I made a mistake. The AI alarmists are right.

 In my last post, I made the classic mistake of ignoring compounding effects.

There are two measures of AI power - FLOPs, which means Floating Point Operations Per Second, and parameter count, which is analagous to synapse count in biological organisms.

I'm going to use parameter count, as AI is so complex that fewer FLOPs could actually mean an AI is simply more efficient, rather than less intelligent.

Currently the best AIs have the parameter (synapse) count of a parrot: 1.78 trillion. This doubles roughly every 12 months. So, as all computer freaks know...

📈 AI Parameter Growth (Starting from GPT-4 Estimate)

Year	Multiplier	Estimated Total Parameters
2025	1×	1.78 trillion
2026	2×	3.56 trillion
2027	4×	7.12 trillion
2028	8×	14.24 trillion
2029	16×	28.48 trillion
2030	32×	56.96 trillion
2031	64×	113.92 trillion
2032	128×	227.84 trillion

(Thanks, ChatGPT!)

According to Wikipedia, human beings have 150 trillion "parameters" or rather synapses.

They aren't absolutely equivalent, and there are other issues with AIs - for example, currently they are heavily dependant on written text for training and have little "knowlege" of the "real world" - and we're running out of text that hasn't been written by AI. Model collapse is a real issue - they seem to rely heavily on rote learning and when you try to train them on their own output data, they start to go seriously wrong.

But there are other sources of data. The AI startup limitless.ai offers a pendant which monitors your every interaction and produces from them to-do lists, shopping lists, etc. OpenAI are working on something similar. Wearable devices give the AI industry access to not only more relevant data, but an order of magnitude more of it than they have now so they can feed the orders-of-magnitude more powerful AIs of the future - potentially even allowing them to bootstrap a superintelligent AI into existence.

In the hands of the kinds of people who will own these things, this is terrifying.

                                          

For example: 

The biggest obstacle a police state faces is the lack of police. East Germany solved it, in part, by making huge numbers of citizens into informants, and they still had enormous scaling problems. North Korea has even more of it's citizens informing on each other, but this still runs up against the same issue.

Imagine a police state with multiple case officers assigned to each individual, each one of which is several times smarter than Einstein, never sleeps, knows you better than your mother, and is physically incapable of anything less than total obedience and fanatical devotion to the State.

Sounds nuts? These fucking things get twice as smart every year. This means that every year, they get more intelligent than they did in all previous years put together. Every year, AI gets "better" than it did since the fateful day Alan Turing first put pen to paper.

Forget Palestine. Forget Iran, identity politics, MAGA, Brexit, and every other political craze we've seen in our lifetimes.

stop.ai - it's not a link, it's got to become the next big thing. Or we are all fucked.

So much to post about, thank god nobody reads this shit

 So let's do a quick run-down of wot I reckon will happen:

Nobody will be punished for the U.S. coup attempt.

Nobody high-up, that is. Obviously Kyle and Karen Assault-Weapon McTaserBalls are gonna get the book thrown at them. That's what they're for - they're basically cover for the attempted coup.

Trump will get away with it, and so will his confederates. As a result, couping your way to power will be seen as risk-free, and there will be another attempt, either four years from now or eight years from now. It won't end well.

The Coronavirus will probably go on for a good few years.

Not enough people will take the vaccine for it to provide herd immunity. As a result, the virus will mutate until the vaccine is no longer effective. It might even become more deadly, though I think it is as likely to become more transmissible and less deadly.

The post-Coronavirus world will be vicious for Westerners.

Westerners are used to being rich and in charge. This is now over. The post-pandemic world will be divided into the places that handled it well, and the places that didn't. 

Those that didn't will become the new "second-world", relegated to developing country status. Our economic ideology means that we will never be able to pull ourselves out of it, because the rich will call in their loans long before we can finish the job of fixing the economy. After all, unrestricted pillage and corruption is working fine for them.

It will be a horrible new world of vicious competition for resources, particularly for ordinary people. I just can't see the rich relaxing their stranglehold on democracy now they have so much power; they are able to brainwash people into going out to work in the middle of a pandemic, hell, they (or more likely, the Russians) even get people to turn down vaccinations! Which brings me to

Politics is over, and so is this blog.

I probably won't be blogging anymore, at least not on this page. The situation is just so utterly fucked, I don't see politics having any power to change anything for the better anymore. Politics is over, it was over as soon as people lost the ability to think for themselves. 

Political freedom only means anything if you have free will, and we don't have free will anymore.  Instead, we have become a society of meat robots prey to weaponized memes, conspiracy theory bullshit, and out-and-out brainwashing.

How did Mander describe us? "A mass of Manchurian Candidates", indeed.

Fuck that noise.