Hacker Cinema
Deep Blue Sea
1999 · Film · 105 min
Directed by Renny Harlin
Researchers on the undersea lab Aquatica have genetically altered the brains of captive sharks to develop a cure for Alzheimer's disease. But there's an unexpected side effect: the sharks got smarter, faster, and more dangerous. After a big storm damages their remote research facility, they must fight for their lives.
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I listened in person when Altman was in Berlin for a talk, and the whole room besides me and like two people were clapping like he won an Olympic medal, while I thought to myself, “This reminds me of the scene from Deep Blue Sea where the girlfriend of the head scientist is bragging to LL Cool J’s character Preacher how brilliant her bf is as a scientist.”
And then the cam zooms to a picture of the silhouette of the scientist standing on a wall with the back to the audience, pissing into the sea, and then pans back to Preacher’s face, and he goes totally unimpressed:
"How smart can he be? He is pissing against the wind."
The scientist dies btw, because he was indeed less smart than everyone thought he is, but you need to watch the movie to see that. Not gonna spoil how, it was amusing tho.
That’s Altman. He is pissing against the wind.
Everyone is talking about how AI will displace jobs. Oracle just fired 30k people with an email because of their AI investment. LinkedIn CEOs bragging every day how AI replaced some of their teams.
Losing your job, especially in the US without a proper social system to dampen the fall for a large part of people who have saved less than a grand in the bank, means they lose their home, they lose the ability to pay for their healthcare, which means they lose their ability to earn money and compete for jobs on the market with people who simply had the luck of being healthy.
For those people, AI, how it is currently projected, is indeed a matter of life and death. And none of them want to basically get murdered by proxy.
If Altman really was that smart, OpenAI would have pushed for everyone losing their jobs because of AI having a path in front of them they can walk without falling off the cliff and drowning into the sea below, before talking about how many humans this technology is going to replace to make rich people even richer.
But he didn’t, neither did any of the other CEOs who have the ear of the President and frequently dine with him.
What billionaires value more than money is their freedom. That’s something the people can take away from them. You can develop your ai future throwing average Joe under the bus from a bunker, but no longer leave your home or send your kids to school. Without proper external stimuli, those "great minds" will just wilt away.
When Brazil threatened Musk with an international arrest warrant, which would have gotten him stuck in the US for an unforeseeable amount of time, he backed off really fast from mobilising his X army, causing trouble for Brazilian judges.
You and I would probably use the Democracy toolbox to fight against Altman if we had to, but I bet we two are also not starving or no longer able to buy a simple asthma inhaler to keep breathing when we lose our jobs.
This is a problem AI companies created for themselves, and I wonder why they can’t solve it with AI.
Would be a great use case, wouldn’t it?
This sounds like the setup for a horror movie. Deep Blue Sea, but octopi.
Directors Commentaries and behind the scenes documents were (and still are to an extent) the main reason I buy physical Blu-Rays.
Apple's store (not Apple TV, but the one you can "buy" movies from) has actual extras for a good selection, but they're still at the whim of one company to take away.
Nothing will ever beat three things, the cast commentary on Tropic Thunder ("Man, I don't drop character 'till I done the DVD commentary." - and he doesn't), the commentary on Deep Blue Sea (Samuel Jackson f's off the studio when his character dies halfway) and the sheer insane volume of BTS material on the LOTR extended DVD boxes.
@jstewartmobile wrote: "Augmenting human intelligence, while leaving the hearts as they are, is a loss, not a gain."
That is a brilliant insight that more intelligence may be a bad thing if your heart is in the wrong place. Sorry to see your comment being downmodded and greyed out. At the risk of the same happening to me, here is support for your point on "heart".
Albert Einstein said in the 1940s: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
More by Einstein: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm "But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."
And Lewis Mumford said in the 1930s: "As a civilization, we have not yet entered the neotechnic phase: we are still living between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, in a cultural pseudomorph.... Paleotechnic purposes with neotechnic means, that is the most obvious characteristic of the present order." (Technics and Civilization pp. 265-267)
Thus my own sig standing on the shoulders of giants: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
I participated in Doug Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution II Colloquium run by Stanford. I brought up some similar ideas there as well. Like in this email thread I started: "[unrev-II] Is 'bootstrapping' part of the problem?" http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/2168.html "This is one reason why I think just stating the Bootstrap's Institute's (or the colloquium's) goal of "bootstrapping" human or organizational ability as a goal is not adequate. It has to be a question of bootstrapping towards what end? There has to be an accompanying statement of human value."
I've continued to develop that theme elsewhere, like: "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism (2010)" http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream."
The dangers of increasing intellect unmatched by increasing heart was also a underlying theme in my book-length essay "Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease (2008)" http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
A lengthy extract from there:
"""
Let's flip back to the beginning of PAW and try again to find a more challenging article that explains PU mythology.
Perhaps the president's letter on page 2, "A Library for Scientists" will do.
PU President Shirley Tilghman describes a new library that will replace several "isolated" departmental science libraries with one "scientific" library. According to her letter, the new library "will symbolize the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the work in these fields on our campus". The question is, where do you even begin to tell a university president so obviously proud of her new library that making science and engineering studies even more isolated from the humanities is the opposite of what Princeton University needs to do to survive as an ethically viable institution? And that splitting ethics from innovation was at the root cause of a lot of evil in the world in the past? There is a lot of talk of facilitating "interdisciplinary" work in her letter, but if you read between the lines, you'll see that the implication is it will be between different branches of science and engineering, not say, between biologists and sociologists, or mechanical engineers and historians.
In case Professor Tilghman has not noticed, there is a picture on page 21 of that same issue of PAW of a shark about to eat a Princetonian floating in DeNunzio Pool [...] Maybe she had better look into that? It can't be good PR under any circumstances, can it? I had not known PU's scientists had got that far in their shark breeding experiments as they are sometimes hard to keep in captivity (real scientists, not sharks. OK, that's just a joke, both are hard to keep in captivity. :-) [...] Still, are those PU scientists and engineers doing a good thing? Wouldn't it make it harder to recruit prospective talent for the PU swim team? Or are the sharks in DeNunzio part of some new training regime? Unless that is supposed to be a visiting Yalie about to get eaten? That seems a little harsh, even by intercollegiate competitive standards. :-(
Still, maybe rather that "make the world a better place through advances in scientific understanding", perhaps when you make an anti-social shark "smarter" (with or without the laser beam :-), what do you have except a bigger problem? :-(
For example from a review of "Deep Blue Sea": "So, in an effort to save their funding, they want to take one really good go at making this...serum? I don't remember, brain activating protein...stuff. So, they conduct their test on the shark. And it WORKS! Yay! Congratulations all around! These guys f--ing rule! And it's all parties and cupcakes until someone's arm gets eaten."
Also [from another review]: "Some scientists are out in the middle of the ocean, trying to reproduce proteins in shark's brains. These proteins are the cure for Alzheimer's, and one character even gives a half-assed speech about how she's driven by memories of her father's mental illness. Well, to harvest more protein, that scientist makes the shark's brains four times bigger than normal and now the shark's are super-smart and eat all the scientists. Hooray."
I'm sorry to say that the internet consensus on PU's smarter sharks is that they are not a good idea. :-( Or maybe "Deep Blue Sea" was just a poorly made horror film. :-)
"""
To be clear, I feel Doug's heart was in the right place -- even if he maybe took that for granted in others.
Isn't this basically the plot of the movie Deep Blue Sea?