MIT Has Predicted that Society Will Collapse in 2040

submitted by EthnocratArcheofuturist from (self.debatealtright)

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[–]casparvoneverecBig tiddy respecter 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Forget about the future, where's our current day Newton?

There are probably people smarter than Newton in STEM nowadays. The thing is that there are no low-hanging fruits left. All the relatively easy pickings: laws of gravitation, elasticity, laws of magnetism, etc were picked by 1900. The scientific advances in the 20th century were much harder and required much more effort by contrast(quantum mechanics, relativity, genetic engineering).

The more science progresses, the harder innovations and breakthroughs become. You see few major breakthroughs or inventions nowadays. In the last 20 years, most progress has been in the pursuit of improving or updating existing tech. This is despite the immense amount of money, manpower, and institutional push behind STEM nowadays.

There is little room for any major breakthrough in physics now. The fruits are too high up the tree and too difficult to grasp. Despite 100 years of effort by the world's greatest minds, no unified field theory has yet come about. No one knows how what's inside a black hole, why time moves forward, or how to achieve interstellar travel or faster than light travel.

The field of electronics has seen a massive revolution in the last 50 years but the limits to that may be on the horizon. TSMC is attempting to make 1nm chips, can chips be shrunk any more than that? Wouldn't quantum effects make further shrinkage impossible?

What would come next after quantum computers?

Nothing has really come out of AGI.

IMO, the field where there's real potential for revolution is genetic engineering, cybernetics, and life extension.

China is throwing the fight on genetic engineering by banning human genetic modification. East Asian propensity for hyper caution. The west is throwing away human genetic engineering due to nonsensical attachment to humanism, equality, and other remnants from Christianity.

India subscribes to the same humanist nonsense.

Russia and Japan are interesting candidates in this field. But Russia's technological prowess in lackluster and Japan is hyper-cautious as well.

[–]TheJamesRocket 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

There is little room for any major breakthrough in physics now. The fruits are too high up the tree and too difficult to grasp.

Thats not true, though. The Standard model is almost certainly wrong. The theory of Relativity is incomplete. And Cosmology is in a crisis. All of the dominant theorys are false, their predictions do not correspond to observations. There is room for a revolution in physics, if only scientists were willing to revise their assumptions, think outside the box, and challenge the status quo.

Despite 100 years of effort by the world's greatest mind, no unified field theory has yet come about.

Thats because the Standard model is wrong. There is no such thing as a Higgs field or a Higgs boson that bestows mass on all particles. Physics is trapped in a false paradigm. And since they are unwilling to revise or rethink the Standard model, they will remain trapped.

The more science progresses, the harder innovations and breakthroughs become.

For the most part, yes. Because the more we learn, the more scientists need to specialize. The days when a Renaissance scientist could master multiple fields of study are long gone.

You see few major breakthroughs or inventions nowadays.

Have you ever read NextBigFuture? Its a science and technology website that exclusively focuses on new inventions. If you were signed up to it back in 2010-2015, the sheer number of updates were mindboggling. There were every kind of inventions of every kind of technology you could think of, from the mundane to the profound.

Nothing has really come out of AGI.

Not yet, it hasn't. And you'd better pray to god that it remains that way for the forseeable future, at least the next 40-50 years. AGI is one of the most dangerous technologys that could ever exist. A superintelligent agent could literally destroy the entire world.

China is throwing the fight on genetic engineering by banning human genetic modification. East Asian propensity for hyper caution. The west is throwing away human genetic engineering due to nonsensical attachment to humanism, equality, and other remnants from Christianity.

If the West can take the lead in genetic engineering once it has a new political mileau and cultural ethos. This requires the destruction of liberalism and other soft ideologys.

[–]casparvoneverecBig tiddy respecter 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

https://www.space.com/how-can-a-star-be-older-than-the-universe.html

One star has thrown a wrench in the long-held belief that the universe is only 13.7 billion years old.

The string theory makes a brave attempt to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics.

It may be that the standard model is wrong, but there's really no theory or discipline out there that has as much explanatory power as quantum mechanics.

Not yet, it hasn't. And you'd better pray to god that it remains that way for the forseeable future, at least the next 40-50 years. AGI is one of the most dangerous technologys that could ever exist. A superintelligent agent could literally destroy the entire world.

I'm highly skeptical about the killer AI theory. AI is based on a circular argument that the human brain is like a machine and thus if we model a machine after the human brain it can be intelligent like a human.

Most of what passes for AI nowadays are just algorithms. Long algorithms written by programmers to have specific responses to specific chains of events.

In any case, why would an AI suddenly go all Skynet? The desire to conquer and kill potential opponents rise in animals due to evolutionary reasons. Evolution has ingrained these instincts in them in order to make it more likely for creatures to pass their genes on.

A machine would not reproduce. It might never develop such instincts in the first place.

The real danger from AI is that it would empower a handful of (((men))) with totalitarian power over the whole human race. A few thousand strong sanhaedrin could feasibly tyrannize and rule over billions of people through control of machine armies and AI-controlled economies and surveillance states.

[–]TheJamesRocket 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

One star has thrown a wrench in the long-held belief that the universe is only 13.7 billion years old.

And thats just the tip of the iceberg. All of their measurements on the redshifts of distant Galaxys (which are supposedly receding at near the speed of light) are all wrong. They didn't properly take into account the effect of parallax angle, which means they overestimate the distance of these Galaxys. Their measurements of redshift would also mean that distant Galaxys appeared -fully formed- as early as 100 million years after the Big Bang. This is not enough time for them to have actually evolved! Its equivalent to having multicellular animal life appear soon after the formation of the Earth itself!

There is a solution to these quandarys, but it requires ditching the Big Bang model entirely. ''The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.''

In any case, why would an AI suddenly go all Skynet?

Have you ever heard of the paperclip maximiser? This is a thought experiment to show the dangers of AI. Imagine you have an superintelligent AI that is programmed only to build paperclips? That sounds totally harmless, right? In fact, the thing might end up creating molecular nanotechnology and consuming all matter on Earth until it consists of nothing but paperclips. The AI wasn't trying to destroy humans deliberately, it was just pursuing its goal of building paperclips.

The desire to conquer and kill potential opponents rise in animals due to evolutionary reasons. Evolution has ingrained these instincts in them in order to make it more likely for creatures to pass their genes on.

This gets deeper into the issue of what singulatarians call 'friendliness programming.' Basically, this is how to design an AGI that won't deliberately or accidentally destroy the world if it gets too powerful. The programming language necessary to instill friendliness is fiendishly complicated. There are many reasons for this.

Carl Schulman has an instructive video on this subject: Super-intelligence does not imply benevolence. Eliezer Yudkowsky also describes this in a related video: The Challenge of Friendly AI.

Human values also exist within its own small 'possibility space.' Within the space of all possible minds that can exist, you will also find the space of all possible values that can exist. Our own human values are not even remotely close to being so called 'universal.' They are very narrow, and highly specific to our own evolutionary past. If we were to live in a 'perfect world' created by a non-human entity, that world would be a perfect nightmare for us.

The real danger from AI is that it would empower a handful of (((men))) with totalitarian power over the whole human race.

Oh, they would TRY to do that. But they would inevitably program the AI in the wrong way, and end up destroying humanity. Greedy psycopaths are literally the worst possible people you could put in charge of programming AI, because they would inevitably give the machine goals that are contradictory to the nature of a friendly AI. 'Maximise wealth for the Globalists!' will end out playing exactly the same as 'maximise paperclips!' But look on the bright side: At least their bodys would end up being converted into the substance they love above everything else; Money.

''Your precious atoms, gratefully accepted! We will need it.''