this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

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What's more likely in the techno-fascist idiocracy of the 21st Century?

We somehow manage to turn statistical models into super-intelligence... or the incompetent, criminally-corrupt, sociopathic leadership at the top of capitalism train an AI to defend the rich from the working class — by training it to be the most efficient killing machine possible — integrate it into fully autonomous killing machines, and it (accurately) determines the most efficient way to kill 99% of humanity is to start a nuclear war?

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[–] Iconoclast@feddit.uk 1 points 1 day ago (3 children)

And llms have no chance of becoming anything similar

I don't think we have the grounds to make this kind of absolute statement. How could anyone possibly know? I'm fine with people proclaiming even extremely high confidence for it being the case but to say it absolutely is so without leaving any chance for the possibility of being proven wrong just seems arrogant.

[–] ech@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 day ago

I'm not claiming there's no chance of a true AI ever being created, but even a cursory understanding of how llms work is enough to know it won't ever lead to anything more than the text-generator it is. It might be a part of the process leading to the former, but it's simply not enough on it's own. Treating it otherwise just plays into the hands of the techbros trying to upsell the lie.

[–] partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Because an LLM doesn’t scale to generalized intelligence. That’s obvious when you look at the scale issues, such as hallucination.

Whatever technology would have potential to produce AGI, it might be similar to LLMs but procedurally it will be a different thing.

IMO, the closest we might get is akin to comparing a porta-potty versus a house. A porta-potty can never become a house. You need more plumbing, a kitchen, …

[–] Iconoclast@feddit.uk -1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

General intelligence doesn't imply never making errors or hallucinating facts that simply aren't true. Humans do that all the time. I know the topic isn't particularly popular here but I feel like most people aren't quite giving LLMs the credit they deserve. They're far from perfect and riddled with glaringly obvious issues in both a technical and moral sense but they also do perform pretty damn good for what they are. Will it lead to general intelligence? Who knows, but based on what I've seen I'm sure not getting more confident that it absolutely won't.

[–] partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

There’s a fundamental difference between AI hallucinations and humans believing something which is incorrect.

With an AI, it’s a problem of statistics. The context window biases the model in just the right way to produce an answer which is incorrect. But, to the model, the answer was correct. That’s to say, it didn’t just fuck up its calculations… no, it arrived at the correct, albeit incorrect, solution.

That’s not the same as what a human experiences in its “hallucinations.” Not even close. Often, a human can sense that something is off (to say the least).

A human can work out their own error. An LLM can not. That’s not because an LLM isn’t good enough to do so. It’s because the LLM is missing something important. Once you add that thing into the architecture, I’d argue it’s de-facto no longer an LLM. Because, by that point, they’re leveraging new science for new behaviors in a much more complex system which overcomes the universal scale limitations of LLMs.

That’s my logic in a nutshell. LLMs might “lead” to AGI simply for the fact that it makes obvious we still haven’t achieved AGI, and so people would ideally start looking toward other approaches.

To me, an LLM is perhaps one subsystem in what should be a pretty large ecosystem of tooling. AGI would likely be the whole system, not just the LLM and really the LLM doesn’t deserve the credit (imo).

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 1 points 1 day ago

I'm hearing very knowledgeable people say they are extremely concerned when we start getting to the 6th or 7th iteration, which isn't that far off.

I'm too stupid to make those predictions myself, but I'm not too stupid to listen to people who are smarter than me about it, and I'm not going to pretend I'm smarter, just so I can invent my own truth to soothe my fears, rather than deal with the actual situation.