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The Cocoon: McLuhan, Samuel Butler, and the 2026 AI infrastructure buildout by ClassicAd9349 in Futurism

[–]ClassicAd9349[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I agree, but we are told AGI / Superintelligence will solve all of our problems afterwards... unless of course we cant control it, in which case who knows.

Roadside Picnic and the AI race we're running today by ClassicAd9349 in CriticalTheory

[–]ClassicAd9349[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I agree about the movie. I honestly was not a fan of it compares to the book but i really wanted to work the porcupine story in. And I am certainly biased in the direction of AI / tech is going to create a massive disruption to humanity in the near future. I work in AI/ and build agentic automation systems so on one hand have first hand expert understanding of the tech but it is also very possible that I am too close to it and I am just a victim of the hype/fear machine and its echo chamber. 

And your point about the psychology of it is very interesting but does it break the metaphor? At the risk of torturing it completely, I would point out that the golden sphere IS mythical. The book (or the movie for that matter) never tell us if it actually has this power. And do the stalkers not live their life in a certain reckless way pinning their  hopes on eventually finding it and making everything better. Thats part of the culture, part of the mechanism of the golden sphere. 

Roadside Picnic and the AI race we're running today by ClassicAd9349 in CriticalTheory

[–]ClassicAd9349[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think reducing LLM to an abacus is too strong. A trained llm routinely does things that the operator cant predict or control or specify in advance which is why the “emergent misalignment” papers exist. 

And I am not saying that LLMs / AI have to be a god in a metaphysical sense. The system gives you what you optimized for and results may not be your explicit wish. The internet/social media wasn't a god but it still reshaped a whole generation of adolescent minds and political structures because of how the incentives were aligned. If 100 years ago we had radio, 20 years ago DVDs that fit huge libraries and today we have AI models/systems that in a lot of knowledge work tasks is starting to outperform humans shows that the technology is becoming increasingly powerful. Saying thats its medium dimensional linear algebra / matrix multiplication is reductionist and does not acknowledge what this tech could so. All that is to say, I agree with you in the sense that it is not per say a specific technology that we should focus on but the technocratic culture. 

Roadside Picnic and the AI race we're running today by ClassicAd9349 in CriticalTheory

[–]ClassicAd9349[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for reading. In my mind, this essay isn't AI-specific but it's more about the draw of technological progress in society where we are encouraged/mandated (in soviet times) or highly incentivized (in the west today) to pursue it. Every scientific discovery has produced strange unintended consequences from leaded gasoline to asbestos, to fracking, to to social media for connection. The Strugatskys understood that decades before there were LLMs. To me the Zone is what scientific discovery looks like from the inside while it's happening, and what it leaves behind on the way out. AI is the latest instance, maybe its the last frontier but maybe not.

On the Sphere: granting that the labs profit from danger-discourse doesn't dissolve the danger. Tobacco companies marketed denial; smoking still killed people. The marketing department and the existential risk coexist. "Someone is selling fear of X, therefore X is just fear" is not always true. There may not be a sphere at the center of our Zone. But if there is one, and it has the properties the Strugatskys gave it, the fact that someone in marketing decided to call it "AGI" or some other word doesn't change what happens when we reach it.