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this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I mean yeah I guess in a competition between getting a bullet directly through my brain, getting all my limbs chainsawed off with my head last and being drowned in boiling water, the bullet would win every time. Though the real perversely funniest outcome is if superintelligence turns out to be completely impossible and we fuck ourselves over with garbage to mediocre AI embedded in all our critical infrastructure
Obviously I don't want the human race to go extinct, but if there was a choice of inevitable outcomes where we do, building an inimmical superintelligence at least implies agency, not carelessness.
Anyway Big Yud's fantasy of a precisely timed diamondoid-bacteria delivered killshot to every human being at the same time might sound terrible, but from a sensory perspective of the victims, it's basically suffering-free. You go about your day, BAM nothingness. Maybe there's a difference in timing so you see your partner keel over a split second before you die - again, you might not even realize what is happening.
I am not sure from where this idea of a global instantaneous simultanous genocide comes from, maybe a tit-for-tat escalation to counter every argument against shutting down the robot god, but from a storytelling perspective it's pretty useless. There's no drama where the survivors lament their loss or brood over what might have been. It's just a plug being pulled on the simulation.
(weirdly it's also the logical outcome of asking a computer to "end human suffering", a bit like the Robobrain logic in Fallout 4's Automatron expansion, but I doubt it's meant that way)
That’s precisely what I was thinking. Obviously I don’t want everyone to die but if you forced me to choose between apocalypse scenarios, I’m picking something painless and instantaneous- like a super-virus that activates immediately or a bullet in the head-over being slowly tortured to death via something like nuclear radiation or extreme heat
A real evil robot god would keep a sample of humanity alive forever in order to torture them as reprisal for them being really really mean to it back in the day.
I think maybe you nailed it here. Being able to pretend they're doing game theory/mapping out an escalation ladder allows Yud and our friends to feel like they're in the same intellectual lineage as guys like Oppenheimer and Teller, manifesting the same sort of "objective" emotionless rationality. The big difference, you see, is that the AI will think so much faster than us that...!