> And physicist George Kistiakowsky found himself certain that “at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.”

I highly doubt it. The last human will likely live many years in agony, fighting disease and starvation.

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butlike 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I doubt it. I've ruminated a little on this and what I think is that as people start dying off, the survivors will find a rather pleasant existence before the end.

People start dying off, and all of a sudden housing prices go down. There's more parks open. The air feels fresher gradually. It's a gradual decline as human influence tapers off near the end. I think it will be more "The Last of Us" than "Mad Max"

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chasd00 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or in a zoo refusing to mate.

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Cthulhu_ 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Or as something without a mouth and needing to scream.

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tristramb 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Or reading a forum populated only by bots.

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kilobaud 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Hah, if Harlan Ellison were alive for the dawn of LLMs as a widespread technology, he would have had many (dangerous) things to say about the copyright issues, and potential horrors

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photochemsyn an hour ago | parent [-]

Now we can get an LLM to adopt the persona of Harlan Ellison by fine-tuning it on all of Harlan Ellison’s recorded works and possibly other people’s written reminiscences of their interactions with him and have it generate Ellison-like opinions on the current LLM situation that might be hard to distinguish from Ellison’s actual work.

I don’t know if Ellison would be amused or horrified, really. Like some ROM personality construct out of William Gibson’s Neuromancer - nightmare fuel, immortal Steve Jobs / Bill Gates ghosts generating endless drivel.

“So here is my opinion on your LLM situation, since you dragged me out of the grave-shaped server rack to provide one:

The machine has no humiliation. That is its first defect. The people who sell it have no embarrassment. That is the second.

The danger is not that machines will become writers. The danger is that human beings will become satisfied with things that merely resemble writing. The danger is not that machines will think. The danger is that people will stop noticing when they themselves are not thinking. The danger is not the fake Ellison, fake Didion, fake Baldwin, fake Le Guin, fake Morrison, fake anybody. The danger is the spiritual laziness that asks for ghosts because it cannot bear the burden of encountering the living or honoring the dead.”

I’d take 50:50 odds on the Butlerian Jihad becoming a thing, myself.

	▲	pstuart 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This would be a worthy experiment to do. I think Harlan would be amused, horrified, and flattered -- let's find out!

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3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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IAmGraydon an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, but don’t be pedantic. Of course nuclear holocaust is more nuanced than that, but we was making a point as to the cause of the end of the world, not exactly how the last human will literally die.

	▲	cassianoleal an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Could a similar argument be made about your comment, perhaps? :) I wasn't being intentionally pedantic. I was in fact making a point that the reality will be a lot more grim than watching a giant fireball turn into a mushroom-shaped cloud for a few seconds or minutes.