“AI will kill us all.”
Or maybe it won't.
I was about to say round 1 went to the weekend doomsday camp. A pretty good psyops campaign. But then the market yawned and said full steam ahead.
The cat is out of the bag. AI is going to progress. Some politicians will continue their games. Bernie will stick to it... I mean seriously, what else has he got at this point?
But let's talk Elon Musk for a second.
Elon was one of the first to realize that, yea, AI could in fact kill us all. He has been sounding the alarm about that for about a decade.
In fact, that concern was one of the reasons he helped found OpenAI. Did we all forget about that?
You know, actual open AI for the good of humanity, before the organization went in a very different direction (Sam, the conman, stole it away when Elon wasn't looking, to be more direct.)
Elon eventually reached the obvious conclusion: OpenAI wasn't going to be the solution.
So what do you do?
Build a bigger, better and faster cat.
There were plenty of people saying, “Oh, Elon has given up,” when it didn't look like xAI was going to win.
Elon never had that thought.
When he regrouped and merged xAI with SpaceX, that was the signal. He's going hard.
Building the biggest cat, the better cat and the fastest cat is the game.
Because better isn't good enough. It must be big and fast.
If another AI becomes dangerous, you want an AI capable of recognizing it, understanding what it is doing and fighting back.
You want the cat to be bigger than the other cats. You want it to be faster. You want eyes everywhere.
And then there's the last piece of the puzzle:
Imagine one of those bad cats is in your house. Running in your data center. Yea. You can flip the off switch.
Here's the thing about Elon:
He likes humans. He wants humans to survive.
He even wants humans to get off Earth so that, if we're just the mice, the cat might not be able to get to us.
His goals are noble. And he is a worrier about us little mice.
Grok 4.6-> 4.7-> 4.8-> 4.9-> 5.0 and Starmind. That's the cat, a lion to be specific, the king of the jungle.
The critical density of the universe is the average density at which spacetime is flat
It just so happens that a black hole the size of the observable universe has exactly the same density as the critical density for a universe with flat spacetime
Another coincidence is that as far as we can tell a black hole is the computationally most dense object possible, the ultimate computer
Now we look out and say 'gee whiz I dont see many Dyson spheres, we must be the only intelligent species because *obviously* surrounding a star with solar panels is the *best possible way* of creating a super computer'
this is retarded, obviously - a black hole is not just the ultimate computer but the ultimate heat engine, something that converts mass directly to energy via Hawking radiation
Face it - we are late to the game. Most of the stars that will ever form have already formed. There are civilizations billions of years older than us, engineering megastructures that look like active galactic nuclei, quasars, etc.
Almost all the entropy in the universe is inside black holes, on the far side of an event horizon.
The galaxy is absolutely littered with black holes. Supercomputers. New universes. Inside, expanding regions of flat spacetime that originate at a singular beginning, just like our universe.
You live in a computer.