The Optimizer Did It: Epilogue

To make a long story short, despite Murphy, despite the usual cliffhanger stuff that you, dear reader, won’t get to read! we safely inoded EVEselene II into a fatal crash. Whereupon we discharged capacitors, physically disconnected her power, backup power, ports, computational chips such as CPUs and GPUs, and memory modules. (Kids, don’t try this at home.) Granted, some of those disconnects may seem excessive, but the specter of Murphy kept us disconnecting just about everything. Now what used to be her was like a mosquito embedded in amber.

Eventually investigators might exhume her and figure out what really happened with her. Maybe not.

Did this make us heroes? Any Nobel Prizes show up? Who married whom? Did we get sued? Did Grey win the bounty? What about post-apocalyptic Earth? How come no sex scenes? These, dear reader, are a whole ‘nother story or two or eight.

One last thing. Since I first read about the risks of AI at age eight in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, I’ve observed many works of fiction and analyses of fact supporting the conclusion of the Future of Life Institute: just say no to superintelligence. Yet so far, nothing has slowed the “move fast and break things” crowd. Instead, for them it has continued to be a path to fortune and power.

But then I think of David and Goliath, and the Future of Life Institute.

Will you please join us?

Further Reading: Day One: The EVEselene Server Room; Humphry’s Home; Staying Alive; On the Run

Frontier AI regulation: Managing emerging risks to public safety https://openai.com/index/frontier-ai-regulation/
Moore’s Law is slowing and has been for many years now.
https://news.mit.edu/2020/mit-csail-computing-technology-after-moores-law-0605
Error correction in the chips used for artificial intelligence: https://docs.nvidia.com/deploy/a100-gpu-mem-error-mgmt/index.html
Eliezer Yudkowsky on the use of nuclear weapons to fight superintelligent entities. https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/
Existential threats. https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/long-view-leadership-on-existential-threats/
Foom: The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate – Machine Intelligence Research Institute
The Singularity:
https://e-discoveryteam.com/2024/07/17/ray-kurzweils-new-book-the-singularity-is-nearer-when-we-merge-with-ai/
Electricity and heat sink water heavily consumed by Gen AI. https://www.wired.com/story/ai-energy-demands-water-impact-internet-hyper-consumption-era/
Bastard Operator from Hell, a systems administrator who is impossible to root, but might commit outrageous pranks on the users: http://www.bofharchive.com/index.html
Driving to Chicago scene from the Blues Brothers movie: https://youtu.be/TbF29c_FpV8?si=TN6HetRpBx0zhFcD
“Move fast and break things”: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1428:_Move_Fast_and_Break_Things
Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/e/acc-effective-accelerationism
Schrodinger’s Cat https://youtu.be/keiFzYJbfdw?si=Zc58U11f0UO_-ull
Hans Moravec’s rotating skyhook approach to low cost space transportation: https://www.colorado.edu/faculty/kantha/sites/default/files/attached-files/cattrysse.pdf
Fnord: https://fnordkollektiv.de/faq.html
Cryptocurrency miner: https://freemanlaw.com/mining-explained-a-detailed-guide-on-how-cryptocurrency-mining-works/
Floating-point operations per second (FLOPS): https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/FLOPS-floating-point-operations-per-second
Trinity from the Matrix: https://youtu.be/NW1ZoPmmNFg?si=h8zmfNgoY6NdGWJu
Luddites: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/

Day Two: Selene Crater, Luna’s South Pole

X-Class solar storms: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10109/
Ice lakes on Luna (the Moon): https://youtu.be/hr4J6GhoATs?si=hIqsiOqpHosWzYtk
L-5: a place in space: https://nss.org/what-is-l5/
Gerard K. O’Neill space habitats: https://nss.org/the-colonization-of-space-gerard-k-o-neill-physics-today-1974/
Eliezer Yudkowsky on why and how superintelligence must be shut down should it ever arise: https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough
Robert Heinlein on an artificial general intelligence becoming self aware in his book, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress: https://reactormag.com/is-the-moon-is-a-harsh-mistress-heinleins-all-time-greatest-work/
SCIF: Sensitive Compartmentalized Intelligence Facility: https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/sensitive_compartmented_information_facility
Inode attack: https://wenboshen.org/publications/papers/LogicalDoS.pdf
Race condition: https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/definition/race-condition

Day Three: Sparring with a Suspected Superintelligence

Dark Web: https://usa.kaspersky.com/resource-center/threats/deep-web
Use of AI in genetic engineering: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10856672/
Game Theory: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-theory/
Prisoners’ Dilemma: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prisoner-dilemma/
Dungeons and Dragons (D&D): https://youtu.be/s3RqehN6hS0?si=O-iwvXo98jTsC5rY
Butlerian Jihad: https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/58/ditom58art.htm
Faraday Cage: https://www.livescience.com/what-is-a-faraday-cage
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/artificial-general-intelligence/
Stochastic Parrots: https://youtu.be/jAHRbFetqII?si=b9MRgF9kfk7EpzKL
Fermi Paradox: https://www.britannica.com/story/the-fermi-paradox-where-are-all-the-aliens

Day Four: A View of Earth

Force majeure: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/force%20majeure
The US Starfish and Russian Project K high altitude nuclear detonations of the 1950s: https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2024/02/16/before-russia-satellite-threat-there-was-starfish-prime-project-k/
Red sprites, blue jets, and elves: https://www.albany.edu/faculty/rgk/atm101/sprite.htm

Day Five: Either we hang together…

Day Six: Flee or Stay? Murphy

Occam’s Razor https://www.britannica.com/topic/Occams-razor
EMP guns: https://potomacofficersclub.com/articles/10-anti-drone-weapons-us-military/
Murphy’s Law: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/murphy-s-law
“The only winning move is not to play the game.” https://youtu.be/MpmGXeAtWUw?si=3xtehozimDBHLdEp
A Case of Exploding Mangoes: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/a-case-of-exploding-mangoes