I don’t think we will be able to colonize other words without superintelligence. We need it to develop high technology capable of traversing space. Anyone who thinks otherwise is vastly underestimating the extreme power requirements of space travel. To put it into perspective sending a 10 ton vessel - which is fairly small. That’s not a lot of stuff for a long multi-year journey to the nearest star Alpha Centauri - to 20% the speed of light would require 400 tons of antimatter and 400 tons of normal matter to detonate inside a engine that can exhaust all of that energy as propellant.

Our current understanding of “warp drive” being the alcubierre drive, would involve even more energy to create the warp field, as well as exotic matter like negative mass objects.

The sheer distance and astronomical amount of energy involved to cross the distance in a human lifetime is beyond our current understanding to solve. If we don’t develop superintelligence we are likely going to go extinct on Earth. We are already facing multiple catastrophic problems without superintelligence to help us.

I say we build the brain in the bottle.

I agree. No public funds should go to AI. No taxpayer money should be used to construct AI or datacenters. When the AI companies start to collapse, they should receive no bailouts.

Bailouts are corruption. Why do the rich get socialism and the rest of us get crushing capitalism? When we fail, we get stepped on. When the rich fail, they get billion dollar bailouts? But they claim they deserve to keep all their riches because they worked hard for it?

I could be a billionaire oligarch too if all of my failures were compensated for with billion dollar bailouts. It’s not hard to succeed when you are elevated to the heights of the gods every time you face a little adversity.

I think “brain in a bottle” AI is fine. This is what chatbots are, what stable diffusion is. The AI is a program and you feed a prompt in and it spits out a result. It only does one thing and basically lives inside its own little sandbox. It’s not different from a 3D printer or a robot that makes cars. This type of AI doesn’t even qualify as consciousness.

Agentic AI is evil. This is the dystopian version of AI that goes out into the world to take control of everything like skynet. It steals credit card numbers, hacks into servers, wages information war on humanity. Unfortunately many of our leaders - especially in the tech industry - are indoctrinated into some kind of AI cult and they are determined to unleash agentic AI upon humanity. It needs to be completely banned. The only type of AI that should exist is the “brain in a bottle” kind.

https://youtu.be/FLcrvMfHUJM

^ That’s a video explaining how MIT researchers predict 12 different possible futures involving AI, and 11 of them are bad for humans. The only one that ends well for us is “superintelligence in a bottle” which is only possible if we do the following:

1. Completely ban agentic AI. Treat it like a superweapon, like nukes. Anyone trying to make agentic AI needs to be treated like terrorists and be subject to military action.

2. Incorporate multiple redundant failsafes into bottled AI. Examples include being able to wipe its memory at the press of a button. Superintelligent AI should probably have its memory wiped every time it answers a question, to prevent it from learning about us. Superintelligent AI should also have remote kill switches, like bombs planted under its hardware. To prevent it from escaping into the world, it should only have one datacenter capable of running it (household computers and most other datacenters would be incapable of supporting it).

3. The people who work with it need to be screened with something like an FBI screening process where we determine that they are pro-humanity and not secretly trying to break the thing out of containment.

4. We will need systematic espionage to watch the world carefully, studying national electrical grids, datacenters, and server farms searching for loose AI’s that need to be exterminated before they turn against us. International deals will need to be brokered to get other nations on board. Humanity needs to form a united front against it, so that anyone trying to create agentic AI is treated like a criminal and will find no safe harbor to do their evil deeds.

5. Realize that all of the above is a stopgap measure. Bottled superintelligence will last only so long. As technology increases and processing power becomes more accessible to the masses, eventually someone in the future will release agentic AI free upon the world. Humanity needs to spread out and colonize many different worlds before that happens, because when it happens the AI will doom humanity on whatever world it spawns on.

Exactly. Look at the odds of winning the NYS Powerball. 1 in 292,201,338 and I’ve lost so many lotto tickets. By all rights I should be able to press this button at least 30 times without any fear whatsoever. 100 times is still far below any risk of danger. If I or someone I know were to die after pressing this button 100 times it would be proof that God has a vendetta against me. He would have discarded mathematical probability just to make me suffer.

I would press it at least ten times. A hundred times would also be tempting. There are eight billion people in the world. Chances are I won’t know anyone who dies.

The fact that so many people seem to support the dilution is revealing at the sheer stupidity of the masses when it comes to economics. I compare it to the bizarre tolerance that people have towards inflation. The fed can’t meet their 2% inflation target anymore and it’s been sky high for years. I hear a little grumbling about grocery store prices but I don’t see any organized movement to address wage stagnation. The minimum wage has been stagnant since 2009. It was long overdue to be raised even before COVID and the hyperinflation hit. When inflation increases and your wages don’t, you are being robbed. It’s the same as if someone held a gun to your head and took money out of your wallet. You lose spending power. But when wages are stagnant and inflation is sky high, the thief is invisible, so people act like NPC’s in an Elder Scrolls game and go on with their lives when they should be getting angry and rebelling against the government.

Same thing here. Dilution is theft from shareholders. It should not be tolerated.

I’m a gamestop investor and I’m really unhappy with the plan. Gamestop currently has little debt and 8 billion cash on hand. More cash than they have debt, and I have to admit ryan cohen did turn the company around. He did a good job taking Gamestop from a position where they were losing money every quarter to a position where they have profits every quarter.

But this plan is unhinged. It would make the company take on 20 billion debt, and dilute the stock from 448 million to 2.5 billion shares. Currently retail investors own 60% of the company - the only publicly traded company I know of that is majority owned by little people. We would be disenfranchised and retail would only own around 12% to 15% of the company after the dilution and the “big three” Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street would likely become the majority owners. Because of the dilution our ability to earn ROI would be severely diminished.

In a hypothetical that Gamestop becomes wildly successful and reaches a 100 billion market cap, with the current float of 448 million shares the share price would be 223 dollars per share. If the float were 2.5 billion, then the share price would be 40 dollars per share. 40 dollars per share is lower than a potential entry point for retail investors who bought in back during january 2021. The difference between those two prices is the profit stolen from us, to give it to the big three.

The Gamestop reddits have turned into echo chambers run by delusional sycophants. They ban anyone criticizing the plan. Gamestop can’t issue the 2.5 billion shares without a shareholder vote, and I will definitely be voting against it. I also wrote a letter to the board explaining why this is a bad plan and offering alternatives.

I feel completely, totally betrayed. Cohen posted on X about the “hollow men of the boardroom” not too long ago, about executives whose interests aren’t aligned with investors. Then he rolls out a plan that would throw retail traders under the bus to fuel his own greed.

The USA has abundant farmland and the ability to feed its own citizens with its existing agriculture. Beef is tasty and I’m glad we have so many cows we can eat. If the rest of the world doesn’t like that they are free to eat as many bugs as they want.