https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence

Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving.

LLMs are pretty capable of abstraction and understanding.

Though they obviously use logic in that they are constructed from/of it, they are not really capable of actual logical analysis, beyond emulating it.

They can’t really do any of the other attributes of intelligence at all, beyond basically decently to poorly emulating them.

Anyone who buys into this deserves the financial ruin that will so obviously happen to them.

Right as the White House is saying that the US does support a ceasefire ‘when it is practical to do so.’

Well even then, if you actually looked into this sort of thing, its been obvious for a while.

Historically, as studied by anthropologists, historians, sociologists, its been known for a while that civilizations collapse due to:

Massive Famines

Unexpected Broad, Rapid Climate Shifts

Massive Internal Political/Civil Unrest

Foreign Invasion

Massive Plagues

Insulated Ruling Class making absurd decisions to maintain their own power at the cost of the actual stability of their society

Collapse of Vital Trade Routes

Neglect and Failure of Vital Infrastructure

Financialization of the Economy, writ large

…

Now sometimes it can be just one of these, but usually its a few.

Most current societies/nation states are currently experiencing or will very soon be facing nearly all of these combined.

I suggest you read John Michael Greer’s Catabolic Collapse book or watch some of the videos about it for an overview of the basic idea that complex societies tend to respond to crises by becoming more complex, which is the exact opposite of what you would want to do from a big picture, hindsight perspective, but is more or less unavoidable due to human psychology and socio/political/economic dynamics of human organized societies.

…

You are right that the vast majority of people will be surprised by the speed of collapse, logarithmic vs linear basically.

But the people who have been in charge of our societies either did, do, or should know or should have known about this.

Yep. The fundamental problem has actually always been that you cannot support the current number of living human beings at their current standard of living without petrochemical fertilizers.

Theoretically if we had globally embarked on some kind of mass agricultural campaign to entirely restructure the food production and global distribution mechanism starting maybe 30 or 20 years ago, we might have stood a chance.

But that never would have happened anyway. Too many people would have had their livelihoods ruined and/or their standard of living decreased to the point theyd revolt or politically prevent this from happening.

Oh well I guess, good luck with the next few decades everyone, its only going to get worse.

Yep, they all go together and all rapidly escalate and compound upon each other.

No you cannot predict /exactly/ what will happen.

But you can look at any analogous situation of a civilization collapse historically and combine that with a basic knowledge of modern political science and economics and a bit of psychology to understand that shit will get so bad that no government, corporation, ngo, your favorite trillionaire or political ideology will be able to stop the downward spiral.

Im educated guessing there will be hundreds of millions of migrating climate refugees in this decade, followed by basically social unrest nearly everywhere, followed by governments becoming more authoritarian and war like, again, basically everywhere.

Except its not a black swan at all. We absolutely knew this was possible, was coming, is now here.

The corporate neofeudalism century, same as the rest of us.

Dude looks like a somehow even more evil version of Dr. Phil.

I dont really know what to say other than, no, historically we are very, very good at accidentally /as well as intentionally/ setting off metaphorical powder kegs, in situations where large segments of the population believes in the inherent stability of society, either ignorant of or in spite of actual history.

Specifically in regards to cold war era nuclear weapons… beyond the cuban missile crisis having, very, very easily gone out of control, take some time and look up the numerous instances where, due to basically either an overzealous command being issued, or a rational decision being made with imperfect information led to an actual order to use a nuclear weapon that was actually stymied by a single individual disobeying a direct command.

Or look at the numerous instances that basically a mechanical failure, intelligence failure, maintenance failure, something like that, led to a nuclear weapon basically being accidentally used, where it was basically down to dumb luck that further failures, or heroic actions from unsung heroes, prevented a nuclear blast from going off that could have easily spiraled into a full fledged nuclear exchange.

But more to the actual point of discussion: Saying that nukes exist and we have not obliterated each other yet, so that implies that a totally different scenario with totally different relevant factors at play is not likely to result in a mass armed civil conflict of some kind… thats basically not even a useful analogy.

EDIT: also for what its worth, im not the one who downvoted you. I generally only downvote people who are extremely abusive or very obviously unable to actually understand the words people say and then also refuse to understand them when explained another way, things like that, at least in the context of fairly serious and complex topic like this.

I actually think its more important that people be able to have a genuine discussion involving disagreement, and also for others to view such discussions, than it is to be angry and downvote some words i dont agree with, but seem to be written in good faith.

Welp, Im a 34 year old man whose misspent and regretable couple of youthful years on 4chan basically scarred me for fucking life.

And I fell into the age old 4chanesque assumption that you were another current or former anon.

At least I can be honest about it, I guess.

embarrassing

Totally off topic but… dear god… HotDogFingies?

Thats like… NuggieMuncher 9000 or NoWaifuMeCryfu.

Best of luck on the intermet, uh, fren.

Yes, I am aware of all of this.

Here’s the crux of your argument:

There is no chance that the commander of the Texas National Guard unit would order their soldiers to fire on federal agents unless they’re a complete idiot.

So uh, this can’t happen because it would be dumb if it did.

I agree it would be dumb if it happened.

Doesn’t mean it can’t.

Doesn’t mean the situation is not a powder keg, doesn’t mean that if basically one exceptionally stupid command, conflicting with a far less stupid command from another authority, is acted on, it could escalate rapidly.

Again, these kinds of /which authority will be recognized in case of conflicting commands, by which individual commanders and sometimes even soldiers/ are a defining element of civil conflicts around the world throughout history, and they are simply not predictable at an individual basis when in an extremely polarized, tense and complex situation.

Your argument is basically just: this would be dumb if it happened, so its unlikely/impossible.

Again, yep, itd be dumb.

Again, viewed through a lense of history of civil conflicts, especially a Chinese lense, it actually certainly qualifies as a very obvious situation to be highly concerned about.

The comparison with Ukraine and Russia was not chosen because the similarities of the situation leading up to armed conflict, but simply to illustrate that a lot of people can believe an armed conflict would not happen because it would be dumb if it did, and also to provide an example that sometimes, in war, surprises can happen that astound even the experts, as well as the general public.

So… quite honestly this is probably a translation issue and cultural differences.

In China, throughout Chinese history, if a local government body /openly defies/ a greater authority, to the point of defying direct orders regarding the deployment of highly armed and combat capable forces… and you now have a scenario where armed forces loyal to the local government are literally right next to armed forces of the greater authority… and both official governments are claiming they have the right to do what they are doing, and the other does not…

This is functionally nearly always a situation that ends up spiralling into war, and basically the inherent assumption is that the local government should be subservient to the greater government, and they should know that what they are doing is likely to lead to armed conflict, it is likely to escalate, thus functionally when you add together the assumption that the local government should submit and is not, and the proximity of opposed armed agents of the state on both sides… basically this would be viewed as Texas declaring war on the Federal government.

We interpret the situation as, well, Texas didnt declare war because they cant actually do that legally!

In so doing we kind of forget that /thats not how civil conflicts fucking work/.

Basically put another way, if an armed conflict does start here, and then it broadens, and then 10 years later youre reading about it in a history text book…

Is the term civil war going to be used?

Or will we all agree to call it the special military and police action to quell an illegal use of force by rogue and criminal elements within the united states government?

Which of those do you think is going to more easily translate to Mandarin and Cantonese and what not?

EDIT: I am /far, faaaar/ from a fan of the current Chinese government for a great many reasons.

But, it can always be a useful exercise to read how other country’s media outlets report on your own country’s domestic affairs.

Is there outright propaganda and lies in some instances? Absolutely.

Is that happening in this case?

In my opinion, not really, no.

I personally, as an American living here my whole life, would basically agree that at the very least, what Texas is doing is done with the implied threat of, and known public support for /functionally/ starting what /basically/ amounts to a civil war, by engaging in escalating brinksmanship, seeking other allies (whats it 25 states now are waiting for Abbot to ask them to send their NatGuard to Texas), and both sides are moving combat capable chess pieces on the board in highly public ways.

Sure its not technically a declaration of war or secession, but uh, thats because /technically/ those things are impossible, even though they realistically are not.

My only possible actual quibble here would basically be that eh probably most Americans wouldn’t view it as a war or secession attempt until shooting starts and a formal declaration of ‘we are forming confederacy 2, this time so we can shot hispanic migrants and form a theocracy instead of uphold slavery of blacks’.

Which… again. A declaration is about /intent/, not necessarily precisely timed with action toward that intent.

Basically, at best, this is a nearly totally unprecedented situation in US History, basically totally unprecedented in a century.

Most Americans suffer from massive latent, unconscious American Exceptionalism across the political spectrum, assuming kinds of status quo type norms that simply are not actually evidenced by both history in general of societies around the world, as well as literally our own.

There are of course many issues where I think generally, the modern culture of China suffers from its own kinds of blinders… but not on this kind of an issue.

Even in this thread we have a comment of basically “yeah right, they wouldnt win in the long run” which both denies the proximal possibility of a civil conflict, but also admits that it could happen, but that itd be /dumb/ if it happened.

As if wars have never been fought for reasons one or even both sides think are dumb, or wars have never been fought when it seems very likely one side would lose.

Remember when nearly everyone thought Russia would never invade Ukraine because it would be dumb, and then he did, and then nearly everyone thought Ukraine would basically be steamrolled, and it wasn’t?

Wonderful.

I have not had enough time to follow everything about Milei, so it was a genuine question.

My nearest point of reference was El Salvador.

Wait so, is this a conjob to later try to switch the country over to some cryptocoin, or was that the stated goal the whole time?

I genuinely feel bad for Argentinians, but jesus christ never put an AnCap in charge of a state.

No, I am not welcoming an artist apocalypse, that would obviously be bad.

I am noting that I find it amusing to me on a level I already acknowledged was petty and personal that many, many mediocre artists who are absolutely awful to other people socially would have their little cults of fandom dampened by the fact that a machine can more or less to what they do, and their cult leader status is utterly unwarranted.

I do not have a nice and neat solution to the problem you bring up.

I do believe you are being somewhat hyperbolic, but, so was I.

Yep, being an artist in a capitalist hellscape world with modern AI algorithms is not a very reliable way to earn a good living and you are not likely to be have such a society produce many artists who do not have either a lot of free time or money, or you get really lucky.

At this point we are talking about completely reorganizing society in fairly large and comprehensive ways to achieve significant change on this front.

Also this problem applies to far, far more people than just artists. One friend of mine wanted her dream job as running a little bakery! Had to set her prices too high, couldn’t afford a good location, supply chain problems, taxes, didn’t work out.

Maybe someone’s passion is teaching! Welp, that situation is all fucked too.

My point here is: Ok, does anyone have an actual plan that can actually transform the world into somewhere that allow the average person to be far more likely to be able to live the life they want?

Would that plan have more to do with the minutiae of regulating a specific kind of ever advancing and ever changing technology in some kind of way that will be irrelevant when the next disruptive tech proliferates in a few years, or maybe more like an actual total overhaul of our entire society from the ground up?

Well, off the top of my head:

Whole Brain Emulation, attempting to model a human brain as physically accurately as possible inside a computer.

Genetic Iteration (not the correct term for it but it escapes me at the moment), where you set up a simulated environment for digital actors, then simulate quasi-neurons, quasi-body parts dictated by quasi-dna, in a way that mimics actual biological natural selection and evolution, and then you run the simulation millions of times until your digital creature develops a stable survival strategy.

Similar approaches to this have been used to do things like teach an AI humanoid how to develop its own winning martial arts style via many many iterations, starting from not even being able to stand up, much less do anything to an opponent.

Both of these approaches obviously have drawbacks and strengths, and could possibly be successful at far more than what they have achieved to date, or maybe not, due to known or existing problems, but neither of them rely on a training set of essentially the entirety of all content on the internet.

Ah, sorry, I am on mobile and without my glasses, thanks for the clarification!