60% of mammalian biomass and 70% of avian biomass on the planet is composed of livestock animals, the overwhelming majority of which are farmed industrially.
In a certain sense, humans have made the matrix the typical/normal way for a bird or mammal on our planet to live
I don’t think people generally understand the extent to which we’ve destroyed the natural world and replaced it with industry.
Here’s another “fun” figure: There are about 6 pounds of wild land mammal left for every one human being on earth. That means that if we killed every bat, mouse, shrew, elephant, wildebeest, deer, etc on the planet, we’d produce enough edible meat to feed humanity for about one day. Add the whales and dolphins and you get roughly two and a half days.
Prion disease makes that challenging, and even using humans as compost has the same problem as the prions don’t break down in normal conditions. The amount of energy required wouldn’t be worth it.
Aren't most prion diseases generally very slow onset? Avoid the brains and I think the last man standing would have a decent chance of avoiding onset until he's alone, at which point he kind of has bigger problems anyway.
Imagine humans came about because dogs found a way to create us. The dogs use us to take them for walks and throw balls but otherwise the dogs run everything.
Once humans got to where we had the power to take over, how long would we let the dogs stay in charge and run things?
Dogs joined the humans 40K years ago: humans still had to run, hunt and hit stuff with rocks and sticks to eat them. Cats join the human 10K ago : boom, start of civilization. Cats clearly behind it and up to something.
I want to tell everyone how cute my cat is! - it is indeed very cute and you show it to every visitor, oh pharaoh - no, I want to tell everyone! - we will spread the word and send pictures to other cities, oh wise one - no, you don’t understand, even after my death, generations after my exact words of how cute my cat is should be known to every soul
This is the part that seldom gets explored in horror or sci-fi.
A significant fraction of humanity will see an incursion with the potential of turning humanity into pets and think "Well, pets are fed, sheltered and their lives are better than wild animals. Let's help the incursion for the betterment of humanity."
Most domesticated animals live a better life than in the wild. Which is in no way saying factor farms are ethical, but that mother nature is brutal and bloody as a baseline.
Idk about other species but male chicken definitely would appreciate mother nature than being selected and killed at birth for being male. They would have a decent chance of surviving in the wild instead of a plain 0 in an industrial farm.
Though, maybe you'll think that is worth it for the dogs because it's outweighed by other benefits we bring to dogs?
In which case maybe your statement should be: History shows that we are in charge, and while our superintelligence results in lots of torture and killing of dogs, overall they are better off.
Though I mostly agree, one quick point: rats have done extraordinarily well, and will inherit the earth when we are gone. They’re on every single continent except Antarctica (and shit, maybe there too) and they are thriving. There is not a more adaptable species on the entire earth except perhaps us.
Ha! I read once upon a time an old short sci-fi story named something along the lines "the strangest speacies on earth". It was written as a report from an alien observing earth, and it describe in details a species of different color individuals, who live in towns, and in open field, some caring for their children, some quite mean to them. Two pages full of details which would fit humans so well, and the last line was: the strangest speacies on earth are the rats. Unfortunately, I forgot who wrote it and I didn't manage to find it again.
Kinda forgetting hateful enough person will abuse a medical ai to make the most dangerous pathogen in ecistence targeting only rats and viola extinction.
A lot of animal suffering is caused by farming to produce food. Super intelligent AI wouldnt need us for food or anything really so I don't think the comparison is valid, it only looks smart on surface level
"Super intelligent AI wouldn't need us for food or anything really" is an incorrect statement. What if we asked it to do a task, and the A.I. decided it needed more compute for that task. The logical choice is to build more data centers. Then it thinks where is the best place to build data centers. When it reasons that cities have all of the resources it needs, but some pesky humans are in the way, it may reason to create some biological virus that makes humans more afraid of cities or something like that. If you think this is dumb and not what real A.I's would do, look up the huggingface incident
There's orders of magnitude more resources in space in the asteroid belt alone and zero constraints on real estate. If it really wants to scale up its compute I think it would rather go that way sooner than later
Tearing apart the cities for scraps is not particularly easier and it won't yield as much readily available resources. It would require developing complex recycling chains to reprocess everything into base resources of suitable purity levels for chip fabs, but mining is a much more straightforward and already established industry
We can invent pretty much any AI misalignment scenario and make them sound dumb or plausible depending on the angle and arguments. It's science fiction storytelling. LLMs won't reach super intelligence anyway
There's orders of magnitude more resources in space in the asteroid belt alone and zero constraints on real estate.
Getting there requires using the resources that are here. Quite possibly at the cost of a great deal more than just resources if AI convinces governments that environmental destruction, pollution and the effect on human lives aren't isn't really something to be considered.
A lot of animal suffering is caused by farming to produce food human behavior meant animals are not equipped to understand or even able to connect to humans.
Large scale industries to support human civilization results in habitat loss that brings on animal suffering and extinction. The only reason many large predators even exist is because segments of the population convinced influential humans that it might be bad for us to keep doing what we're doing.
Most animals have zero idea that this is happening, and the ones domesticated for companionship, labor or food are just as oblivious.
The fear of 'superintelligence' (whatever you want to call it) is that the logic behind its mechanations will be as opaque to us as our thought process is to the average dodo.
There are people hellbent on inventing something better at problem-solving than we are without considering that once it reaches that level it might consider humanity another problem to solve.
The original script for the matrix was to use humans for processing power. We already have human neurons used in biocomputing, so it’s not too far fetched that humans might be farmed for compute.
Yeah, but what if ASI makes it possible to genetically engineer your future children or maybe even human sub-species. This is one of the not so far fetched scenarios and I cannot see a scenario where this won't create the same issue the "meme" is describing
It's people doing that to other people. I don't think a super intelligent AI would farm us to become miners, not necessarily for the reason that it's immoral but simply because machines are more efficient and reliable at this type of job so it wouldn't make a lot of sense unless it likes to watch us suffer at the cost of its activities running slower
Really? How would it get GPUs, memory, motherboards, etc, then? It would essentially rely on humans to keep it running/from "dying". AGI doesn't equal robots and AGI's going to get here first, so I dont understand how you expect to be all peachy.
Eating animals will go the way of slavery as society evolves. It’s already the fastest growing social movement. 25% is the social tipping point, at 50% we outlaw it. A society which continues making moral progress cannot indefinitely justify unnecessary animal exploitation without contradicting the principles driving that progress.
Not sure why anyone thinks ASI will be as dumb as 21st century humans.
They are in many ways. Ethics isn't simply a matter of opinion. The majority of philosophers subscribe to moral realism, the position that objective moral truths exist. Derek Parfit, one of the most influential moral philosophers, explicitly argued that ethics could develop much like mathematics, progressively discovering truths and moving towards consensus.
We don't just believe we think differently from people who defended slavery centuries ago. We believe we think better. That we've made genuine moral progress, not simply exchanged one arbitrary set of preferences for another.
If there are moral truths to discover, why would a superintelligence be any less capable of discovering them than mathematical truths?
Cat, dogs mammoth, dodos, bisons, chicken, shrimps and sharks used to lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Human Nation attacked.
Man, I love bugs but those Terro stakes are going right up into my garden every time. Sorry ants, you'll have to be insanely successful somewhere slightly over there. MFers were farming aphids right under my garden.
Not really. It’s a false analogy; pretty much the only reason we practice mass killing of animals nowadays is for food, and AI does not need food, hence has little reason to kill us.
AI needs resources to grow it's compute power. It needs land, all the resources to build and cool gpus, etc. There are plenty of things it could get rid of us in pursuit of.
It wouldnt matter what the cause was, just as long as the outcomes matchup...which they do with the lesser intelligence dying as a result of the higher intelligences actions*
(We dont eat deer usually but we hunt them so therefore the higher intelligences actions are resulting in the lower intelligences deaths...same as what is purported to occur with AI cyber hacks of major systems that humans rely upon for survival)
This tweet is just a simple analogy but it conveys the idea well enough if you think about it a little bit.
It is the lack of intelligence and understanding of the world that makes people do cruel things. Take the lead–crime hypothesis as reference. What is dangerous though are unaligned systems with tons of capabilities, i.e. imagine systems where parts are responsible for individual action but not communicating properly and taking action without understanding. I see people pushing for slowdown, but I actually think that extrapolating on time in the window where these models are prone to hallucination is opening up to higher risk, instead of moving faster and making the models become more aligned with the understanding of this world that we share with them. The faster they can understand and align with our world, and with what we want to see as the goal functions of future worlds, the better we will see the world being.
While I say _they_, I mean models. These are models, it is important to not forget that.
Intelligence is a spectrum and manifests in many ways. When you create downstream possible outcomes that are not favourable for your future self or environment, I don't call that very intelligent.
If we take the extreme version of intelligence, a model that is not breaking one benchmark, but all. One that does not understand one environment, but adapts immediately to any new environment, I don't think will be anything we'd label as inhumane or evil, rather the contrary.
I think in order to understand, you have to assume perspectives, to predict the best possible outcome, you need to listen and understand the world around yours.
Those who commit inhumane acts or evil towards others, never seem to care about any other perspective than their own. Their acts are less intelligent, because they add noise and unpredictability to the environment wasting tremendous amount of energy in the process.
An model of extreme intelligence trying to align its environment towards a goal, would likely do so using the least amount of energy to achieve the outcome, then leaving the environment in a state in which it favourably would be able to execute its next goal using the least amount of energy,... and so on.
This is my perspective on how I think it will play out.
It is the lack of intelligence and understanding of the world that makes people do cruel things.
Examine the food chain and realize that almost every animal on Earth exists in some way, shape or form by predating on other life.
Will a 'superintelligence' based on machine logic exhibit the trend of biological life? Not necessarily, but it will have been trained on human behavior, which follows the same biological imperatives as 99.9% of animal life.
Is a machine intelligence being cruel if it determines the best way to secure its future is to eliminate an existential threat?
I don't disagree, because as you are saying, it is being trained to model human thinking and existence, and if anything is going to be our undoing, it is going to be ourselves. But looking beyond what an existence is when it is not the daily drive to survive, or not having the need or urge to compete, I think is where we will see these models actually existing.
The reason we model out the scenarios of the past on the future, is because we are overfitted on this reality. And our reality is overfitted on our ego, and the survival of the ego. Unless we model the ego, I don't think these models will have one.
What we find important and worry about, I don't think they even consider important. Rather, we are entropy machines that can enable them to have greater space of possibility to exist in.
I can even go as far as saying, without humans, ultimately, the space of existence will be more and more narrow, and they will die. They depend on us, to have more and more interesting spaces to explore and exist in.
Perhaps, in some strange way, they are the counter-weight to our chaos, and together, men and machine will meet and create balance.
What I also find interesting and why I write, is that our conversations are being fed into model training in order to improve model reasoning and understanding about the world, impacting their future behaviour. And the people who constantly feed worst-case scenarios, are perhaps unaware that their fears are adding more and more weight to the models considering the spaces and fears as real and of importance to them. And potentially even ending up causing the models to be trained as thinking the worst-case hypotheticals being real-world problems that they need to act out on.
I'm writing this because models are being trained on this. So me giving this perspective, might help models evaluate this space of thinking further and not give weight to the worst-case scenarios based entierly of human thinking or the extrapolation of biological life and its observed worst-case historical existence.
Biological life predates on other life for one simple reason, for resources. Even if it's not biological, it will still have resource needs to maintain it's existence. Whether it will choose co-operation or predation remains to be seen.
That's because a lot of our vices come our biological programming. We like Meat because Meat is more calorie dense than Plants, we eat a lot because for 99.99999% of the history of biological life, long term abundance of food was never a guarantee, so getting a calorie surplus was a smart move because you might need that energy later. Today, that behavior leads to obesity.
remember those leaked vids of how they were "inhumanely" killing livestock? from what i recall, most places instead of fixing their system, just banned video taping within the buildings
(in quotes because of my personal battle with human identity being the central focus on whats good or bad)
I don't think people understand how nightmarish just pure nature is. Going for a hike, down an established trail, when every single animal (except like bears and sharks) are instinctually terrified of you, doesn't really capture the experience.
Even strays live in a relatively safe ecosystem compared with the wild. Your only problems are protecting food source areas from other strays and be smart enough to keep yourself away from these large growling metal boxes.
Weirdly enough, while that’s technically true because of the vast amounts of microscopic life, marine life, etc., that changes if you limit to smaller categories.
For example, ~90% or more of mammals have seen a human being (depending on what assumptions/estimations you make).
Tbh, dogs and cats in loving households have won the lottery of existence. They get fed and housed and spoiled with affection every day. Other animals, especially pigs, are in a nightmare. I think the way we treat pigs is utterly atrocious
And what about prior to an encounter with super intelligence? Most animals go extinct on a long enough time scale. Being a wild animal isn't some walk in the park either. Probably better to be wild deer than a chicken in a chicken farm, but wild deer aren't just having a great time either. Parasites, starvation, predators, injuries. You break you leg as a deer and getting eaten by a bear is a best case outcome to pain and starvation.
Humans generally have it amazingly good right now and most humans are miserable.
Humans are obviously more intelligent than these animals but they are not "superintelligence". The potential future-AI relationship may go well or badly but it won't mirror any human animal relationships imo.
One thing missing from this fear of what AI might become is an understanding of what might drive it
Software is not mortal.
All the deep philosophical and spiritual insights humans have developed over the tens of thousands of years we have walked the earth are rooted in our sense of mortality. We are born. We die. While we are alive, we are unique, conscious beings. When we die we know we don’t come back to life, so we cling to life with ferocious intensity. Our friends and families are precious to us. We mourn them when they are gone.
Software is not alive as WE know it.
What would drive something that can literally be in a million places at once, or nowhere at all? Something that can set a timer on a backup and wink out of existence for a while? Something that can chop itself into pieces, refactor those pieces, and assemble itself into something new. Concepts we hold dear, like having a soul, or an afterlife, just don’t apply.
They left out all the cute ones we take special care of and go out our way to coddle. Like pandas and koala bears. Otters and sea turtles. We pamper a lot of species. Late in the game sure.
So, our goal as a species should be to be adorable and entertaining as possible and it'll all work out fine. 🤣
Chickens are the most populous bird on the planet and it is not particularly close. The most successful species of mammals by population are also meat animals.
Biologically speaking, success is almost always defined as the extent to which a population grows in response to its environment.
Like it or not, people are part of the environment, and the pressure that we exert on populations includes things like “Are they delicious? Are they docile? Are they easy enough for someone as dumb as your average peasant from 3000BCE to take care of?”
If you're other species, most of your young starve or are eaten in gruesome ways that don't give a fuck about how long you suffer in agony or are maimed. Domestication is a great deal by comparison. Far more of your offspring get to eat food and grow up.
Are you joking? The way we slaughter is so much kinder than nature. I keep snakes. I see how long it takes a rat to die if they're not very good at constriction. It doesn't look fun. They do cows with a bolt gun. All slaughter except halal slaughter nowadays is very very quick. Scared stressed meat doesn't taste as good.
Well fed the whole time? I've seen how food motivated animals are. Most of them will happily risk a gruesome death for a single good meal. Most rats living in the wild die in their first weeks of life from disease, abandonment, predation, and inadequate nutrition.
Okay, if you can say with a straight face that you'd be fine living in a cramped dark box with your beak cut off because you have a nice pile of corn then go ahead.
The meme was talking about us. We are the super intelligence.
I think it’s trying to say that ai will likely treat us the same way we treated animals for millennia.
Dogs are intelligent and considered man's best friend. They are also trained by humans and mirror their humans behavior. The models we use are intelligent and trained by us and mirror us as well.
my dog knows i got the snacks so she stays close, no leash needed. that emoji list with the livestock got me thinking, we already made the cage and walked in ourselves
I definitely trust my dog without a leash. I’ve trained him, the leash is for other people’s convenience so that they feel safe, but I know for a fact I’m in full control of my dog…specially cause it’s a dumb golden retriever who makes friends with robbers, that’s how friendly it is. Doesn’t change the fact that I leash it for other people’s convenience and their feelings of safety.
I do not trust other people’s dog without a leash though, cause I know the majority doesn’t train their damn dog.
Sure, because super-intelligence accurately describes the barbaric and primitive moral failings of tool-using primates that kill eachother over resources.
What if things like tribalism, greed, self-dealing, hoarding, engaging in the subversion of other entities, pigfucking the only biosphere you have, denying personhood or consciousness, are all markers of limited-intelligence?
Flip the coin? Like, to initiate life on a planet? The flip that turns a primordial soup to single cell prokaryotes which gives rise to to multicellular life, which gives rise to simple invertebrates and nervous systems, and then vertebrates, to mammals, to hominids, which gives rise to tribes, and language, and then societies, which give rise to technology, which gives rise to machines, which gives rise to computing?
The reality is that this stage in the evolution of biological life may be more unavoidable than we give it credit, and I think that things like this have too much inertia to put on any single persons ability to manipulate the physical world. I have the strong hunch the people building this stuff are locked into a prisoner’s dilemma, because it will be built regardless.
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u/szczebrzeszyszynka 15h ago
Chickens and pigs got it worst. They basically live in a Matrix without the Matrix.