A 1956 film got the structure of this exactly right, including the part where the safety system identifies the threat, recognizes who it belongs to, and shuts itself down rather than act.
Love the bunkers. Nothing funnier than people who had the luxury of the entire world available to them deciding they'd rather live in a hole in the ground while the rule of law breaks down and their staff look at them... speculatively...
And their businesses collapse and their mansions are looted and burned and their stocks become worthless...
The jet? No fuel, no airports, no maintenance, no pilots, no first class lounges. The yacht? No ports, no crew, no fuel supplies, no gourmet food supplies. The bunker? Now owned by your bodyguard.
The people who more than anyone depend on everyone else to supply their every need are planning for the breakdown of that society?
Rather than ensuring the world that coddles them so wonderfully survives, they'll let it burn for the sale of a bigger number on the bank balance even if they later have to come out and face the survivors. Good luck with that, guys.
I don't think the bunkers are particularly meaningful.
If people with incredible wealth and power really believed that civilization was ending, they'd apply their wealth and power to prevent the end, because living in a hole in the ground is clearly going to suck compared to living large in an industrialized, technological society. And if they thought the end was coming but didn't think they were able to stop it, they'd put more thought and effort into planning for the end times than a tiny 5000 ft^2 bunker.
So, why build a bunker? Why *not* build a bunker? Even if you don't think societal collapse is likely, if you can build a small bunker for a negligible fraction of your wealth, why wouldn't you? It would be kind of fun, and maybe mildly comforting.
It would be interesting to see what someone with tens or hundreds of billions in assets and a *real* prepper mentality might do. Something like hollowing out a granite mountain to build a real end-of-the-world shelter, complete with a geothermal tap for endless power, big hydroponic farms, air filtration (or even submarine-style air regeneration!), manufacturing facilities, massive stores of supplies, equipment, even weapons. This would require millions of square feet, not 5000. They'd need to select the staff carefully and treat them very well, trying to construct some closed society which would keep them on top, or at least as a first-among-equals.
That's clearly not what Zuck's basement is. It's a basement, with a bit of extra reinforcement and probably some self-contained infrastructure because why not?
This is why I think these supposedly super intelligent idiots are really very, very stupid. They're so pampered and spoilt that they think they wealth and power will buy them out of any trouble. They cannot imagine what happens when their money isn't even worth the paper it's printed on.
They are not dumb, they just live in a separate universe with its own logic detached from everyday common sense.
They are become isolated from the real world that feeds them, a real world that they have come to despise and look down to. They forgot, or want to forget, that they are part of that ecosystem.
The story of Meta is the warning to them all. But since Meta survives well on inertia, they concluded "no big deal".
They're not dumb. They don't believe that civilization will end. Unless maybe because AI kills us all, but there's no way to survive that, so no point in preparation.
I'm not so sure. I certainly think they're not as smart as they think they are. I'm actually less worried about the threat of AI than climate change. There are a couple of premises behind AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that I think are false, mainly that a sufficiently complex neural network will become conscious. In many ways AI is a bit of a misnomer because it isn't intelligent in the way we usually describe our and other animals' intelligence. Basically, although even experts in AI don't fully understand how it does what it does, they're very sophisticated pattern matching machines. However, LLMs (Large Language Models) are notoriously bad at arithmetic (for example, I asked one to count the words in a paragraph I'd written, was suspicious of the answer so ended up counting them myself. It was wrong. I then repeated the experiment on a single sentence and it got that wrong too). One year for consciousness is the self-awareness test, whether you recognize a reflection of yourself as that. Among the frantically few species that can do that, the most noteworthy are certain birds, particularly members of the corvidae (crows, ravens, magpies &c) and parrots. They have much smaller brains than many species that don't recognize their reflections. That would indicate that there's more to consciousness or sentience than just size and complexity. Roger Penrose believe that there is a quantum element to consciousness (he wrote a book called ‘The Emperor's New Mind’ in which he discusses ideas about artificial intelligence).
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to reply, that's always greatly appreciated 🙏🏼.
That's not a personal bunker, it's an attempt to prevent humanity from being dependent on the survival of a single planet. Musk doesn't actually expect to move to Mars himself, he knows full well that even if everything goes smoothly (which it will not; there will be a lot of problems and challenges), he'll be long dead before life on Mars is as secure and comfortable as his life on Earth.
When I said it would be interesting to see what a real prepper with massive assets would do, I was actually thinking of Elon Musk. He's not a prepper, but if he were, he is exactly the sort of person who could and would design and build a "bunker" that stands a chance of enabling some people to survive and thrive in a civilization-ending catastrophe. It would be fascinating to see what he'd come up with.
Mars _is_ the failed planete. Mars and Venus represent the two faces of a coin, the two worst outcomes for Earth. Is Musk dreaming of living on failed Earth?
These bunkers are good preps for life on Mars..
Otherwise, this is still dependent on a single star, and that star is what sets the expiration date. Futile.
Going to another star? The closest star would require a thousand years journey: the ship will have to be its own self-sustainable world, like a wandering planete. Who would need a star if that was possible?
One basic rule in security that I learned from experience designing a few computer systems: the strongest security is not sustainable without a weak backdoor. Literally..
Let's show my age: the DEC's VMS OS had the "bypass" privilege, for a reason.. I was granted that privilege one day, after making the sysadmin's life way too busy for his taste: I needed lots of quotas I never knew existed.
Lone Skum is a moron. He came from a privileged, wealthy background in the first place and had made his money by taking credit, exploiting and/or stealing other people's ideas and inventions. His ‘success’ is the result of his ruthlessness and his apartheid mentality. It's given him the impression that he's smarter than everyone else when he's only meaner, nastier and has no scruples. I think he'd be happy to see the planet to go hell just to prove his superiority. Sadly, far too many of us have confused financial success with intelligence. There's a quote by David Orr on the subject of success:
“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
Exactly what you say. I'm and consistently perplexed by these supposedly intelligent people preparing for Armageddon when their wealth will become meaningless. What good is all the money in the world when there's nothing to spend it on? I've been making a similar point for at least a few decades: if living in, for example London where I happen to live, becomes increasingly unaffordable, if the teachers, nurses, cleaners, drivers and all the other people who provide the services the rich and powerful rely and depend on, so that they can no longer afford to live there, what happens? Briefly they may become playgrounds for the super wealthy, but inevitably they'll become ghost towns, populated only by the pampered and least able to look after themselves. It's so relentlessly stupid and self-defeating. It's as if they've become so presumptuous that their wealth will buy them out of any difficulties they may face. Well, good luck with that. Maybe then you'll learn that it's all pointless, that the true value of our lives doesn't lie with how much wealth, power of stuff we can accumulate, but in our connexion to one another and our planet. What they'll inherit after they've destroyed the rest of us is a desert. I imagine they'll get busy destroying each other too prove their supremacy. All that money is nothing but bits of paper, promissory notes, worthless when the promissors are all gone; numbers in systems that are just numbers when there's no one left to run and maintain the systems, never mind all the workers that supply the energy to keep them running.
BTW, I thought ‘Forbidden Planet’ was based on Shakespeare's ‘The Tempest’? I'm just curious how the analogy with the original bears up?
But they'll have soulless automatons to do their bidding and continue a simulation of life. They couldn't have possibly read or seen the plethora of science fiction media on this very subject. It doesn't end well. Usually, the survivor ends up ending themselves out of loneliness too late to realize all their wealth can't warm their heart, the heart they finally realize, again too late, they actually have.
Yes, exactly that. I'm also very skeptical that it'll work anytime soon. Computers don't work in the same way our brains do. Neutral nets are more like it, but our brains have more connexions than there are stars in the universe. When I first read that, I couldn't believe it, but it appears to be true, at least as far as the visible universe is concerned (by visible I mean traceable, infrared, radio &c). That alone should make us wonder at the incredible complexity and complication that we are.
I remember a sleepover at a friend‘s house in the 60s. I must’ve been 10 or 11. We watched Forbidden Planet on TV. When the Id starts climbing the ladder and crushing the steps, I freaked out so severely that my friend‘s parents had to call my parents to come and pick me up. The movie scared the living shit out of me. I wasn’t able to watch it for decades.
When ALIEN first came on cable, it aired one night at 1:30 am. I was probably 12 or 13. I set my alarm for 1am, woke up made myself a bowl of cereal, turned on every light in the house, and had THE SHIT scared out of me, so it was a good thing I turned all those lights on. Needless to say, I couldn’t go back to sleep. My experience with aliens had been ET, Close Encounters, STAR WARS, and War of the Worlds, in which the aliens were subdued by a sneeze…then Ridley Scott showed me a near invincible biomechanical killing machine that tore through an armed 8 member crew like they we’re mannequins and my whole view of space (in which no one can hear you scream) changed forever…
One of the great things about being an adult is looking back at how terrified you were of a film you chose to watch. Then after you first experience being unable to sleep even with the lights on after the scary movie you did it again with an even more terrifying film. Good times.
Yes, the same thing happened to me with the Time Machine as a child, and then with the Exorcist as an adult. Needless to say, I am not a fan of scary movies. Reading the news is scary enough
Fantastic story, epic in its scope, brilliant in its execution, well acted, with groundbreaking use of an electronic musical score. No bug eyed monsters but a marvellous robot that was a character in its own right. A ground breaking SciFi film that respected the material? and that is still entertaining 70 years later.
Nothing like a good Armageddon narrative to go with my morning tea. I do wonder about the logistics. If Skynet launces all the missiles and kills all the people, there will be no one left to man the power stations and maintain the electrical grid (technology has not quite reached the point of building and maintaining itself); if the electrical grid goes down, Skynet goes down, so maybe these prognostications are a bit premature?
The Krell are fictitious! It’s a science fiction story! It’s not a historical record. Star Trek also has the technology to give everyone everything they ever wanted! Matter energy technology, AI super computers, Galaxy spanning internet, Warp drive, shit, virtual immortality! It’s easy, and very, very lazy to pick and choose a fictional narrative to support your biased point of view and hilarious to say the least”OMG! Look what happened to this completely made up civilization! If it happened to the Krell, it can happen to us!!!” Hilarious!
Love the bunkers. Nothing funnier than people who had the luxury of the entire world available to them deciding they'd rather live in a hole in the ground while the rule of law breaks down and their staff look at them... speculatively...
And their businesses collapse and their mansions are looted and burned and their stocks become worthless...
The jet? No fuel, no airports, no maintenance, no pilots, no first class lounges. The yacht? No ports, no crew, no fuel supplies, no gourmet food supplies. The bunker? Now owned by your bodyguard.
The people who more than anyone depend on everyone else to supply their every need are planning for the breakdown of that society?
Rather than ensuring the world that coddles them so wonderfully survives, they'll let it burn for the sale of a bigger number on the bank balance even if they later have to come out and face the survivors. Good luck with that, guys.
I don't think the bunkers are particularly meaningful.
If people with incredible wealth and power really believed that civilization was ending, they'd apply their wealth and power to prevent the end, because living in a hole in the ground is clearly going to suck compared to living large in an industrialized, technological society. And if they thought the end was coming but didn't think they were able to stop it, they'd put more thought and effort into planning for the end times than a tiny 5000 ft^2 bunker.
So, why build a bunker? Why *not* build a bunker? Even if you don't think societal collapse is likely, if you can build a small bunker for a negligible fraction of your wealth, why wouldn't you? It would be kind of fun, and maybe mildly comforting.
It would be interesting to see what someone with tens or hundreds of billions in assets and a *real* prepper mentality might do. Something like hollowing out a granite mountain to build a real end-of-the-world shelter, complete with a geothermal tap for endless power, big hydroponic farms, air filtration (or even submarine-style air regeneration!), manufacturing facilities, massive stores of supplies, equipment, even weapons. This would require millions of square feet, not 5000. They'd need to select the staff carefully and treat them very well, trying to construct some closed society which would keep them on top, or at least as a first-among-equals.
That's clearly not what Zuck's basement is. It's a basement, with a bit of extra reinforcement and probably some self-contained infrastructure because why not?
This is why I think these supposedly super intelligent idiots are really very, very stupid. They're so pampered and spoilt that they think they wealth and power will buy them out of any trouble. They cannot imagine what happens when their money isn't even worth the paper it's printed on.
They are not dumb, they just live in a separate universe with its own logic detached from everyday common sense.
They are become isolated from the real world that feeds them, a real world that they have come to despise and look down to. They forgot, or want to forget, that they are part of that ecosystem.
The story of Meta is the warning to them all. But since Meta survives well on inertia, they concluded "no big deal".
Hubris.
They're not dumb. They don't believe that civilization will end. Unless maybe because AI kills us all, but there's no way to survive that, so no point in preparation.
I'm not so sure. I certainly think they're not as smart as they think they are. I'm actually less worried about the threat of AI than climate change. There are a couple of premises behind AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that I think are false, mainly that a sufficiently complex neural network will become conscious. In many ways AI is a bit of a misnomer because it isn't intelligent in the way we usually describe our and other animals' intelligence. Basically, although even experts in AI don't fully understand how it does what it does, they're very sophisticated pattern matching machines. However, LLMs (Large Language Models) are notoriously bad at arithmetic (for example, I asked one to count the words in a paragraph I'd written, was suspicious of the answer so ended up counting them myself. It was wrong. I then repeated the experiment on a single sentence and it got that wrong too). One year for consciousness is the self-awareness test, whether you recognize a reflection of yourself as that. Among the frantically few species that can do that, the most noteworthy are certain birds, particularly members of the corvidae (crows, ravens, magpies &c) and parrots. They have much smaller brains than many species that don't recognize their reflections. That would indicate that there's more to consciousness or sentience than just size and complexity. Roger Penrose believe that there is a quantum element to consciousness (he wrote a book called ‘The Emperor's New Mind’ in which he discusses ideas about artificial intelligence).
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to reply, that's always greatly appreciated 🙏🏼.
Something like building a civilization on Mars, maybe?
That's not a personal bunker, it's an attempt to prevent humanity from being dependent on the survival of a single planet. Musk doesn't actually expect to move to Mars himself, he knows full well that even if everything goes smoothly (which it will not; there will be a lot of problems and challenges), he'll be long dead before life on Mars is as secure and comfortable as his life on Earth.
When I said it would be interesting to see what a real prepper with massive assets would do, I was actually thinking of Elon Musk. He's not a prepper, but if he were, he is exactly the sort of person who could and would design and build a "bunker" that stands a chance of enabling some people to survive and thrive in a civilization-ending catastrophe. It would be fascinating to see what he'd come up with.
Mars _is_ the failed planete. Mars and Venus represent the two faces of a coin, the two worst outcomes for Earth. Is Musk dreaming of living on failed Earth?
These bunkers are good preps for life on Mars..
Otherwise, this is still dependent on a single star, and that star is what sets the expiration date. Futile.
Going to another star? The closest star would require a thousand years journey: the ship will have to be its own self-sustainable world, like a wandering planete. Who would need a star if that was possible?
I'd assume an extinct volcano would come into it, and the word "lair". Probably a cat...
Have you seen the latest series of Silo?
A metal door filled with concrete? How do you open it when the power fails?
Did you miss the "escape hatch" part? :-)
One basic rule in security that I learned from experience designing a few computer systems: the strongest security is not sustainable without a weak backdoor. Literally..
Let's show my age: the DEC's VMS OS had the "bypass" privilege, for a reason.. I was granted that privilege one day, after making the sysadmin's life way too busy for his taste: I needed lots of quotas I never knew existed.
Slowly
Good hinges. You can overcome inertia, friction is more difficult.
Lone Skum is a moron. He came from a privileged, wealthy background in the first place and had made his money by taking credit, exploiting and/or stealing other people's ideas and inventions. His ‘success’ is the result of his ruthlessness and his apartheid mentality. It's given him the impression that he's smarter than everyone else when he's only meaner, nastier and has no scruples. I think he'd be happy to see the planet to go hell just to prove his superiority. Sadly, far too many of us have confused financial success with intelligence. There's a quote by David Orr on the subject of success:
“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
Exactly what you say. I'm and consistently perplexed by these supposedly intelligent people preparing for Armageddon when their wealth will become meaningless. What good is all the money in the world when there's nothing to spend it on? I've been making a similar point for at least a few decades: if living in, for example London where I happen to live, becomes increasingly unaffordable, if the teachers, nurses, cleaners, drivers and all the other people who provide the services the rich and powerful rely and depend on, so that they can no longer afford to live there, what happens? Briefly they may become playgrounds for the super wealthy, but inevitably they'll become ghost towns, populated only by the pampered and least able to look after themselves. It's so relentlessly stupid and self-defeating. It's as if they've become so presumptuous that their wealth will buy them out of any difficulties they may face. Well, good luck with that. Maybe then you'll learn that it's all pointless, that the true value of our lives doesn't lie with how much wealth, power of stuff we can accumulate, but in our connexion to one another and our planet. What they'll inherit after they've destroyed the rest of us is a desert. I imagine they'll get busy destroying each other too prove their supremacy. All that money is nothing but bits of paper, promissory notes, worthless when the promissors are all gone; numbers in systems that are just numbers when there's no one left to run and maintain the systems, never mind all the workers that supply the energy to keep them running.
BTW, I thought ‘Forbidden Planet’ was based on Shakespeare's ‘The Tempest’? I'm just curious how the analogy with the original bears up?
But they'll have soulless automatons to do their bidding and continue a simulation of life. They couldn't have possibly read or seen the plethora of science fiction media on this very subject. It doesn't end well. Usually, the survivor ends up ending themselves out of loneliness too late to realize all their wealth can't warm their heart, the heart they finally realize, again too late, they actually have.
Yes, exactly that. I'm also very skeptical that it'll work anytime soon. Computers don't work in the same way our brains do. Neutral nets are more like it, but our brains have more connexions than there are stars in the universe. When I first read that, I couldn't believe it, but it appears to be true, at least as far as the visible universe is concerned (by visible I mean traceable, infrared, radio &c). That alone should make us wonder at the incredible complexity and complication that we are.
I saw Forbidden Planet as a kid and it was brilliant. It’s always haunted me.
Did you know that it's based on Shakespeare's ‘The Tempest’?
I do recall reading that, yes.
Yes, and that’s appropriate, because Bill was typically using older sources for his material (like Lear and Macbeth).
I remember a sleepover at a friend‘s house in the 60s. I must’ve been 10 or 11. We watched Forbidden Planet on TV. When the Id starts climbing the ladder and crushing the steps, I freaked out so severely that my friend‘s parents had to call my parents to come and pick me up. The movie scared the living shit out of me. I wasn’t able to watch it for decades.
I feel this…
When ALIEN first came on cable, it aired one night at 1:30 am. I was probably 12 or 13. I set my alarm for 1am, woke up made myself a bowl of cereal, turned on every light in the house, and had THE SHIT scared out of me, so it was a good thing I turned all those lights on. Needless to say, I couldn’t go back to sleep. My experience with aliens had been ET, Close Encounters, STAR WARS, and War of the Worlds, in which the aliens were subdued by a sneeze…then Ridley Scott showed me a near invincible biomechanical killing machine that tore through an armed 8 member crew like they we’re mannequins and my whole view of space (in which no one can hear you scream) changed forever…
One of the great things about being an adult is looking back at how terrified you were of a film you chose to watch. Then after you first experience being unable to sleep even with the lights on after the scary movie you did it again with an even more terrifying film. Good times.
Yes, the same thing happened to me with the Time Machine as a child, and then with the Exorcist as an adult. Needless to say, I am not a fan of scary movies. Reading the news is scary enough
NDAs. That’s cute. They’ll be in for a rude surprise when those contractors drag them out of their holes.
We haven’t learned “alignment” between humans? What makes us think we can teach AI?
Fantastic story, epic in its scope, brilliant in its execution, well acted, with groundbreaking use of an electronic musical score. No bug eyed monsters but a marvellous robot that was a character in its own right. A ground breaking SciFi film that respected the material? and that is still entertaining 70 years later.
At the late night…double feature…picture show…
In the back row…
Yesterday's science fiction is today's science fact.
The robot uprising will not begin when the robots start defying us. It will start when they are capable of carrying out our orders. All of our orders.
Wow, over a year ago. Damn. LoL anyway it is very short and you might like it.
https://michael162478.substack.com/p/playing-with-train-for-real?r=4mt31t&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Nice! The analogous bond has been strengthened!
Nothing like a good Armageddon narrative to go with my morning tea. I do wonder about the logistics. If Skynet launces all the missiles and kills all the people, there will be no one left to man the power stations and maintain the electrical grid (technology has not quite reached the point of building and maintaining itself); if the electrical grid goes down, Skynet goes down, so maybe these prognostications are a bit premature?
The Krell are fictitious! It’s a science fiction story! It’s not a historical record. Star Trek also has the technology to give everyone everything they ever wanted! Matter energy technology, AI super computers, Galaxy spanning internet, Warp drive, shit, virtual immortality! It’s easy, and very, very lazy to pick and choose a fictional narrative to support your biased point of view and hilarious to say the least”OMG! Look what happened to this completely made up civilization! If it happened to the Krell, it can happen to us!!!” Hilarious!
Who could possibly dream of living the rest of his life in a bunker? Tech bros are terminally insane.
As I recall, several of the sci-fi movies back then seemed to end with the message "There are some things man was not meant to know."
Looks like they called it.
I referenced this movie so many times since we invented the internet 😵💫
I think one of the best movies ever made.