20 Comments

“Set it past midnight and see what happens.”

That got a hearty chuckle from me. Brilliant.

Expand full comment

What happens is the cuckoo finally comes out.

Expand full comment

And yet, no one single AI MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE can tell me why its important. Not one..

Expand full comment

Perhaps the Doom Clock has AM and PM reversed, like in Seinfeld. We will probably be annihilated when we are sound asleep and waiting for the alarm to go off.

Expand full comment

😂😂

Expand full comment

You and I know that AI is nothing but a piece of code where outputs deterministically follow inputs. Why does it appear to be more? Because the logic is obscured.

It is a similar power to what is so often attributed to 'randomization'. And if we analyze both thoughts then it is clear that it is the hiding, the obscuring, which is makes the power seem credible. Perhaps I have never seen this faith in occultation so plainly as I remember seeing it in '22 and '23 in Western strategy in the Ukraine war. The US plan was literally just to lie. 'You've got artillery and infantry we've got fibber ninjas counterfeit-fu.' Do I need to point out the source of this fabulistic faith?

Expand full comment

"Set it past midnight" Well I sure laughed! In 1999 I set my computer clock to past 2000 and did very well reselling my toilet paper.

Doc, I love your sense of humour!

Expand full comment

😂😂

Expand full comment

“Transitions between the aeons always seem to have been melancholy and despairing times, as for instance the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt… between Taurus and Aries, or the melancholy of the Augustinian age between Aries and Pisces. And now we are moving into Aquarius, of which the Sibylline Books say: Luciferi vires accendit Aquarius acres (Aquarius inflames the savage forces of Lucifer). And we are only at the beginning of this apocalyptic development!" C. G. Jung

Apocryphal curse: May you live in interesting times.

Expand full comment

Did your mother not tell you that it is not nice to mock the afflicted?

"Set it to past midnight and see what happens."

That is just cruel.

Expand full comment

There's a 1950's black and white film featuring a "scientist" with a pretty blonde assistant/fiance, who works on an artificial intelligence project. He succeeds without at first realising it and the computer falls in love with his woman and tries to kill him by smashing the lift into the basement. How any of this magic is achieved - using valve technology no less - is never even hinted at, it's all just flashing lights and beeps and handwaving.

But it reminds me that I've been hearing Doom! forecasts about AI >>AGI and nuclear war for my entire life.

I am not young, and perhaps that accounts for my no longer believing any of it. However long I may live, life is just too short for that nonsense.

Expand full comment

One could infer that with an oversupply of paperclips, paperwork for everything would need to increase to compensate and we all die under a mountain of TPS reports in triplicate. So maybe that guy is on to something.

PS. I clicked that link, read two sentences, and immediately decided I would not waste minutes of my life finishing.

Expand full comment

well, i'm not sure what moving it farther away from midnight does...

does it mean "peace and safety" ?

reminds me of something about sudden destruction.

1 Thessalonians 5:3

Expand full comment

By the looks of it the Doom Clock was at its lowest when people were getting shot dead in Sarajevo and started to rise when Monica Lewinksy was getting down to business.

Expand full comment

Smiled at the jab (lol) you threw at Taleb. I remember aggressively tearing up the two books of his I owned after seeing him go full Covid re—(won’t write it out for reasons of politeness, but you get what I mean). His entire credibility vanished, like a black swan in the dark.

Expand full comment

Same here .. I was a big Taleb fan, but put his books in the trash when he went full COVID **tard. What got my goat was that in his books he showed how to see life through a philosophical lense and came across as wise old stoic. But when the voodoo virus took to the airwaves he messed his underwear.

Expand full comment

The Doomsday Clock was always just commie propaganda, fear-mongering by fools.

Expand full comment

"The Doomsday Clock's origin can be traced to the international group of researchers called the Chicago Atomic Scientists, who had participated in the Manhattan Project."

Nope it is pure American.

Commie, like Racist or Terrorist just means something that you personally don't approve of.

Expand full comment

I love how the first graph ("seconds to midnight") and the third graph (blow-up of "probability of doom") are mirror images of each other. A wise man I know once said something along the lines of, "A model is going to say what it is told to say."

Expand full comment

Yes, a one to one function of each other.

Expand full comment