[nostrademons]

> The Skynet stock rallies.

Interestingly, a lot of people are looking at LLMs or automated drones as "AI", but I think that capitalism is a better contender. It's a self-healing, self-organizing system that has its own logic and seems to have escaped the desires of its human creators. It treats individual firms as the cells within it, individual humans as its DNA molecules, and it even has a form of tissue differentiation via industries. All efforts to shut it off, even through widespread warfare and "tissue" (i.e. human) death, fail, resulting in it becoming even more entrenched.

There's this heavily anthropocentric idea of intelligence that it will look like us, talk like us, and operate on the same scale as us, but it's highly likely that the next layer of intelligence will operate on a much higher level than us, and our intelligence will be to it as DNA replication is to ourselves.

[GolfPopper]

SF author Charlie Stross delved into this a few years ago:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...

[CalRobert]

“. If I predict that in 2027 LTE cellular phones will be everywhere, 5G will be available for high bandwidth applications, and fallback to satellite data service will be available at a price, you won't laugh at me. It's not like I'm predicting that airliners will fly slower and Nazis will take over the United States, is it?”

[Alpha3031]

> escaped the desires of its human creators

I wonder if we will ever solve the corporate-superorganism-alignment problem and why the AI alignment people rarely (as far as I can tell anyway, though I admit I'm not in the field) talk about it considering it (complicated multi-human systems) does seem to be about as good as a model organism as we can get before we actually have AI to align.

[trencedamp]

We can't solve that problem because we're all trapped by it. There's about as much chance of cows solving the problem of being human food

[Alpha3031]

Previous changes to society were also made by people within society so I don't see how that follows.

[ozim]

But we already embraced this way of thinking since introduction of „corporate personhood”.

[ghaff]

One can disagree about aspects of corporate financing of elections etc. while also accepting that everything doesn't get thrown up in the air if a corporate officer leaves for another company. Corporations are established entities that effectively act as a person for certain purposes--though one is welcome to disagree about the extent of those purposes. I expect most people here wouldn't, for example, be opposed to corporations donating to open source projects or other charitable causes.

[ozim]

There is a world of difference between supporting open source software or any pro bono foundation

and

supporting election candidacy.

I think a 2yo will get the distinction and you are asking for clarification?

Besides that go read up on 80’s literature on corporations. Like Gibson or Stephenson.

[idiotsecant]

This is a strawman. Why do you have to be a person to donate to charities?

[ghaff]

Corporations donate to 501(c)3s as entities and even have matching gifts. In fact, a lot of charities have corporations/foundations as some of their largest contributors.

[ChaitanyaSai]

> self-healing self-organizing system that has its own logic

Great way to to put and it seems to be the gradient for all biological intelligence. Compete until you figure out cooperation and communication. Communication glues together intelligent entities into systems where the systems take on a life and agency of their own. In our case it was language gluing us together first into tribes, shared stories into culture.

You might enjoy our book https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60500189-journey-of-t...

Also, nostrademons, your "name" is one of the few I recognize here on HN as there's usually something interesting and you weave it into words so well. Thanks!

[throwaway27448]

I 100% agree that skynet is most satisfying when read a metaphor for the market. I was extremely surprised with the rise of LLMs that so many people took the threat of AI as literal.

[palmotea]

> but I think that capitalism is a better contender. It's a self-healing, self-organizing system that has its own logic and seems to have escaped the desires of its human creators.

Except capitalism is an ideology not a system. And I think (in its current form) it serves the desires of some of its human "creators," while failing many, many others. Those creators then fund huge amounts of propaganda to indoctrinate adherents to sustain its dysfunctions.

[phs318u]

> capitalism is a better contender. It's a self-healing, self-organizing system that has its own logic and seems to have escaped the desires of its human creators. It treats individual firms as the cells within it, individual humans as its DNA molecules, and it even has a form of tissue differentiation via industries

This is not a new idea. Howard Bloom (author of The Lucifer Principle [0]) developed the idea that among intelligeng beings "memetic evolution" > "genetic evolution" i.e. the unit of selection is the "idea" as expressed in social/political groupings. In this view of the world, the survival of individuals are less important than the survival of the "group concept" (not the set of genes i.e. the tribal "badge" > the tribal genes). e.g. Judaism, mercantilism, Catholicism, free-market capitalism etc etc.

Definitely worth a read.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucifer_Principle