The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

(https://image.ibb.co/jpfuSK/gametime.jpg)

So, are any of you guys interested in making such a game to save mankind?

Shouldn't be so much more difficult than making Pokémon Go.

… that wasn't easy, you know? It had a major studio behind it. Plus, I don't see how this would actually work. You've mixed environmentalism, human rights, and AI control. It seems a bit muddled.

Well, I guess we need to figure out how to make this work. Otherwise, I think Russia and China are going to make lots of killer robots soon.

But I am not scared of dying, so I don't care so much if Chinese and Russian killer robots are coming to kill me. ;)

That's a rather cliché plot, why would that be in any way "powerful"? Stories about homicidal and genocidal AI have already been done to death.

Because it is actually going to happen I guess. Machine learning algorithms weren't very good before 2012. Now they are beating humans in lots of things, and they will soon be able to beat humans in almost anything.

Anyhow, professor Harari tells it much better than me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5ELw11xPl8 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5ELw11xPl8)


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_autonomous_weapon#Campaigns_on_banning_LAWs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_autonomous_weapon#Campaigns_on_banning_LAWs)

And the same Wikipedia article also explains the potential benefits of such autonomous weapons – namely, waging wars without putting human lives at risk.

Obviously, there isn't going to be an easy solution for the problem of sharing our world with other intelligent beings, especially since we've done a terrible job sharing it with other humans so far. But I wish someone would approach it from a different angle than just "ban them all".

You think this also would be a good idea when dictatorships like China and Russia are the countries that are most eager to develop killer robots?

And let us use them for killing homosexuals and human rights activists, without putting Chinese and Russian police officers at risk. That sounds like a great idea.

Also, it would be much easier to be a dictator with killer robots. You don't even need to convince a human military that you should stay in power. You just need to be able to control the killer robots.

Well, in that case these countries might finally abolish conscription. :P

And abuse of power is another important issue, I agree. But what advantage would any hypothetical dictators gain over the people with killer robots that they wouldn't have with human soldiers? Even today, few protests end in a successful coup d'état. And even with killer robots, the rebels may be able to hack them.

People living in Russia and China will soon be monitored completely since we are also getting much more advanced surveillance technology. So, while it might have been possible to secretly criticise Putin and Xi Jinping in Russia and China, this will soon be completely impossible due to more advanced surveillance technology. Citizens of Russia and China will then be living in constant fear of saying the wrong thing. I don't think this would be a very good way to live.


Well, even though humans have done lots of atrocities, they are marginally better than killer robots. It is for example more difficult for a human being to kill an innocent child than for a killer robot.  Also, dictators need to give people in the police and military lots of power, in order to make them support the dictator. With killer robots, the dictator doesn't really need a lot of human supporters.

The same can be said of any other government on Earth. So wherever you live, we must think of ways to combat government surveillance and other abuses of power. And as always, advanced technology is going to be utilized by both sides.

Sure, but it is much more difficult to work against surveillance in dictatorships since people working against the will of the dictator often are murdered. In western democracies, we can say more or less whatever we want. The presidents and prime ministers don't have so much power, and there are already powerful organizations and a legal framework working to protect us from surveillance in western democracies.

In western democracies, you can say whatever you want, as long as it is not illegal.

In the rest of the world, you can say whatever you want, as long as it is not illegal.


By repositioning three words in the above misquote I was able to make it an accurate statement. :D

If Russian journalists wrote about Vladimir Putin in the same way as many American journalists are writing about Donald Trump, they would all be dead. The world is not the same everywhere.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e7/Press_freedom_2018.svg/1024px-Press_freedom_2018.svg.png)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index)

In any of the countries with red color, you cannot necessarily work openly against more surveillance and killer robots. So it is better to work in secrecy there, by delivering human rights propaganda to residence mailboxes.


I think this is a bit more accurate:

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Internet_Censorship_and_Surveillance_World_Map.svg/1024px-Internet_Censorship_and_Surveillance_World_Map.svg.png)

Western Europe has less surveillance than the US, but the US has less than Russia, and Russia has less than China and the Arabic countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_by_country (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_by_country)

By the way, I have written about the inability to appreciate nuances at my page about biases:


https://www.archania.org/biases/#Inability_to_appreciate_nuances (https://www.archania.org/biases/#Inability_to_appreciate_nuances)

That might be so. It also might have been that Iraq really had weapons of mass destruction or that Libya needed liberation from virtuous freedom fighters.  Alas, some of the things suspected about other countries by the first world turn out to be true while others turn out to be war time propaganda.

But what is very much clear are the explicit laws and punishments of various nations.  If the law of a land allows imprisonment or seizing assets from someone for saying thing X, then we know they do not have freedom to say whatever they want.  And it will then be that much harder for them to convince another nation's populace with different limitations put on their verbal freedom, that they have it so much worse and should put their lives at risk to pursue an extremely vague definition of what "freedom" means.


"Greetings oppressed people of country X!  We are political activists from the European Union, where it is illegal to say things that might cause gross offense, insult certain religious constructs or debate the exact number of armenians killed a hundred years ago in history.  We just want you to know that we can criticize to some extent the unelected bureaucrats of our government and we think you should give up your lives, livelihoods, friends or existence outside of a prison cell in order to maybe get the right to criticize your own unelected bureaucrat(s) to a similar extent as we can ours.  Whether or not you do, our American allies will be invading you for your resources at their earliest convenience.

P.S. If you disagree it is because the political machinations of your society have brainwashed you while it is just by coincidence that we so thoroughly agree with the political machinations of our own."



I too imagine this is so (and certainly hope it is).  But what would this same map look like decades ago.  Because only by comparing what was and what is can you guess where things are going.  I suspect that while Russia and China and perhaps some third world countries are getting slowly better, our nations are getting worse in this way.


If you want nuanced responses from people it helps to prescribe nuanced solutions to well evidenced and significant problems.  If folks sense that the problem is illusory, unlikely or dwarfed by larger issues or that the solution is completely unrelated to the problem, unworkable or itself unnuanced, then you will receive a response of another kind.

Deus, what is that… thing you wrote, there?

You're seriously equivocating between Iraqi MWDs and Russian press freedom problems on the one hand, and on the other hand between… wait, where is it illegal to debate the Armenian Genocide? Turkey?

None of this is illegal here. I think it might be illegal to threaten people. It might also be illegal to deny someone to study or work because of their religion. Some of these rules might be a bit silly, but it is trivial compared to how little freedom of speech people have in most dictatorships.

Anyhow. This is a proposal for a game, not a proposal for spreading the European Union. Lots of things are bad both in the EU and in the US. In fact, players would get blue points from finding proof of corruption anywhere. There is lots of corruption in the EU and the US, so you might very well get blue points from exposing corruption in western democracies. I just don't think it would serve any purpose to spread humans rights propaganda in western democracies since the governments already are agreeing to all of that.

I am connecting these three dots:

2003: "Saddam Hussein is a horrible dictator that oppresses his people, he will blow up the world!"
Result: Disastrous Intervention.

2011: "Muammar Gaddafi is a horrible dictator that oppresses his people, he will blow up the world!"
Result: Disastrous Intervention.

Now: "Vladimir Putin is a horrible dictator that oppresses his people, he will blow up the world!"
Result: Pending.

(The Bashar Al Assad intervention's result is also pending as of this writing.)

So we hear about how horrible this foreign "regime" is from somewhere outside of the west. Then we go to war with them. Then we find out it wasn't actually so bad before our war and that we made the situation tenfold worse.  At the same time, we ignore the problems internal to our own nations and suffer costs of all kinds resulting from the war.  And then we do it again.


France. (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/armenian-genocide-french-mps-vote-denial-crime-criminalise-a7117091.html)

Did you seriously not know France illegalized denial of various genocides?  It comes with the penalty of up to a 5 year prison sentence, IIRC.

Has anyone here proposed to go to war? Spreading human rights propaganda can hardly be considered an act of war, and since this is a game and not a country, you would, in any case, be going to war against a game then.

Those three are massively dissimilar. 2003 was a disastrous intervention founded on lies, no argument there. In 2011, there was an active civil war already going on without Western intervention, and the tendency at that time was that Gaddafi would win and was already killing a large number of people. We blew up part of his armed forces so he couldn't do that any more; the civil war continued for some time and resulted in a mess, but it's not a worse mess than would have resulted with no intervention. And In the present case, the proposal is to make a VR video game.

I can squint and see a connection between the first two; the third is… dissimilar.



I'm pretty sure that Putin's intervention to save Assad from the fate of Libya will end up working, yes.


That article doesn't exactly support the precise example you presented. It says, "While the new motion is yet to be passed by France’s Senate, backers of the amendment hope for it to be implemented by the end of the year" (that being 2016). It is not clear that this effort succeeded; I have not been able to find evidence of it. However, if you were to change that to 'deny that the Holocaust occurred', yes it would be illegal. Your initial claim that it is illegal to "debate the exact number of armenians killed" is blatantly false, even if you change 'Armenians' to 'Jews'.

That does not seem totally true. (https://www.newsweek.com/youtuber-count-dankula-who-taught-dog-nazi-salute-faces-jail-hate-crime-853470)  Every country has weird laws that "regulate" freedom of speech.  In western Europe they often fall under the guise of protecting ordinary people's egos or preventing dangerous propaganda from being spread.  In other countries speech is limited to prevent a deity from being offended (Saudi Arabia and Iran come to mind) or to prevent undermining of the country by mysterious foreign powers (America in the era of McCarthyism and now again and Russia in just about anytime in about the last century).

But in any case the result is the state can punish word crimes.  And they can slowly introduce expansions of word crimes' definitions and punishments and use older precedents of such laws to help justify the creation of new ones.


I was specifically responding to your statement that journalists who were critical of Putin were being disappeared.  My response is that that could be true.  But it also sounds a lot like military propaganda we often see coming out of America and directed at its enemies and competitors.  It is difficult to determine which is the case since presumably the assassin does not advertise what they have done.

In contrast, speech laws are readily visible and advertised by their enforcers.  They have to be to function as laws.  Thus, judging the "freedom level" of a nation by its speech laws seems way more practical and gets us out of conspiracy theory territory (assuming that is desired).


It is possible the intervention in Libya saved lives.  It is also possible the intervention in Iraq saved lives.  But are these things likely?  Was one a good intervention and the other bad?


The connection being between conspiracy theories as to a country's secret crimes (murdering journalists, weapons of mass destruction) and deteriorating relations between that country and America.  I am not absolutely against conspiracy theories being used to support a point since they sometimes turn out to be true later on (as was the case with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction) but that does expand the conversation quite a bit in a lot of ways.  (Like whether or not Russia was the only country that would have benefited from those journalists being assassinated.)


Huh, I thought I remembered them having a list of several genocides that were taboo including a number of African ones.  I suppose I must have conflated proposals for further expansion of the law with what was already enforced.  Still the point is the same, every country enforces speech crime laws.

Also relevant to the topic, it is worth asking if the specific flavor of these laws is designed to reflect the values and morals of the populace, not the government.  That is, while a government may use speech laws for its own ends, the rationale for them is carefully chosen to be as palatable to the populace as possible.  So does Putin and his government want to oppress homosexuals or is attempting to suppress homosexuality desirably to the majority of Russians and their government is just using this as a guise to further limit their speech?

Yeah. People just coincidently disappear when they are critical of Putin. Or, maybe you think the US is killing them to make it look like Putin is doing it?


You cannot necessarily get an objective evaluation of freedom of speech from speech laws either since laws might not be enforced to the same degree in different countries. In Brazil, for example, they have had laws against drunk driving for a long time, but people continue to drive while under the influence of alcohol since the police haven't been able to enforce the law.

This is what I think many Americans have a very poor understanding of. The solution to all your problems isn't just less government. Many of the countries in the world with weak governments are completely chaotic, with tons of garbage everywhere.



Human rights propaganda doesn't necessarily need to be against Putin. It can also be intended for changing the mindset of the Russian population, for example, in regard to homosexuality.

Here is an example of how a human rights propaganda sheet could look:

(https://i.imgur.com/hQJkHlE.png)

And here from google translater:

(https://i.imgur.com/0SFJE4t.png)

Could also make similar sheets for China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and other dictatorships.

The way you're wording it, it may seem like the moment a person says something critical of Putin, they're going to get assassinated. This is simply not true. It's not yet Stalinist USSR or North Korea here yet, nobody's going to do anything to you for telling a joke about Putin. However, there are indeed serious problems with freedom of speech in Russia. With homosexuals, it is actually illegal now to "promote" homosexuality among minors, although what constitutes such "promotion" is up to debate. Some organizations (like Deti-404, or 404 Children in English, whose objective is specifically to help LGBT teenagers) have already had trouble with the law because of that, but they survive nonetheless. And also on the topic of homosexuality, I don't think it's specifically Putin who promotes homophobia in Russia. The Russian society is already homophobic as it is, Putin simply exploits this homophobia to grow his power base. After all, people will readily hand you more power when there is a scapegoat that they're seriously afraid of.

With the mass media specifically, the vast majority of TV channels are pro-Putin, while on the Internet the opinions are more diverse. You can find pretty much the entire political spectrum on the forums and the social media, and there are some media outlets on the Russian segment of the Internet that are anti-Putin. Some of them are blocked in Russia by the Roskomnadzor (the main Internet censorship organization in Russia), some are not.

None of this is to say that there is no risk that one could be imprisoned or killed in Russia for voicing a dissenting opinion. There are anecdotes that say that some people were jailed for making a repost on the social media. What the odds are for getting imprisoned (let alone killed) for political reasons in Russia, I cannot say.

Well, at least I can guarantee you that the odds of getting caught for having dissenting opinions is going to be a lot higher in the future because of more advanced surveillance technology:

(https://9to5google.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2017/06/mary-meeker-google-voice-recognition.jpg)

(https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20160625_SRC498.png)


https://www.iflscience.com/technology/ai-beats-humans-emotional-recognition-test-landmark-study/ (https://www.iflscience.com/technology/ai-beats-humans-emotional-recognition-test-landmark-study/)

As you can see, the algorithms have improved a lot during the last years. Now it is only a matter of time before dictators are able to implement these algorithms for massive surveillance.

Well, in any case there are two ways to go when a new technology emerges - try to suppress it or try to adapt to it. Trying to suppress a technology rarely works out well.

I don't think you needed to develop the Tsar Bomba just not to suppress nuclear technologies. You can develop nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes, such as for power generation. Similarly, I don't think we need to develop killer robots and massive surveillance systems just not to suppress machine learning technologies. You can use machine learning algorithms to do many other things.

Lots of the nuclear weapons from the cold war are in a bad condition now, both in Russia and in the US. The US military needs to use a lot of resources now just on maintaining the nuclear weapon systems from the cold war. I guess the situation is somewhat similar in Russia.

Now you want to introduce another type of weapons, which might become a lot worse than the Tsar Bomba. If we lose control of super advanced killer robots we are not necessarily going to be able to adapt. They will kill you just as easily as they beat you in chess.

I think both scenarios are perfectly plausible.  Both nations have very much the motive and capability to do this.  And I believe both have the history of conducting assassinations.


This is true, but I guess it just brings us back to the idea that you really cannot tell what is going on in other nations you do not have direct experience in.  Each situation is complex and opaque when viewed from the outside.


This I guess is getting very broadly focused then...  How does (for example) convincing the Russian populace to embrace homosexuality stop killer robots from destroying the world?


Are your chances of survival against these things better if your nation outlaws or heavily regulates what kinds of firearms its populace has access to or does not develop a nuclear arsenal that might be useful for clearing swathes of killer robots at a time?

I am really worried about western European populations now, who may soon be facing swarms of killer robots while in the worst cases not even holding pointed knives.  You need to demand that your democratic governments remove all bans on weapons of all sizes and degrees of sophistication as long as they are not too AI augmented that they themselves become a threat.  No amount of firepower will for certain be enough so you need to be as well armed as possible to maximize your chances and the chances of the human race.

It's a package thing. If you think that homosexuals and people with dissenting opinions should have the same rights as you, then you are also more likely to think that the government shouldn't be surveilling them. And if the government doesn't have any good reason to engage in massive surveillance, then you are also less likely to be surveilled yourself.

If you think people from other countries should have the same rights as you, you are probably less likely to think it is a good idea to make killer robots to murder people from other countries. If all countries believe in human rights, it is much less likely that we will develop super advanced killer robots and lose control of them.

With power comes responsibility. Dictatorships simply aren't responsible enough to have such powerful weapons. It is like giving the Tsar bomba to a 5 year old kid. Who knows what the kid will do with it...

That does not follow, since there is always some group in society people will see as criminals and potentially want surveilled.  Rapists, murderers, thieves, drug traffickers, gun traffickers, people traffickers, killer robot engineers.  Unless you advocate for total anarchy where there are no crimes and no criminals, there will always be many cases where surveillance of some people by authorities can be justified to the populace.


Unless you feel that someone labeled a "dictator" by your media and the ultimate evil of the present moment is a threat to your society and you need new and better weapons to protect yourself from said dictator.  New and better weapons like, say, killer robots.


Yeah, because they might detonate the Tsar Bomba once over a deserted region and then scrap the project soon after?  Because that is what the "dictatorship" that actually had a Tsar Bomba actually did with it.  How irresponsible of them.

Well, even if it was detonated in a deserted area, people might still argue that was irresponsible. All the nuclear tests in the 50s and 60s had quite an effect on the concentration of C14 in the atmosphere:

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e2/Radiocarbon_bomb_spike.svg/750px-Radiocarbon_bomb_spike.svg.png)

And that the cold war didn't turn into a nuclear war could have been just be a matter of luck. A 5 year old kid might also not have done anything stupid with a Tsar Bomba, simply because of luck. Anyhow, killer robots can potentially move from any deserted region you introduce them to, to any populated region on Earth. Nuclear weapons and killer robots are very different types of weapons.


Sure, but at least here, there are very strict rules regarding who the police are allowed to surveil, and if the police have been found to do illegal surveillance, they can be punished just like any other criminal. We can also punish the government if they are involved in illegal activities. One of the problems with dictatorships is that the police and the government are above the law.


The world is just flowers. There are no dictators and malicious people in the world. How much have you traveled? Have you lived for long periods of time outside the US? I have been to Russia multiple times. I have a close friend that lives in Moscow. I also have a friend from Ukraine. He wasn't very surprised when Russia invaded Crimea.

People with high cultural intelligence, know that people can think and experience the world very differently in different countries, because of different traditions and different educational systems. We are not all the same.

Both the US and USSR were doing that. "Dictator" Harry Truman even tested two nuclear weapons on Japanese cities.  Or wait no that was a democracy that did that.


Actually ICBMs are nuclear armed killer robots that do exactly that.  We have had them for decades and are all still here to tell the tail.


As you pointed out earlier, judging laws without taking into account how thoroughly they are enforced is rather pointless.


It is great that you are an accomplished tourist but I think you have missed my point.  I was using the word "you" not to refer to you personally, but in the same general sense that you were using it, to refer to the average human being (and more specifically their mindset).

You claimed that with universal acceptance of a modern western definition of human rights, people would not be motivated to develop new weapon systems since such things could be used to harm the rights of others.  But this whole time you have been making an excellent case for how such weapons development can be justified to people anyway -- to defend against dictators (who may or may not themselves be developing such weapons).

"Some dictator somewhere in the world is developing killer robots (maybe).  We must develop this technology also to defend ourselves or destroy this person before he does too much harm."

Exactly this kind of rhetoric can and has been used to justify ("humanitarian") military invasions and advanced weapons programs like armed drones.

Most of the people in the US and EU didn't have a particularly strong understanding of human rights in the 50s. There was lots of legal discrimination both in Europe and in the US then. Our modern understanding of human rights didn't really emerge before the civil rights act of 1964, but it has continued to evolve since then. The UN didn't discuss LGBT Rights before 1995. Today, people are becoming increasingly concerned about animal rights. Particularly the rights of other mammals.


Do your ICBMs decide themselves when to launch? Because that is kinda what fully automatized killer robots do.


It is not maybe. Russia, China, and the US are all developing killer robots.

These peoples also lacked the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction if they took wars against other powers too far.  At that point, the Japanese had no ability to fight back in a threatening way.

Today, countries targeted by western power that have no modern military-technological defenses become an Iraq or Libya.  Those that do remain intact like North Korea or Iran. Those that are in between go the way of Syria.


In both cases the answer is the same -- robots do what they are programmed to do.  ICBMs can launch without human authorization and drones can require it and vice versa.

What makes ICBMs so tremendously more dangerous is they do all of their task at once so that the destruction of their own support infrastructure does not limit their casualties.  Drones, no matter how automated in their decision making, require refueling of one kind or another, repairs and rearmament.  Once their maintenance and logistics networks are destroyed their potential is largely gone (just like with other conventional forces).


Those nations already had them. Those all have ICBMs.

The "maybe" only referred to smaller regional powers or non powers labeled "dictatorships" as soon as western nations would like to militarily invade them to spread humanitarianism and/or prevent their development of WMDs killer robots.

That might be true for ordinary computer algorithms, but not necessarily for machine learning algorithms.


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4747914/Facebook-shuts-chatbots-make-language.html (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4747914/Facebook-shuts-chatbots-make-language.html)


Think more of an AI that is a military general. This would be advantageous since the AI general is capable of analyzing much more data much faster than any human general. If the AI general also has access to drones and ICBMs, it can also accomplish things much faster than by giving orders to human soldiers.

If either China, Russia or the US decides to make an AI general, they will have a much better general than the other superpowers. So they are probably all working on making AI generals.

Also, why not make a fully automatic factory producing drones and controlled by the same AI? Then the AI general can produce as many drones as it needs. They are probably already experimenting with such systems in China.

Now let's build a few fully automatized aircraft carriers filled with tons of drones, but without any people. Get yourself a few such aircraft carriers, and you can have the AI general waging war all by itself. This is maybe 10 years from now.

This is effectively a whole new topic that dwarfs and supersedes (no pun intended) your original topic.  In this scenario the question becomes what is the evolutionary advantage of a civilization that keeps humans around at all?

If you have machines that do everything a human can do, but better, then the civilization that has the smallest human population and thus wastes the least resources keeping (these no longer useful) humans alive will out compete the rest in time.  Ultimately, the civilization with ~0 humans will prevail.

Assuming machine learning is not the same as strong artificial intelligence you could also see a less dramatic evolutionary path for human civilization where we are still useful for the highest levels of research and development of new technologies.  In that case, we should expect to see the evolutionary plateau be a civilization where only people with an IQ of over X still exist and they almost all are involved in technological innovation.  Effectively, automation replaces humans at increasingly less mundane tasks until it reaches a point where it can no longer be improved or improved quickly and then everyone still around gets to keep having a "reason to exist" (from a cold, natural selection viewpoint).

In both cases there is also the possibility of some remaining random humans living like and with wild animals in the few parts of the world not worth exploiting by the automated civilization.

The point of a human life obviously isn't just to be an efficient worker.  There is something very different about creating machine learning algorithms for peaceful purposes and creating machine learning algorithms for war.  If all our machine learning algorithms are just for peaceful purposes we might end up being "useless" in the conventional sense, but that doesn't necessarily mean we should cease to exist.  We just need to "reinvent" ourselves and find a different purpose. Machine learning algorithms that are created for destructive purposes, might not just make humanity become "useless", they might actually wipe us out. Then it won't necessarily be possible for you to "reinvent" yourself and find a different purpose.

The next decades are going to be extremely challenging no matter what, and we cannot rely on idiots like Donald Trump to guide us through this difficult period. People such as Bret Weinstein (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi5N_uAqApEUIlg32QzkPlg) and Yuval Noah Harari (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2m77KGMIKZCD0Kw35-4shQ) might be able to guide humanity through this difficult period. But they cannot necessarily take over the old political world simply by making youtube videos. We need something like this augmented reality game to engage people in saving the world. Maybe we could involve Bret Weinstein and Yuval Noah Harari in making this game, and make them into the "bosses" which give orders to the players. So, for people playing this game, they are gradually going to develop a stronger concept of Bret Weinstein and Yuval Noah Harari as their true leaders.

You remember the mission briefings for example in the game called Dune 2:

(https://www.allegro.cc/depot/screenshots/2784_large.jpg)

Well, in this game, Bret Weinstein or Yuval Noah Harari could be the guys giving you mission briefings.

(https://i.imgur.com/hZaxnmM.png)

(https://i.imgur.com/K6yNvt3.png)

We would of course also need some proficient software engineers to make such a game. I guess there should be many such people here. Wouldn't this be much more fun than working on and/or playing completely fictional games, which don't necessarily have any impact on the real world? Especially since the real world is in such a critical phase now.

From a rational, Darwinian standpoint, the "purpose" of human life is to survive by remaining competitively adapted to our changing environment.  If the civilizations we started becomes so adaptive and competitive autonomously that they no longer benefit from having us around, then we will have become a vestigial feature that will ultimately disappear due to natural selection continuously preferring those civilizations that do not burden themselves with us.

This is why development of "peaceful" automation is actually tremendously more dangerous to the survival of our species than warfare automation.

By itself, Military Automation can only cause harm until it runs itself out of the vital resources humans will no longer want to provide it with or killed enough of us and our infrastructure that we no longer can provide for it.  It burns itself out almost like a virus.

In contrast, by itself, Infrastructure Automation has no limits on how long it can run without us.  It could continuously rebuild itself, reinvent itself and not appear so threatening as it really is until we had long given over to it too much control of resources for us to be able to reverse the process.  It could then decide to simply convert our food growing croplands into bio-fuel or bio-plastics producing croplands.  Or set up orbital solar collectors that it develops to the size of continents, thereby reallocating the natural source of energy we earthly organisms depend on, to its own projects.  And if we did actively retaliate against it, whatever civilian type security systems it did not already have could be developed quickly to deal those of us that damage its infrastructure.

You are projecting. You are talking about a machine learning algorithm, not a biological organism with needs and desires. A machine learning algorithm doesn't necessarily care anything about if it benefits from anything. It only cares about doing whatever it is set to do as efficiently as possible. Machine learning algorithms are created to serve us, they are not created to be served. We don't even know how to make a machine learning algorithm that desires and/or enjoys anything.


Why do you think that we need to provide for a military automation?

Exactly the same can be said for almost all organisms.  Bacteria do not "care" about anything either (as far as we know) they are just biological machines following their genetic programming.  But that genetic programming mutates over generations and is directed by natural selection to do things in ways you would not have guessed by looking at their earliest ancestors billions of years ago.  (That is the same kind of thing the article you linked to earlier was claiming, that the negotiation machine learning experiment had mutated its behavior to create something the human engineers had not anticipated -- a language of its own.)

What you can predict about this process though, is that over the long term, survival of the fittest will direct the evolution of an organism or civilization towards being as competitive and adaptive as it can be.


Only if we outlawed "peaceful" automation of infrastructure would that be the case.  Almost certainly this will not be the case of course.  But if your goal is to "save the world", as your topic title suggests, then this is exactly what you would need to be advocating for.


I should say again that while in the darkest possible scenario, an automated civilization would have no human component at all, in a nearly as dark scenario, one of your dictator types or a very tiny elite could run an entire civilization with no other people in it, thanks to automation of infrastructure.  Then it really would be a human(s) making the biggest decision and not a machine learning algorithm.

But this elite would not even need killer robots, they could simply reorganize the infrastructure to no longer feed anyone but themselves.  It could be very much like how France has nearly exterminated the local European Hamster population by converting croplands from growing cabbages to growing maize.

They do care about their own survival and reproduction.  All biological lifeforms are programmed for survival and reproduction. Machine learning algorithms don't necessarily care about their own survival unless we program them to care about their own survival. Maybe it should be illegal to make machine learning algorithms that care about their own survival and growth since such machine learning algorithms might become competitors to biological organisms.


I can imagine a world where humans are only consumers, but not producers. Would that be a very dark scenario? You could sit and play fictional computer games all day, travel wherever you wanted, have sexual intercourses, use recreational drugs, and the machines would provide you with everything.

Indeed.  But this comes back to a key point you made earlier:

"Think more of an AI that is a military general.  This would be advantageous since the AI general is capable of analyzing much more data much faster than any human general. If the AI general also has access to drones and ICBMs, it can also accomplish things much faster than by giving orders to human soldiers.  If either China, Russia or the US decides to make an AI general, they will have a much better general than the other superpowers.  So they are probably all working on making AI generals.  Also, why not make a fully automatic factory producing drones and controlled by the same AI?  Then the AI general can produce as many drones as it needs.  They are probably already experimenting with such systems in China.  Now let's build a few fully automatized aircraft carriers filled with tons of drones, but without any people.  Get yourself a few such aircraft carriers, and you can have the AI general waging war all by itself.  This is maybe 10 years from now."

Just the same as there are powerful incentives to make a military as smart, fast and efficient as can be to not get behind your competitors in warfare, there is very similar incentives to protect and grow your economic infrastructure.  So just as you can not trust militaries of the world to maintain proper safeguards and limitations on killer robots, you can not trust the world's civil bodies to keep proper safeguards and limitations on autonomous infrastructure.  The long term risk and the short term incentives are both dangerously high.


It is not dark at all if it just stayed that way.  It would be a utopian paradise.  The problem is only that a civilization that can produce just as much with no consumers will eventually out compete one that can produce just as much but does have consumers.

So the long term paradise is one where we live mostly hedonistic lives but still produce enough useful high level thinking beyond what machine learning can accomplish alone that it more than offsets the cost of our upkeep at a high quality of life.  Unfortunately we have no control over this -- the physical laws of our universe have preset whether or not AI can be fully better than us.  We are just waiting to find out which is the case.

That said, we probably have some control over how fast we develop technology in general, such that if we were all incompetent enough in how efficiently we pursued technological progress we might see a major natural disaster remove our ability to destroy our own future before we could fully utilize that ability.

Just wanted to say that Sam Harris published a podcast with Yuval Noah Harari today. They discuss more or less the same things as us:

https://samharris.org/podcasts/138-edge-humanity/ (https://samharris.org/podcasts/138-edge-humanity/)

Also, if you haven't already seen it, here is Bret Weinstein about the Fermi Paradox:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a66PZpSrWMQ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a66PZpSrWMQ)

We are certainly living in a very dangerous time now......

I deleted some of the story, and made a webpage about this:

https://www.archania.org/game/ (https://www.archania.org/game/)

I have changed a bit on the garbage collecting procedure:

(https://www.archania.org/game/cleaning_garbage.png)

https://www.archania.org/game/ (https://www.archania.org/game/)

I am thinking, maybe I could get the players to deliver garbage to my company, and then I could use the new chromatography columns I have developed to extract useful chemicals from the garbage.

(https://i.imgur.com/UFff07X.png)

Humanity really is fucked.....

(https://i.imgur.com/tpWfTK6.png)

And here is a graph I made to show the necessary paths I am doubting humanity will be able to implement in red:

(https://www.archania.org/game/machine_workers_and_unemployment.png)

Corporations are probably going to resist paying more taxes, and most politicians are too stuck in the old socioeconomic narrative to realize the seriousness of the situation.

https://www.archania.org/game/ (https://www.archania.org/game/)

(https://www.archania.org/game/facilitating_trust.png)

https://www.archania.org/game/#facilitating_trust (https://www.archania.org/game/#facilitating_trust)

Somebody told me that I should also give green points for planting trees:


(https://www.archania.org/game/planting_trees.png)

Maybe we could get Toys for Bob to develop this game? They should be just as capable as the studio that developed Pokémon Go.

It would be nice to have Paul Reiche III working together with Bret Weinstein and Yuval Noah Harari. If anybody has a chance of making a game to save mankind, I would bet on those 3 guys.

Here is Bret Weinstein in a new video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtPG-QH3q-A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtPG-QH3q-A)

I am a bit disappointed because Paul Reiche III didn't reply to my email where I asked him if he was interested in developing this game. So I am thinking maybe I need to do all of this by myself as usual. I have continued to develop the concept.  If people are rewarded with cryptocurrencies for saving this planet, they might be more eager to do so. If anyone of you has experience with cryptography and cryptocurrencies, I need a programmer with such skills to develop green points and orange points into cryptocurrencies. I will give 1% of all the mined cryptocurrencies and 1% of all the money used to buy these cryptocurrencies to the team that helps me develop this game.

Here is a video I made envisioning some of the aspects of how we could throw trash in an augmented reality game. The real game would, however, be much more intricate than what I showed in this video.

https://vimeo.com/294324379 (https://vimeo.com/294324379)

I I think I need some level of confidentiality for this project. So everything I write about this project from now will be in a password protected folder at:

https://www.archania.org/game/ (https://www.archania.org/game/)

I will give the moderator of this forum (Death 999) a username and password to access this folder.
 

Fair warning: I'm not helping.

Why?

The thing is. I cannot necessarily have this information openly available on the Internet. I don't expect you to do anything on the project, but I thought maybe you could give the password and username to people from here that might be interested in working on such a project.

I will give everybody access to this image:

(https://i.imgur.com/WoZV9Bk.png)

I think there should be enough people in the world that might be interested in getting a steady income of 1% of all that is mined and purchased of a new cryptocurrency. The real value of this cryptocurrency is also going to be determined partially by the quality of the game.

Anyhow. If none of you are interested, I am certainly not going to have any trouble finding other people that are interested in this other places.

Here is Russell Brand with Yuval Noah Harari:

https://www.russellbrand.com/podcast/049-yuval-noah-harari-children-ai-slaves/ (https://www.russellbrand.com/podcast/049-yuval-noah-harari-children-ai-slaves/)

Here Yuval Noah Harari on Channel 4 News:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kUPyKEOZhc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kUPyKEOZhc)

(https://www.archania.org/robots.gif)

And to all the naive individuals that think we won't get killer robots:

• Since the USA doesn't trust that Russia and China won't get them, USA feels forced to get them.
• Since China doesn't trust that USA and Russia won't get them, China feels forced to get them.
• Since Russia doesn't trust that USA and China won't get them, Russia feels forced to get them.

There is NO WAY to stop the development of killer robots unless we can make the superpowers trust each other.

Apparently you do not need to worry about most of those cases, as according to a source of information you are likely to trust:


So there will be no USA versus Russia situation soon enough. Thus, you only need be concerned with a robot conflict involving the Chinese. Progress!

Yes! Let us all join the Empire of Putin. ;)

Here is a longer animation of Atlas from Boston Dynamics in USA:

(https://www.archania.org/atlas.gif)

And here is a larger and longer animation of what we might expect soon from Russia and/or China:

(https://www.archania.org/terminator.gif)

USA donated their first nuclear bomb in 1945. Only 4 years later (in 1949) Stalin donated the first nuclear bomb in Russia. This is the problem with new weapon technologies. It is impossible to keep it to yourself forever.

Anyhow. These killer robots are going to completely transform warfare because one single individual (such as Putin) will be able to control millions or billions of these all by himself. Power has never been as concentrated as that before.

(https://www.archania.org/AI-takeover.gif)

I do not see justification for that. It could be much faster or slower, and far more lumpy.

Also, you started at zero. Some professions are already mostly handled by AI. Humans have been relegated to second-layer responders in these roles.

I doubt it is going to be much slower unless some global disaster prevents this trend from continuing. But it could be faster. It is really difficult to keep track of everything that is happening today. Also, it is probably going to happen much faster in some countries than in others. If South Korea gets completely automatized 10 years into the future, they could very well start to mass produce products to a much lower price than most other countries, and cause non-automatized companies to go bankrupt all over the world.

(https://ifr.org/img/uploads/Robot_density_by_country_page_1.jpg)

According to my calculations, South Korea should have about 2500 industrial robots per 10 000 employees in 2029, and about 10 000 industrial robots per 10 000 employees in 2039, if they increase the number of industrial robots by 15% each year.

(https://i.imgur.com/HFtvKK7.png)

The exponential growth of technological advancement seems to have been going on for at least 100 000 years:

(https://www.archania.org/governance/exponential_growth_technology.png)

Why do I get a popup that Archania is aksing me for a password, when I visit this site?

(And the warning includes a warning that the password entered will not go to the site visited (uqm.stack.nl) but to archania.org....)

Can you please modify the behaviour of the host of the linked images, Zanthius?

I think it would be best if a moderator deleted that post. I cannot modify or delete myself, because it is too old.

PM me a link to the exact post so I can delete it. I don't want to guess which one(s) you mean.

It's not happening today, and even then I could not pinpoint which post caused this. It happened on pages 4 and 5 of this thrad, but as I write, right now it's not happening...

I estimate a global disruption between 2025 and 2035:

(https://www.archania.org/governance/estimated_time_for_global_disruption.png)

(https://i.imgur.com/CmQNlSm.jpg)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TRcx-btcle4 (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TRcx-btcle4)

Perfect summary. ;D

Of all these social engineering threads, honestly.