GoKawiilSorry to bother you on Saturday. Thought this was important to share.
I.
The first thing you learn about a loom is that it’s easy to break.
The shuttle runs along a track that warps with humidity. The heddles hang from cords that fray. The reed is a row of thin metal strips, bent by hand, that bend back just as easily. The warp beam cracks if you over-tighten it. The treadles loosen at the joints. The breast beam, the cloth roller, the ratchet and pawl, the lease sticks, the castle; the whole contraption is wood and string held together by tension. It’s a piece of ingenuity and craftsmanship, but one as delicate as the clothes it manifests out of wild plant fibers. It is, also, the foundational tool of an entire industry, textiles, that has kept its relevance to our days of heavy machinery, factories, energy facilities, and datacenters.
It is not nearly as easy to break a datacenter.
It is made of concrete and steel and copper and it’s on the bigger side. It has interchangeable servers, and biometric locks and tall electrified fences and heavily armed guards and redundancy upon redundancy: every component duplicated so that no single failure brings the whole thing down. There is no treadle to loosen or reed to bend back.
But say you managed to bypass the guards, jump the fences, open the locks, and locate all the servers. Then you’d face the algorithm. The datacenter was never your goal; the algorithm lurking inside is. It doesn’t run on that rack, or any rack for that matter. It is a digital pattern distributed across millions of chips, mirrored across continents; it could be reconstituted elsewhere, and it’s trained to addict you at a glance, like a modern Medusa.
But say you managed to elude the stare, stop the replication, and break the patterns. Then you’d face superintelligence. The algorithm was also not your goal; the vibrant, ethereal, latent superintelligence lurking inside is. Well, there’s nothing you can do here: It always “gets out of the box” and, suddenly, you are inside the box, like a chimp being played by a human with a banana. It’s just so tasty…
There’s another solution to break a datacenter: You can bomb it, like one hammers down the loom.
Some have argued that this is the way to ensure a rogue superintelligence doesn’t get out of the box. A different rogue creature took the proposal seriously: last month, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard released satellite footage of OpenAI’s Stargate campus in Abu Dhabi and promised its “complete and utter annihilation.”
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