their own version yet, which is why it was showing up in the original files as ‘built but not yet shipped’.

Well that’s good to hear. Hopefully most fans are like you and I get proved wrong. :-)

Currently the AI only runs for a short time after you provide a prompt. So say you ask it to ‘draft a letter to my congressman demanding an end to the war’, the AI will read what you wrote and output its interpretation of what you want, then it will stop.

What they’re talking about here is something very different, something which can continue processing inputs all of the time. It would be ‘aware’ of (depending on what you give it access to) emails coming in, what you’re working on in other programs, calendar events, etc. The idea is that it could potentially interrupt you with suggestions, maybe even anticipate what you will want and do it for you.

Obviously this is going to be risky at first. We’ve already seen stories of AIs deleting entire projects, what could they get up to if they’re allowed to be your online stand-in with access to everything on your device?

I haven’t read the linked interview or watched the video, but based on the quotes in this post what Weir is saying isn’t wrong, it’s just (in my opinion) missing the point a bit. Do we really want AI to make art for us? Is that a good use for the technology?

My prediction is that AI generated books will end up replacing the ‘pulp’ part of the industry; the ‘airport novel’, the ‘trashy romance’, etc. If people can just prompt a machine to give them exactly the kind of book that they’re in the mood for, many will.

Human made books will still be valued because they’re human made, but they’ll probably occupy several niches; the books written mostly because the author loves writing (fan fiction, etc.) with little expectation of a large audience, and the higher-end literary works where the human element will be most valued.

I don’t think this is the direction that we should be taking with this technology. AI should be automating away the dangerous jobs and drudge-work so that humans can focus on more interesting and rewarding things, but at this point it would take a massive popular movement to shift things onto a better trajectory, and if we can’t collectively even get our shit together to properly address climate change, what chance do we have of doing this?

What’s interesting, to me, is that’s exactly how people hedge in the fringe UFO community too.

Ha! True. Very true. I find this scenario compelling but it’s based on a series of assumptions which individually seem plausible but I have no way to evaluate them all together. It’s like the Drake Equation; because the probabilities are multiplicative even tiny adjustments to a few of them end up making a huge difference to the final answer.

The thing is though, if there really is even a tiny chance of the ultimate outcome of this thought experiment being true (i.e. the end of humanity) then we should probably address it. And what that would look like is stopping the AI companies from doing any more research until they can prove their model will be safe, which should make people who are more concerned about AI slop happy too. Everybody wins by hitting the brakes. (Edit: well, Sam Altman doesn’t but I’m not going to lose sleep over that.)

It’s not meant to be a specific prediction, it’s just a plausible (for when it was written) scenario. Don’t worry about the actual years, it could be off by an order of magnitude, just decide for yourself if any of the assumptions are completely wrong.

Nobody is programming those laws because it’s not possible with the way that LLMs are currently built and trained. Instead of The Three Laws, which are inviolable but in certain edge cases insufficient, we have Anthropic’s Constitution, which is 23,000 words worth of good intentions which Claude should keep in the back of its mind while it does whatever it wants to do.

Yeah, globalisation has caused lots of problems, working class people have suffered even as the wealthy have flourished. But there’s no going back. A small nation like Britain couldn’t be completely self-sufficient without essentially regressing to a lower technology level, at which point they would just get invaded by somebody with an advanced military.

Instead we need to look at other ways of righting those wrongs, new strategies to ensure that the people can live happy and healthy lives. Lots of people want UBI, and I can see the attraction. I think it’s worth a try, even if it doesn’t work as advertised we could get feedback and adjust things until we find something that does work. The status quo is just not tenable.

I think the problem is that Brexit was never about becoming ‘self-reliant’. As you said, Brexit cut the UK off from their single biggest export market, which is the exact opposite of what you need to do if you want to build up your industry. These days no country is completely self-reliant, and trying to be so, while it sounds good, just ends up meaning that you generalise, becoming mediocre at everything and exceptional at nothing.

If the Brexiteers truly wanted to make Britain great again they should have chosen a domain to be great in and lobbied for investment in it. Britain was already punching well above its weight in financial services, they could have invested further in that, for example, and become a true world leader… but only from within the single market, where they had unrestricted access to the talent and economies of the EU.

I find it hard to visualise pictures but I am good at imagining how things relate to each other in space and how they move. For example, if I try to imagine a scene of somebody playing on a swing hanging from the branch of a tree, if I focus hard I can ‘see’ parts of it; the rough, frayed rope, the look of joy on the kid’s face, or whatever, but only one at a time. But I can easily imagine how the swing moves, how the rider leans back or forward to make it go higher. I don’t need to ‘see’ the image for this, it’s more abstract.

LLMs could theoretically give a game a lot more flexibility, by responding dynamically to player actions and creating custom dialogue, etc. but, as you say, it would work best as a module within an existing framework.

I bet some of the big game dev companies are already experimenting with this, and in a few years (maybe a decade considering how long it takes to develop a AAA title these days) we will see RPGs with NPCs you can actually chat with, which remain in-character, and respond to what you do. Of course that would probably mean API calls to the publisher’s server where the custom models are run, with all of the downsides that entails.

I was thinking the same thing after posting! Shut pretty much the whole of Manhattan to cars, only allow bikes and buses. Goods vehicles can deliver during the night. Think of the reduction in noise, smog, stress, and people could get wherever they want so much quicker than they do now!

Don’t forget that Hawaii should go to Iceland due to volcanic brotherhood (and to give the Icelandics an opportunity to get a tan). And NYC goes back to the Netherlands if they’ll take it (think how expensive it would be to add all the bike lanes).

We can see the relationships between forces and motion in our everyday lives so we naturally internalise a model of how they work. Newton didn’t actually ‘discover’ the force of gravity, for example, he developed calculus to be able to extrapolate out from the force we see when we drop something on Earth to the planets themselves.

Quantum mechanics is completely different, there is nothing we see in our everyday lives which allows us to naturally build up a mental model of how quarks interact, or the way that photons propagate. It is only through dedicated study, a solid grasp of very advanced maths, and painstaking experimentation that we can figure out how those things work.

So I don’t think school going people will ever have the same inherent understanding of it that we do of forces like gravity.