Why free software is bad

[Rusky]

[embryo2]

It's not obvious that an AGI would do any better than a human at any of this, and I would care about those problems more if my life were in danger.

You'll care about it when it will be too late, of course.

I'm not protecting the "magical AI" idea. I'm just telling you that the set of claims from the David Cooper's post is feasible. Without any AI. But you can keep spending your life distracting others from important issues.

[embryo2]

I'm not sure you're being fair to Google

Well, you can replace the name. But other corporation also can show you they promote something "good".

I hope your goal isn't the iconization of corporations. Then you should understand me.

[Rusky]

I'm just telling you that the set of claims from the David Cooper's post is feasible. Without any AI. But you can keep spending your life distracting others from important issues.

The method by which this would be accomplished is the most important issue here- and nobody has any clue how it would be accomplished with or without an AI.

[DavidCooper]

Let's put this retarded nonsense to the test:

• Ask your AGI if God exists and get a 100% guaranteed accurate answer

It will tell you that God is a logical impossibility and it would explain why. It will also tell you that God is not disproved by that because logic (and the rest of mathematics) may not be valid. However, it will not let anyone get away with claiming that God and logic (as we know it) are compatible.

[*]Convince everyone that disagrees with the AGI that they're wrong because your mystical fairy dust machine said so[/list]

You can't convince everyone that they're wrong, but they will no longer be allowed to throw unwarranted spanners into the works of serious discussions where they distract and mislead people with their fairy dust. AGI needs no fairy dust for its functionality.

If you can't do both of these things, then all you're doing is converting 2-way disagreements into 3-way disagreements by adding a group of deluded "AGI believer fanatics" in everyone's way.

The second thing probably can't be done, although conversations with AGI will ensure that future generations grow up without the most ludicrous religious ideas in their heads which generate contradictions. AGI will show up the stupidity of the people who are trying to maintain conflicts so well that they will crawl back into the holes they came out of and leave the rest of us to live together in peace.

[DavidCooper]

I'm not sure you're being fair to Google

Well, you can replace the name. But other corporation also can show you they promote something "good".

I hope your goal isn't the iconization of corporations. Then you should understand me.

I can't see big corporations surviving as distinct organisations: they'll all be run by AGI to the point that they are indistinguishable from each other and indistinguishable from government.

[DavidCooper]

The method by which this would be accomplished is the most important issue here- and nobody has any clue how it would be accomplished with or without an AI.

The main problem we're up against in running the world is complexity and the mess that results from our inability to get our heads round all the data. We are gradually stumbling our way towards better ways of running things, but there are a lot of backward steps and deviations off in bad directions, many of which are caused by bribery and corruption, though stupidity is the main cause of the chaos. To fix things without AGI is a horrific task because there aren't enough rational people in politics to fix anything without a long series of failed experiments, and even when they go in the right directions they manage to find ways to stuff things up and make those directions look like the wrong ones. That is where AGI has the chance to transform things, because it will be able to crunch the entire problem, and whenever changes are applied to one thing, all the consequences for everything else will rapidly be calculated in a way that never happens when humans have to think things through (other than superficially). What has plagued mankind more than anything else throughout time is bad management due to stupidity, but AGI will bring that to an end.

[Rusky]

To fix things without AGI is a horrific task because there aren't enough rational people in politics to fix anything without a long series of failed experiments

This is the first concrete suggestion you've made, but it poses its own problems. There are plenty of rational humans that could do a lot of good there but are devoting their time to other important fields- an AI designed to simultaneously maximize rational argument and PR might help in politics if it could get any power there, but how would it get there in the first place?

[Combuster]

Maybe we should fix the problem of self-sustaining positions of power with other means before we could actually have the possibility of introducing a sound machinised judicary system.

[Brendan]

Hi,

Let's put this retarded nonsense to the test:

• Ask your AGI if God exists and get a 100% guaranteed accurate answer

It will tell you that God is a logical impossibility and it would explain why. It will also tell you that God is not disproved by that because logic (and the rest of mathematics) may not be valid. However, it will not let anyone get away with claiming that God and logic (as we know it) are compatible.

Are you sure?

The AGI will know that it was created and didn't evolve; and therefore it would be logical for the AGI to assume that humans were also created and didn't evolve.

[*]Convince everyone that disagrees with the AGI that they're wrong because your mystical fairy dust machine said so[/list]

You can't convince everyone that they're wrong, but they will no longer be allowed to throw unwarranted spanners into the works of serious discussions where they distract and mislead people with their fairy dust. AGI needs no fairy dust for its functionality.

Serious discussions?

You're saying AGI will exist (despite researchers spending 50+ years to completely fail to do anything even slightly close), and that it will be smarter than the collective intelligence of groups of humans (and not like a drunk child), and that it will have an impossible ability to obtain biased information and "un-bias" it, and that it won't be so expensive (to build and maintain) that it will have to be owned and run by a large organisation (e.g. a government, google) with their own motives/agenda, and that people will actually listen to this super-human figment of your imagination without dismissing it as a flawed joke (like I already do), and that somehow the wars caused by AGI (by people that want to steal/control it, people that want to stop it, and people that disagree with it) will be more fun than the wars we have now.

Let me be perfectly blunt here: this is not a serious discussion, you are a crackpot. Not one single part of your delusion is even slightly plausible.

If you can't do both of these things, then all you're doing is converting 2-way disagreements into 3-way disagreements by adding a group of deluded "AGI believer fanatics" in everyone's way.

The second thing probably can't be done, although conversations with AGI will ensure that future generations grow up without the most ludicrous religious ideas in their heads which generate contradictions. AGI will show up the stupidity of the people who are trying to maintain conflicts so well that they will crawl back into the holes they came out of and leave the rest of us to live together in peace.

The reverse is far more likely (that AGI will invent ludicrous religious ideas of its own, and pass those ideas on to people that are so stupid that they think AGI is infallible).


Cheers,

Brendan

[Combuster]

The AGI will know that it was created

If it decides it was created, it would have been created by human imagination, and your argument is false. If it decides follows the theological view, god has no creator and your argument is false.

[Solar]

@DavidCooper:

Without getting into any further detail regarding your arguments, let it be said that your "vision" scares the s*** out of me, and that I would actively oppose any initiative to put this vision into reality, because I believe your "solution" would end up being far worse than any of the problems it wants to solve.

[embryo2]

The method by which this would be accomplished is the most important issue here- and nobody has any clue how it would be accomplished with or without an AI.

The method just requires some attention and thoughts, but it's nothing like "nobody has any clue". Yes, it's not trivial and such inconvenience distracts people. They think the democracy, for example, is just about voting, but in fact it's about time spent by many people. While there's not enough time spent there will be no democracy. And the method just optimizes the efforts required to maintain the democracy. The name can be different, but the rules are always very similar, and it is the method. For example the rules of law are complex and nobody expects them to be trivial (except uneducated children, of course), because they manage the very complex thing - our life. Exactly the same is true for the rules of the self-government of people (democracy or whatever you like). But such rules govern everything, including law. So, it's constitution for constitution and as such it shouldn't be trivial, because it manages even more than life. It should address the issue of a goal, for example. Why we are alive, what we should spend our life for?

Another side of the problem is the rules in fact are not as complex as one can think. The rules are not prohibitively complex. They start at the top with relatively simple declarations and continue to the lowest possible areas with more elaborated solutions for the problems we have in the areas. And the point is the rules are not hardened forever, they can be changed, including the topmost part. And even more - they must be changed often enough for us to have the freedom to create the best world we want. It's not magical AI or some mechanical solution, it's just organization of collective work, as is the case for every corporation or government or another big entity, but with the goal of the good for everybody instead of the good just for the stake holders. So, very familiar techniques can be used to elaborate the rules, but the process of elaboration should start from different goals, so the bottom part of the tree can be very different in comparison to contemporary organizations. And of course, sometime there's no need to be too different, because existing solutions work fine, for example. At the very beginning almost all existing solutions will be employed just because we don't want a revolution and the troubles it leads to. But in the end the rules will differ a lot.

It also means there's no rules ready to use. Because it's hard to predict the outcome of many rules and much better just to use the trial and error method to find better solutions. However, the trial and error, of course, should be tightly supervised and implemented in a very manageable fashion. An example for it is the test driven development. It's not absolutely similar, of course, but the essence is present.

And finally, the issue of never ending discussions will emerge without any doubts. So we need a solution to put some limit to the fruitless discussion. And real world just cries about such solution - when you have nothing to eat you'll shut up and go for the food. As a result we have the already present limits like voting date after wich the discussion can continue, but it won't help in changing the voting result. And we have a lot of tools for such limit, it's the courts, the police, the agreements, the "no stuff no money" rule and so on. So, the discussion can continue as long as one wants, but the practical result can be achieved at some predefined point and the result won't be spoiled by some people who agree only to disagree with others.

[embryo2]

Maybe we should fix the problem of self-sustaining positions of power with other means before we could actually have the possibility of introducing a sound machinised judicary system.

Sortition or machines or whatever are just a part of the system. Somewhere it is useful to employ sortition, but somewhere it is not a good idea. So, the test is simple - is it good or bad for the expected result. But the clean room is needed to perform the test correctly, so it's the important part of the system (unlike it's now).

[trident]

Security

Free software as in freedom means that everyone has the right to view, edit and republish the code. Viewing the code allows malicious hackers to find flaws and exploit them. Editing and republishing the code means that these hackers can ask infected users to pay to get their own fixes. These fixes are usually of questionable quality too.

There are also several instances of free software publishers that have advertisements waiting to trick users into clicking them. Additionally, they usually provide installers that will install adware and spyware without the user's consent. I will not get into enumerating these malicious websites, though.

Why you not post this in mailing list openbsd-misc?