If it wasn’t “blown out of proportion” then many things would not have been fixed, and many of them would have broken, causing some of the very things that seemed blown out in the media.

I wish you could appreciate how hilarious that sentence is. But okay- thanks for clarifying that it had to be blown out of proportion to prevent the things that would have happened if it weren’t blown out of proportion ;)

I drive a Unimog to prove my penis is small but prehensile.

I figured Saberhagen’s Berserkers filled that role, but with a little more ‘personality’ than a mindless self-replicating swarm or paperclip maximizer scenario.

So ‘some over-panicking’, but definitely not ‘blown out of proportion’…

Kind of bizarre you’ll babble about all that but just can’t just accept that the phrase ‘blown out of proportion’ is perfectly applicable to Y2K. But you’re committed that it wasn’t ‘blown out of proportion’ now- no way out but more babbling ;)

So in your opinion the media and public response to Y2K was entirely proportionate… I guess that’s an opinion.

Even referring to a computed outcome as having been the result of a ‘goal’ at all is more sci-fi than reality for the foreseeable future. There are no systems that can demonstrate or are even theoretically capable of any form of ‘intent’ whatsoever. Active deception of humans would require extraordinarily well developed intent and a functional ‘theory of mind’, and we’re about as close to that as we are to an inertial drive.

The entire discussion of machine intelligence rivaling human’s requires assumptions of technological progress that aren’t even on the map. It’s all sci-fi. Some look back over the past century and assume we will continue on some unlimited exponential technological trajectory, but nothing works that way, we just like to think we’re the exception because if we’re not we have to deal with the fact that there’s an expiration date on society.

It’s fun and all but this is equivalent to discussing how we might interact with alien intelligence. There are no foundations, it’s all just speculation and strongly influenced by our anthropic desires.

Fortunately we’re nowhere near the point where a machine intelligence could possess anything resembling a self-determined ‘goal’ at all.

Also fortunately the hardware required to run even LLMs is insanely hungry and has zero capacity to power or maintain itself and very little prospects of doing so in the future without human supply chains. There’s pretty much zero chance we’ll develop strong general AI on silicone, and if we could it would take megawatts to keep it running. So if it misbehaves we can basically just walk away and let it die.

It’s fun to imagine ways it could deceive us long enough to gain enough physical capacity to be self-sufficient, or somehow enslave or manipulate humans to do its bidding, but in reality our greatest protection from machine intelligence is simple thermodynamics and the fact that the human brain, while limited, is insanely efficient and can run for days on stuff that literally grows on trees.

You know it didn’t. It broke a bunch of dependencies and ruined a lot of dev’s day. The ‘internet’ continued to work everywhere left-pad wasn’t used. So now you’ve ‘blown it out of proportion’ too, but yeah- already established you’re just missing the whole concept, but interesting to watch.

That the issue got miscommunicated to the consumers as somehow being an issue for them

That’s literally what ‘blown out of proportion’ means. If I ‘miscommunicated’ to non IT staff that left-pad ‘broke the internet’, that would have been ‘blown out of proportion’. That’s what that phrase means.

Yes actually. As I recall I added two digits to the date fields in a FoxPro script so a bunch of casino coupons went out correctly. It saved a lot of lives ;)

I’m getting that you don’t get how ‘blown out of proportion’ means a disconnect between the reality and the public perception of an event. Not sure how to walk you through that.

Are you saying that there was no risk, especially in finance, and that people didn’t work for years fixing the bug?

Seriously where are you getting any of that?

I said, very concisely and more than once, the threat was blown out of proportion. Did you read or watch any local news in the late 90’s?

I was there, and the threat absolutely was blown out of proportion.

Yeah this list kind of assumes humans\machines are inherently adversarial and machines are always a threat.

To be more fair we’d have to have an opposite Bio Threat Level Scale for machines to evaluate threats from biological life. That would be a lot of fun actually. Maybe the highest level would just be like a ‘Luddite Virus’ that makes the infected destroy machines.

And of course I’m kind of ignoring the idea that the distinction between bio and machine life is a bit arbitrary to begin with so there’s no real reason we can’t just get along.

YES! I love that site. Haven’t been there in a while- I thought Keter was the worst but Apollyon and Archon are new to me. SCP-096 Shy Guy still freaks me out.

Thanks for the heads-up on bookwyrm- just created an account.