Soyweiser

Angela Collier: Dyson spheres are a joke.

Could be, not sure the science fiction authors thought this much about it. (Or if the thing I was musing about is even real and not just a coincidence that I read a few works in which it is a thing). Certainly seems likely that this sort of science is where the idea came from.

Moravec's Paradox

Had totally forgotten the name of that (Being better at remembering random meme stuff but not names of concepts like this, or a lot of names in general is a curse, also a source of imposter syndrome). But I recall having read the wikipedia page of that before. (Moravec also was the guy who thought of bush robots, wonder if that idea survived the more recent developments of nanotechnology.

Rodney brooks wiki page on AI was amusing

Thanks! I should have looked up the whole quote, but I just made a quick reply I knew I had worded it badly and I had it wrong, but just didn't do anything about it. My bad.

Ow yeah the way it used in this story also made sense but not in a computer science way. Just felt a bit how Gibson famously had never used a modem before he wrote his cyberpunk series.

Thanks. I know some complexity theory, but not enough. (Enough to know it wasn't gonna be my thing).

My im not a witch shirt ...

Yeah, I was also just wondering, as obv what I read is not really typical of the average public. Can't think of any place where this idea spread in non-written science fiction for example, with an exception being the predictions of C-3PO, who always seems to be wrong. But he is intended as a comedic sidekick. (him being wrong can also be seen as just the lack of value in calculating odds like that, esp in a universe with The Force).

But yes, not likely to be a big thing indeed.

what could possibly go wrong

Unrelated to this specific topic but more cryptocurrency fails. This reminds me of hardware wallets which, on the wallet show information about the transaction. Which seems smart, so you can make sure the data from your perhaps compromised machine is correct. Only, the problem with these wallets was that they didn't understand smart contracts. So if you got a smart contract you could still get hacked this way, because the information on the hardware wallet didn't make sense (there were fixes for this, but think most people only really went in to fix this after the North Koreans made off with billions of fake coins).

Was reading some science fiction from the 90's and the AI/AGI said 'im an analog computer, just like you, im actually really bad at math.' And I wonder how much damage these one of these ideas (the other being there are computer types that can do more/different things. Not sure if analog turing machines provide any new capabilities that digital TMs do, but I leave that question for the smarter people in the subject of theorethical computer science) did.

The idea that a smart computer will be worse at math (which makes sense from a storytelling perspective as a writer, because smart AI who also can do math super well is gonna be hard to write), which now leads people who read enough science fiction to see the machine that can't count nor run doom and go 'this is what they predicted!'.

Not a sneer just a random thought.

A hack can also just be a clever way to use a system in a way it wasnt designed.

Say you put a Ring doorbell on a drone as a perimeter defense thing? A hack. See also the woman who makes bad robots.

It also can be a certain playfulness with tech. Which is why hacker is dead. It cannot survive contact with capitalist forces.

“Why didn’t Iain take my neuroses into account??”

Yes, why didn't he take the neuroses of normal people into account. Normal people who spend 90% of their day worrying about the acausalrobotgod killing everybody.

Strikes me as they simply have never talked to normal people about immortality like that, even in a post scarcity world, lot of people simply don't feel like it would be worth their time to live forever in that.

Edit:

But one of my hobbies is “oppositional reading” – deliberately interpreting novels counter to the obvious / intended reading. And it’s not so clear to me that the Culture is all it is cracked up to be.

This isn't oppositional reading. This is an often discussed thing in the novels. So much so that the novels have counterarguments for a lot of the regular 'the culture is bad' arguments.

Anyway the article is so bad I wonder how well this person can read.

Edit part 2, can't let things go shouting electronic booo:

Sociopaths

They mention that sociopaths either get a 24/7 drone on them to guard them if they do crimes (more a general criminal thing) or if they are more megalomanic sociopaths they get to run out their desires in a virtual world (Which I assume runs a lot like the modern game Rust, where a subset of the playerbase seems to love to make 14 year old boys cry, going from the yt vids I saw). If this isn't enough, they will need to convince a Mind to help them. Because all large machines in The Culture are intelligent. Good luck with that. Also The Culture is not something like the glitter belt of Revelation Space, where somebody can sign a contract to give away their voting rights or something. So the power of a sociopath is already limited.

not solved alignment

They both have, and it doesn't matter. They have because any mind-equiv mind who goes mad gets destroyed (they literally need to take care of large group of humans or go mad, they have symbiotic relationship with humanity), or if they try to go foom they sublime, in the culture universe, sublimation is inevitable. (Therein also lies the real distopian part, considering sublimation is seen as so amazing that keeping a whole culture away from proven heaven seems like an angle to take, then the deathism also would be an argument, but more like that they let people die without going to heaven (but again, this is not subtext, culture not going poof is seen as very weird, only question is why a Yud-equiv mind doesn't come back to uplift the physical universe)).

A manipulated population

Not subtext, but simply text. Often criticized in various ways. But also a lot of behavior outside of the norm is tolerated, see the lava boat ride (where the only person not tolerated is the one having a 'this is a simulation' break). Or the guy just building a cable system.

Not mentioned:

consent

(This is also why humans are not pets).

It also comes from a mall cop (a very USA sort of concept) who was extremely afraid of getting shot at his job (more so than regular cops at the time) and who overreacted massively and wanted all kinds of weird gun attachments iirc. Sadly this paranoia is something that the US cops also suffer from now. Causing everybody to suffer.

E: wow I had misremembered how crazy the story was.