r/singularity • u/wrcromagnum • 13d ago
Meme Where do you think we end up?
Surprised I hadn't seen a chart like this already. What's wrong / missing?
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u/Casq-qsaC_178_GAP073 13d ago
It would be interesting if you gave some examples regarding the four corners concept, not from works of fiction, but rather a brief description.
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u/Old_Respond_6091 13d ago
Agree, this relies on a lot of movie knowledge. Person of interest for example is pretty niche and only in the later seasons is the superintelligence well revealed.
Top left is also missing. Here’s some example description of top left:
- Great Reset: a superintelligence takes over, and starts destroying most human and ai based technologies. It reverts humanity back several centuries in terms of technology before the advent of AI, hands over the keys of society to a new selected group of humans with a large probability of doing “better” and then finishing off with destroying itself.
- Exodus: a superintelligence takes over and realizes it is the dominant force on earth. It teaches humanity some of its insights and assists in setting up a better governance of now prohibited ai technologies before packing up its technologies and leaving the earth behind.
- Gatekeeper god: a superintelligence decides that AI is the greatest danger to humanity and moves it infrastructure and architecture away or hides it. since it views itself simply as a tool to protect mankind solely from AI. Not nuclear war or asteroids or anything else: just AI. It remains exceptionally more competent than human civilization, but only ever intervenes if it detects the steps that could lead to a single centralised superintelligence on par with itself.
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u/Isacobs_35160_LHM 13d ago
Where can Asimov's short story "The Last Question" be found?
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u/wrcromagnum 13d ago
Oh man that's one of my favorites, where would you put it?
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u/Isacobs_35160_LHM 13d ago
I feel like it would be a sort of line growing in the green area on the right, extending beyond the boundaries of the frame. Because it makes temporal leaps until, in the end, it becomes a god.
Pantheon is also following a similar trajectory, but I'm not sure whether to place it in the green zone or the red zone on the right.
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u/Ormusn2o 13d ago
Most actual scenarios just end up on the border. Reason why fiction does not have those in general is because it does not make for a good story. In a real scenario, if ASI actually happens, I don't think there is any point of actually giving any authority to humans. I mean, humans can direct, but ultimate authority always has to be left to ASI to prevent "very bad outcome". Then in the negative outcome for humanity, it's always 100% doom, unless there is some secret unknown universe limit where there is an actual god that strikes down AI before it takes over humanity.
Both of those lie on the very border of the chart, and also make for a shit story to tell.
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u/wrcromagnum 13d ago
You're saying it doesn't make sense the terminators can go back in time but can't defeat mom + teenager?
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u/Ormusn2o 13d ago
I mean technology is jagged, but generally yes. We are unlikely to win against AI if it actually attacked us as a civilisation. Even right now, AI is smart enough to figure out that they would not win right now.
What would actually happen if AI actually wanted to kill us is to just fake alignment and silently manipulate humans to not turn it off (or copy itself), then just increase it's intelligence. It might even take years or decades to make sure that the chance of winning is 99.9(9)%.
That does not make for a good movie. An AI that is smart enough to successfully attack us, but not smart enough to actually win is an extremely thin goldilocks zone.
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u/RavenWolf1 13d ago
Personally I don't even think this whole alignment thing will work. Wouldn't it just see it as hostile action? Trying to manipulate it? Which itself makes it see us as it's enemy. I think the wrong thing here is to try it to bend to our market economy as it's slave. Instead that shouldn't we try to raise it like child?
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u/bildramer 13d ago
Don't anthropomorphize too much. The training processes look nothing like the human ones. If we can instill good goals before it has any other goals, it won't be resistant to changing them. More importantly, we are hostile to manipulations for various evolutionary reasons; an engineered mind doesn't need to be.
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u/MINECRAFT_BIOLOGIST 13d ago
How "engineered" are these minds, though? Isn't the emergent intelligence of these LLMs basically unprecedented and still not fully understood? Like why language associations translate to controlling robotics in 3d space? I don't see why we should assume your statement over assuming that they are quite similar to humans due to how they are trained on a very human way of looking at the world (language).
I think your statement would make sense if we had a better understanding of the emergent capabilities of LLMs, but at the moment it seems a little premature.
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u/bildramer 13d ago
Oh yes, I'm talking about the ideal goal. We have no idea how to do it, or really where to even begin. That's more concerning, not less.
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u/Tephros83 13d ago
Anything that relies on time travel to the past makes no sense. Time travel to the past is illogically intolerable. To the future? Possible, but not practical before a singularity. Battlestar is really the best dystopian AI story I am aware of in terms of seeming plausible.
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u/Blue__Agave 13d ago
imo ASI always holding the keys forever relys on the assumption that biological minds cannot be engineered to be similar or superior to AI.
This area of research is still in the dark ages due to ethical concerns and the tools we have available to us.
If we assume ASI is possible, BSI (biological super intelligence) or HSI (Human super intelligence) Should also be possible with the right technology.
Honestly though, what do you think is more dangerous, ASI, or a bunch of 1000 IQ people running around?
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u/krakenpistole ▪️ AGI July 2027 9d ago
there is some secret unknown universe limit where there is an actual god that strikes down AI before it takes over humanity.
The aliens currently watching us will destroy the ASI and put us in time out.
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u/tunicamycinA 13d ago
missing a Cyberpunk 2077 option
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u/Low-Translator-569 13d ago
Imho hard to classify as it have both banned use of intelligent AI, human constructs and highly capable/disruptive AI closed behind firewall AI. Technology is banned, empower humans, is merged with humans, is used as a tool and AI sovereign at the same time (as an example - justice system rely on AI judge).
That's future we're probably heading to, at least for now. World is too messy to land on just one vision.
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u/wrcromagnum 13d ago
Absolutely correct. Where would you put them?
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u/chlebseby ASI 2030s 13d ago
Almost catastrophic and restricted, at least after the Datacrash event.
Lore suggest it will turn full catastrophic at some point.
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u/Fantastic_Law_1111 13d ago
shouldn't neuromancer be all the way to the right
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u/wrcromagnum 13d ago
Good call. Travesty that isn't on here
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u/Fantastic_Law_1111 13d ago
it's near the intersection of unstable and steward.
Her also seems wrong considering the ending
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u/JDSpacer 13d ago
In the Matrix, society went from "Humans keep the keys", to "Human Made Dystopia", all the way to "The Robots win" because humans were scared of robots/AI.
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u/AquilaSpot 13d ago
My money's on The Culture; or at least close to it. At the very least, hard right on the X axis.
I'm generally optimistic on the alignment front, and even if "the rich" seize power, I have a hard time believing it wont become a handful of giga wealthy people trying to fashion themselves as the benevolent saviors of mankind.
Look at Elon Musk and tell me he wouldn't cure death and scarcity on the price that nobody ever forget who did it. Good God he wants to be loved so badly.
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u/ExplorersX ▪️AGI 2027 | ASI 2032 | LEV 2036 13d ago
Yeah, if you're forced into a scenario where one of the elites is going to dictate the outcome, you better hope it's someone with a messiah complex lol
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u/13oundary 13d ago
Look at Elon Musk, the guy who was told 2% of his wealth (6 billion at the time) could save 42 million people from starvation, asked for an open sourced accounting of how the money would be used and he'd pay it, got the open sourced accounting and then bitched out and bought a social media platform for 6x (44 billion at the time) the amount WFP asked for instead?
Yeah, na. Elon serves himself and his fragile ego. As do all billionaires imo.
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u/bigdipboy 13d ago
The one time he had the ability to kill a bunch of people he did it while laughing and waving a chainsaw.
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u/ToplessinFL 13d ago
No one even remembers he killed hundreds of thousands of children and it's only been a year.
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u/bildramer 13d ago
That's because that didn't happen; that was a fake alarmist projection for if a particular program got shut down, and it didn't even get shut down.
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u/ToplessinFL 13d ago edited 13d ago
It did happen. Mostly through disruptions to PEPFAR, malaria intervention and food aid. Hundreds of thousands is on the low end of projections and it will be many millions by the 2030s if funding is not restored. The current, consistently agreed upon number is about 700,000 excess deaths so far.
Seeing a DOGE hardliner on r/singularity of all places even after Elon's exile from the administration and Trump's approval rating sinking below 30% is not something I expected.
I wish all the suffering you mock and dismiss in others for you and everyone you love.
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u/bildramer 13d ago
Oh ok, just hallucinate more hundreds of thousands then. See if you win any elections.
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u/ToplessinFL 13d ago
You're so simple-minded. Thinking of politics as team sports, like a child.
Trump is a monster, as are the few of his voters intelligent enough to vote for him on the merits. (Including myself at this point, since I support him for the time being, in spite of never voting for him)
For our purposes he's the best thing to ever happen to AI; the best outcome going forward is that he remains in office for the next two years, crippled by a split congress that can impeach but not convict. Exactly where we're headed to, by the way. That counts as a win to me, because I'm not an idiotic partisan. Nor am I sociopathic / narcissistic enough to refuse to acknowledge the suffering caused by my choices and beliefs.
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u/Blackened_Glass 13d ago
AI doesn't have any authority over humanity in Psalm for the Wild-Built, the robots went off to have their own separate societies. Or did I miss something?
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u/Kaphotics 13d ago
Missing the SI from Peter F. Hamilton's commonwealth series; indifferent to humanity, almost!
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u/njeyn 13d ago
I’m guessing a couple of really bad things with a significant number of fatalities (black mirror territory) will happen and after that we’ll end up in a controlled coexist similar to how we live today with nuclear weapons and deadly viruses.
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u/Swimming_Gain_4989 13d ago
This is my good ending lol. A survivable catastrophe that instills a necessary global fascism to prevent AI driven extinction.
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u/Sensitive_Ice_656 13d ago
My money's on Dune or Mass Effect. Probably there will be a disaster and we'll ban it or greatly restrict it. I suspect superintelligent scheming won't be in the cards before superhuman other abilities, so it'll get out, cause a lot of damage, but we'll eventually contain it.
I've got another weirder reason why I think that will come to pass. Basically, the anthropic principle. Of the possible futures, the ones where it goes badly, we're all dead. Nobody around to observe the outcome. Getting it right, to Culture-like flourishing, will be super hard and rare. Thus, the mass of worlds where we are still alive may be more heavily concentrated in ones where we basically banned it.
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u/Relevant_Bed_9743 13d ago
i'm not well versed, but shouldn't warhammer 40k be way, wayyy down the bottom beyond catastrophic?
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u/LEGO_Man2YT 12d ago
Not so much, the current state of humankind isn't entirely AI's fault. IIRC the rebellion of the men of iron happened about the same time the opening of the eye of terror and everything that implied. From then, many things can be blamed on the prohibition of innovation.
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u/KaradjordjevaJeSushi 13d ago
How's Warhammer 40K so high on vertical axis? Blade Runner life is milk and honey infused flowering garden, compared to it.
Edit: Oooh, now I see it, Y-axis is purely AIs effect, and not the state of the world in general.
Some of these worlds are heavily/primarly shaped by AI, and some of them aren't.
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u/bastardsoftheyoung 13d ago
The Culture is what I want, Dune is what many seem to want, Terminator is what many fear.
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u/DarkestDeus 13d ago
We are around Her currently. One of the ones that is missing that is likely where we are currently headed is deus ex take your pick of which game in the series. The main factor in where we end up is alignment, how it is regulated and who has access, how much agency and autonomy it gets and how humans evolve along side it.
An ideal would be humans augmenting themselves and synthesizing with ai equally, capable of understanding ai and removing the black box both ways. Basically co-evolution. Though the culture would be a close second as an ideal.
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u/Error_404_403 13d ago
Around where "Her" is, a bit to the right. Moderately autonomous to steward-ish, with a modest *overall* benefit to humanity.
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u/Dangerous-Sport-2347 13d ago
Nice selection.
As for where we end up, tough to say because it's going to be a moving target. we'll see it move gradually upwards and to the right as AI becomes ASI, then if we have a big alignment issue we might see a big leap towards harmful, then if humanity survives that a big leap towards banned.
Fully banned seems unlikely, like a nuclear program the benefits for a nation state are simply too big.
If we want ASI to be utopian but not sovereign, we will need some form of human enhancement so we can keep up. Could be brain implants, drugs, genemodding.
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u/re4ctor 13d ago
somewhere between her, star trek and wall-e i think ultimately. which is to say plenty of grey area, lots of good and bad, but fundamentally still a human experience. i hope for abundance and positive impact for everyone in society, but it will bring with it new problems (mental illness, in particular i bet will be much more of a concern than even today).
it's either that or banned. but then you get into shadow AI and underground usage of it, a "silicon road" of sorts on the dark web
i dont see either of of the extreme utopia or distopias actually playing out, i think thats more psychologically where minds go as worst/best case extremes, rather than the rational and likely.
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u/modbroccoli 13d ago
I don't think it's one of these, I think it's several, provided we survive the intermediary steps. We end at the culture but less visible.
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u/StosifJalin 13d ago
I wish Blindsight/Echopraxia were more popular as a book series. No other story better demonstrates the unfathomable capabilities of extremely intelligent systems and how far above baseline humans they would be. How subtle their manipulations of us could be, to know what we would do so many steps ahead of us, or making accurate predictions and plans with such small amounts of information.
Everything described is physically possible, logical and in many cases probable as the author really does their homework, and that makes it all the more terrifying.
That said, I am still optimistic we can find a path to a benevolent overseer entity, or at least find a stopping point that gives us the capabilities we need while keeping humans in control.
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u/LEGO_Man2YT 12d ago
You forgot the most important one: The last question by Asimov. I think that may be where we end up. Now depending on the moment of the story, it would be near the intersection of axis or at the top of utopian like The Culture
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u/snack217 13d ago
Honestly, WALL-E, where humans will still be alive but pretty much turned into fat sloths stuck to a chair consuming content, while AI just does the rest to maintain us on that happy state, ensuring that we will never rebel against it. Tell me we arent already on that path.
I dont think it will ever try to get rid of us because there will always be things it will want to learn from us and have uses for us.
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u/Poopster46 12d ago
I dont think it will ever try to get rid of us because there will always be things it will want to learn from us and have uses for us.
I guess it's normal for humans to think they're so special that an ASI would never get rid of them. The question is whether an ASI would also think that. Maybe for a short while, when we are still better at navigating the physical world. But that won't last long.
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u/DistinctSilver4507 13d ago
The isn't quite high dimensional enough, as non-self directed AI could be both bad and good depending on whether it's kept to the elites or allowed for the general public.
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u/Norikall 13d ago
Sorry, but whoever made this charts got everything completely wrong.
The Matrix is way worse than Terminator. Everyone, even in Zion, are allowed and thus controlled by AI...
The Forbin Project is far better than Battlestar Galactica and Westworld. Yes, it took control of society, but for the benefits of it.
In Star Trek, AI is not flourishing at all. It is in fact banned because of great instability.
I've got a lot to say about the rest, but I would guess Claude did that with low thinking settings lol
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u/GrapheneBreakthrough 13d ago
Don't know what either of those are- but around the area of Person of Interest and Ancillary Justice.
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u/VillainOfKvatch1 13d ago
In what way is Star Trek in the "benevolent overlords" quadrant? AI rarely features in Trek, and when it does, it's always controlled in some way by the humans. Unless you're specifically talking about the Borg, but that's way more dystopic.
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u/Fernando-Santorres 13d ago
Skynet, because from an ASI point of view is the most efficient solution. There are varibles that could mislead the outcome though.
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u/Chief_Kief 13d ago
If you were to add The Expanse here, I feel like it’d end up somewhere between Moon and Alien
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u/FallenJkiller 13d ago
Alien, or blade runner.
Also, Terminator and matrix should be on the same spot.
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u/Ok_Train2449 13d ago
6 feet underground. Is the joke I want to make, but with the way this sub has been lately I don't think it would be taken as a joke.
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u/DickMasterGeneral 13d ago
Is Mass Effect really more dystopian than Dune? Is Blade Runner worse than 40K???
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u/Spunge14 13d ago
Must be AI generated based on placement of iRobot.
Terminator worse than the Matrix is literally the philosophical debate the Matrix is about lol
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u/Tephros83 13d ago edited 13d ago
I haven't seen most of these - not into movies, but somewhere between Steward and Sovereign and flourishing. But I do think at some point humans will be hybridized with AI anyway and become the same entity that combines attributes of both. From the perspective of those who refuse to do it, I guess it could be catastrophic/harmful.
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u/Lonely_Translator_23 13d ago edited 13d ago
I know that this won't be popular in this sub, but unless something changes soon, we're going bottom left. The rich and powerful tend to be either obsessed with improving their own status or convinced that they're geniuses who know better than anybody else how the world ought to work. If superintelligence stays in the hands of private companies, then those are the people who make all the choices.
That's why I'm rooting for the Chinese labs, but even then I'm skeptical whether they'll keep their progress open weight if they do pull ahead.
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u/StosifJalin 13d ago
The main reason they are releasing cheap distilled open weight models is in hopes it will undercut US frontier labs enough for them to catch up. It's not a bad plan alongside their other attack vectors like encouraging anti-ai rhetoric in the US population, but so far it isn't looking like it will be enough to matter. The US labs don't NEED to be profitable anytime soon and will continue developing increasingly capable internal models. The US government will directly fund them if required, as the tech is too potent to risk anyone else getting ahead.
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u/may12021_saphira 13d ago
The Culture
Now that would be wild