A historical anecdote I think about a lot is Seneca recounting his visit to the games. In usual Seneca fashion he has stuffy chud things to say about the normies but you can really tell how deeply horrified he was by the violence. It feels like such a shockingly modern outlook.
"Granted that, as a murderer, he deserved this punishment, what crime have you committed, poor fellow, that you should deserve to sit and see this show?"
What are people still getting math PhDs even doing? Don't they know ASI is going to make everyone obsolete? They should drop out of their comfy campus life so they can spend the last 2 years of dwindling human importance competing for entry level jobs.
99% Chance: We are alone and the drake equation is just way too optimistic
1% Chance: Reversible computing or some other quirky Free Lunch physics exploit is real and the need for dyson spheres or galaxy consuming von neuman probes are completely obviated by it.
You see a regular argument on here about how AI won't cause a jobpocalypse because humans will always be needed for accountability/legal liabilities. Idk man, we let the self driving cars merge onto the highway with babies on board, I think we will let AI do insurance adjusting.
The datarepublican EA tracker is what the future of privacy looks like: Security Through Obscurity will not exist. For $0.01usd, an AI will track every piece of public information about you with the kind of meticulousness that is usually reserved for terrorists or chris-chan
The reasons for openai sitting on solved math questions are pretty spurious imo and its looks more like openaI trying to appease an influential guild than anything else, but this is just the start of a larger trend where frontier labs sit on massive discoveries across all fields.
I'm not particularly against this, if AI starts pumping out clarketech then there is a strong argument for selective withholding (to avoid something like Stross's Singularity Sky), but there are the obvious concerns here about small groups hoarding the frontiers of knowledge.
As some on here are speculating, this may already be happening with openai hoarding a p=np solution for cryptographic security reasons but thats way beyond me.