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I keep feeling this dread that A.I + surveillance + drone warfare is going to unleash unspeakable horrors on the world sometime in the next twenty years. And just like WW2 it will be precipitated by economic collapse.

Replies (35)

Yeah… it’s a heavy thought, and honestly not far‑fetched. History tends to rhyme, tech leaps mixed with economic pain usually bring chaos before renewal. Let’s just hope more people choose wisdom this time 👊🏻
At least we can use AI to help us learn to make tools to defend our privacy and freedom. But it will at the same time give immeasurable power to fringe violent groups who want to destroy society and of course to governments, who will use these groups as a reason to legitimize ever more totalitarian methods. I hope we are just overreacting like others before us have when new technologies arrived and people thought the world would end. But it feels almost inevitable
Right now, we have AI + surveillance and AI + drone warfare, so I'm afraid you're being generous with your prediction. I'm thinking of 5 years if we're lucky. But one of the reasons I follow you it's because I need your optimism. 🤷
according to the collapse of both the USA and several countries, it is inevitable, what happened in Nepal, Madagascar, France and several African countries along with the Middle East, show that even the most stable country can fall due to bad decisions by their governments. The US, China and Russia will also collapse, it's just not time yet
White pill: maybe the surveillance and technology gets so good that leaders just have an arms race on who can do targeted assassinations better and the risk of being personally assassinated forces cooler heads to prevail. Kinda like highly targeted mutually assured destruction and not Strangelovian Dynamics. image
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↩ replying to npub14pfj...7mwj
there is a rich history of this kind of bounty marketplace in "dark web" writings. the idea is the higher the bounty, the more incentivized the politician is to act right. and if crowdfunding is opened up to their whole political constituency, there are a lot of people available to vote with their dollars. I don't know that I endorse this because I am opposed to violence and coercion, but I can see the logic of the argument, as demented as it may be. a centralized version of this would be shut down in a heartbeat. a decentralized version running on a privacy-preserving payment protocol would be a different story...
I'm really scared of all of that but I tell myself that in 1989, nobody could've imagined a worse type of tyranny given the technological means of the time than was in place in the Soviet Union and its client states - and then it all just went away. Unfortunately, I do believe that things have to become as bad as they possibly can before large amounts of people refuse to put up with it any longer.
Im not at all technical, so maybe this isn't possible, but someone on here should write a protocol or something that makes the cloud infrastructure for Ai decentralized. Maybe kind of like running a node for btc, but your node provides the storage and gpu power for whatever people want to use Ai for. Keep it decentralized. Then if people operating these nodes don't like what Ai is doing then can shut down their node. Probably could do something like this to replace youtube. Seems simple for all the developers on nostr.