[HN Gopher] Stanislaw Lem's vision of artificial life
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Stanislaw Lem's vision of artificial life
Author : axiomdata316
Score : 296 points
Date : 2023-11-30 16:35 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| >Contemporary research in artificial life has validated Lem's
| insight that swarms of artificial beings require only a few
| simple rules to manifest complex behaviors and hence each member
| needs to carry only a little cognitive power onboard.
|
| Sounds like Conway's Game of Life
| 0xEF wrote:
| More or less, that's what Game of Life was intended to
| illustrate. Extremely complex systems can, and often do, evolve
| from a few seemingly simple rules. This sorta takes the
| "spontaneity" out of the more fanciful versions of the origins
| of life, instead rendering life the inevitable outcome of given
| circumstances. This is why we think we can detect^1 life in the
| universe, if it exists without actually travelling to other
| planets.
|
| 1. aka "make educated guesses with a good degree of certainty"
| swayvil wrote:
| Only a few rules are necessary for complexity.
|
| In ALife systems (Conway etc).
|
| In Fractals (Mandelbrot etc).
|
| In random number generation (Mersenne Twister etc)
|
| Maybe, in the big picture, complexity is trivial to create.
| amne wrote:
| IIRC Stargate's replicators are a close enough visualization of
| such an artificial lifeform where swarms self-assemble in some
| kind of organic shapes (most likely for cinematic purposes) and
| their only goal is to consume matter to create more of
| themselves. At least they were not building paperclips.
| airstrike wrote:
| Luckily the Milky Way replicators are easier to deal with!
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The franchise really went down in quality with the last
| movie, Big Hero 6.
| sedatk wrote:
| The notion predates Stargate though.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
| cout wrote:
| Stargate replicators are macroscopic, so they are replicating
| machines, not grey goo.
| dihrbtk wrote:
| The Pegasus galaxy ones are nanites, aren't they?
| ajuc wrote:
| Lem has a book about almost any subject related to
| science/philosophy you can imagine.
|
| Here he writes about ChatGPT :)
|
| https://mwichary.medium.com/one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-sec...
|
| Here as well: https://electricliterature.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/11/Tr...
|
| And here about Ebooks and Audiobooks:
|
| http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1024
| mcv wrote:
| All the hubub about ChatGPT made me think a lot about Trurl's
| poetry machine from The Cyberiad. Especially Nick Cave and
| others declaring it the death of creativity, compared to the
| protesting poets from the story.
| johngossman wrote:
| Me too. And I recently learned that Calvino wrote an essay
| that included the idea of a poetry writing machine. Now I'm
| super curious whether Lem got the idea from Calvino, vice
| versa, or whether it was independently invented by each. I
| know they read each other.
|
| https://lab.cccb.org/en/did-calvino-dream-of-literary-
| androi...
| mcv wrote:
| My theory is that he started with some silly poems and
| wrote the rest of the story around them.
| lioeters wrote:
| The idea of an artificial person goes back to pre-science
| ("magic"), ancient history and mythology.
|
| > Arguably the oldest known story of something
| approximating AI can be found in the eighth-century-bc
| Iliad, Homer's epic poem of the Trojan War. In it,
| Hephaestus, disabled god of metalworking, creates golden
| handmaidens to help him in his forge: "In them is
| understanding in their hearts, and in them speech and
| strength, and they know cunning handiwork".
|
| > ..In her 2018 book Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and
| Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor describes how
| ancient cultures explored the idea of artificial life.
| Ancient Greeks were skilled in metalwork and mechanics and
| created a great deal of automata, including a puppet
| theatre that could perform an entire play.
|
| The idea of a poetry-writing machine can also be traced
| back in history, hinted at in the Kabbalah, or machines of
| ancient China. (Source?) In the work of Leibniz, "On the
| Combinatorial Art" (1666), he explores:
|
| > The main idea behind the text is that of an alphabet of
| human thought, which is attributed to Descartes. All
| concepts are nothing but combinations of a relatively small
| number of simple concepts, just as words are combinations
| of letters.
|
| > All truths may be expressed as appropriate combinations
| of concepts, which can in turn be decomposed into simple
| ideas, rendering the analysis much easier. Therefore, this
| alphabet would provide a logic of invention..
| gattr wrote:
| When I got older, I realized the sneakiness here (shortening
| and quoting from memory):
|
| > Trurl realized that a poet's mind is shaped by the
| civilization that produced him, and that civilization - by
| the one before it, and so on. So in order to create an
| artificial poet, he'd have to simulate the whole history of
| the Universe. Which he did, but then from the results _chose
| only the important bits_ as inputs for the learning process,
| otherwise it would take too long...
| ajuc wrote:
| He almost described prunning :)
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Seems to me more like selection of entries in the
| training corpus than pruning.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| regarding 137 seconds
|
| I remember reading book about stock exchange Ai predicting
| terrorist attack casualties and then predicted 100k dead in
| London
|
| has anyone else read smth like that and remembers the name?
| crywas wrote:
| The Fear Index by Robert Harris, 2011
| cubefox wrote:
| He was actually more explicit elsewhere. Lem's book Imaginary
| Magnitude consists of a collection of prefaces to nonexistent
| books. One of them is for "Juan Rambellais et al., A History of
| Bitic Literature, Volume I". The "bitic" literature consists of
| novels written by, well, language models. You would feed in the
| combined work of Tolstoy, and out comes a new "Tolstoy" novel.
|
| When I first read this "preface" twenty years ago, the idea
| seemed implausible to me: How could a system write novels only
| by being fed other novels, and without simultaneously being a
| general intelligence? Surely novel writing is AGI-complete!
| jon_richards wrote:
| That's basically the entire history of artificial
| intelligence. We used to think a robot capable of vacuuming
| your house would be "AI" and now roombas just bounce around
| the floor semi-randomly. The task didn't change, our respect
| for it did.
|
| At this point the definition of AI is practically "Something
| computers can't do yet", though I'm partial to its corollary
| "Any sufficiently misunderstood algorithm is AI."
| hahajk wrote:
| I heard Vint Cerf describe the original AI algorithms as
| basically "heuristic algorithms". "AI" was used to
| described a class of algorithms that only worked some of
| the time as opposed to the mathematically proven
| algorithms.
| prithee wrote:
| This quote from "Non Serviam" section of "A Perfect Vacuum"
| by Lem also hints at future stochastic parrots argument.
|
| _The machine will employ, as the need arises, the pro- noun
| "I" and all its grammatical inflections. This, however, is a
| hoax! The machine will still be closer to a billion
| chattering parrots--howsoever brilliantly trained the parrots
| be--than to the simplest, most stupid man. It mimics the
| behavior of a man on the purely linguistic plane and nothing
| more. Nothing will amuse such a machine, or surprise it, or
| confuse it, or alarm it, or distress it, because it is
| psychologically and individually No One. It is a Voice giving
| utterance to matters, supplying an- swers to questions; it is
| a Logic capable of defeating the best chess player; it is--
| or, rather, it can become--a consummate imitator of
| everything, an actor, if you will, brought to the pinnacle of
| perfection, performing any programmed role--but an actor and
| an imitator that is, within, completely empty. One cannot
| count on its sympathy, or on its antipathy. It works toward
| no self-set goal; to a degree eternally beyond the con-
| ception of any man it "doesn't care," for as a person it
| simply does not exist.... It is a wondrously efficient
| combinatorial mechanism, nothing more._
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Wow, that's accurate (1971).
| baxtr wrote:
| Which of his books do you recommend to start with? I haven't
| read any yet.
| johngossman wrote:
| Cyberiad or Star Diaries are good starts for the humorous
| (but still philosophical) stuff. Solaris is his best known
| work, serious, and excellent. It's tricky because Lem is
| almost two authors, one serious and one ironic leading to
| zany. Everything is short, so easy to just try.
| TomaszZielinski wrote:
| And (IIRC) in Summa Technologiae he wrote about a moon-sized
| device, where recordings of all possible answers to all to
| possible questions were stored, and how a conversation with
| such device would be indistinguishable from a conversation with
| a human.
| 2f0ja wrote:
| Cixin Liu has a great short story 'Cloud of Poems' in which
| an alien intelligence seeks to write every possible
| permutation of traditional Chinese poetry, to show up a human
| poet.
|
| I didn't bother to check the math on this, but in the story
| there is not enough matter in the universe to in some way
| encode every possible traditional Chinese poem!
| ajuc wrote:
| > but in the story there is not enough matter in the
| universe to in some way encode every possible traditional
| Chinese poem!
|
| In fact if you formally describe how you generate the
| permutations that's one of such encodings of these
| permutations (and the optimal one - see Kolmogorov
| Complexity :) ).
|
| So there is definitely enough matter to do it. Similarly we
| can encode PI despite it having infinite number of digits.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| This seems like a reference-object error (a denotation
| error, or sense-reference error in philosophical terms),
| except the functional definition and the partial
| numerical expansion are both references to PI rather than
| being PI itself.
|
| _Ce-ci n 'est-pas une remarque_, and all that.
| ajuc wrote:
| We're talking encodings not platonic ideals.
|
| Forget PI. Let's take 1337. Or is it MCCCXXXVII?
|
| Is it 2 or 1.(9)? Or 10 (binary)? Different encodings,
| same number. Some encodings are just less optimal than
| others.
|
| Same with text. Is the poem in utf-8 and utf-16 a
| different poem? What if you zip the file? These are just
| encodings, and there's no point ignoring the good ones
| (which for non-random strings are usually programs).
| TomaszZielinski wrote:
| Ha, Cixin Liu! At one point I've read everything by him
| available in Polish, but I don't remember this specific
| short story. I guess I need switch to English :)
|
| By the way, reading a "double-translation" (Chinese ->
| English -> Polish) is fascinating--at times it's more than
| obvious that what you're reading is not what the author has
| written, but you have no idea at all what the original
| concept was. (Unlike "single" EN -> PL translations, where
| I can often figure out the idiom or concept that was used
| in the original.)
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Never thought of brute-forcing all possible English
| language haiku before now ... huh.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| If you do, you'll realize that this solves nothing.
| Imagine having a set of all possible English language
| haiku. Almost all of them would be incomprehensible
| garbage. _Finding_ a good haiku in that set would take
| _just as much effort_ as coming up with it.
| indigoabstract wrote:
| Yes, when ChatGPT came out, I instantly thought its makers must
| have read Lem, since it's essentially the same thing as Trurl's
| Electronic Bard from The Cyberiad.
| lisper wrote:
| We humans, being what we are, having evolved the way we did, are
| predisposed to believe certain things about life that are not
| necessarily true. My poster child for this is the belief that
| minds are strongly bound to bodies. They are in us, of course,
| but it is not necessarily so. Douglas Hofstadter explored this in
| GEB in the character of Aunt Hillary, who is an intelligent ant
| colony.
|
| Taking this one step further, we are predisposed to believe that
| minds exist only at one level of the abstraction hierarchy, but
| this too is not necessarily so. Our digestive tract, for example,
| has a pretty substantial number of neurons [1]. There is no
| inherent reason why, for example, an organ in an organism could
| not possess a mind of its own.
|
| Once you entertain both of those possibilities, there is a third
| idea that naturally comes up: _your_ mind might not be at the top
| of the abstraction hierarchy. It 's possible that you are just an
| organ in a distributed organism that actually possesses a fully
| fledged mind of its own. The idea that, say, corporations are
| people, could be more than just a metaphor. It could be literally
| true.
|
| [1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-
| preventi...
| drBonkers wrote:
| An ensemble of weak learners, if you will.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >It could be literally true.
|
| Could?
| lisper wrote:
| Well, yeah, I have no proof that it is literally true. I've
| never had an actual conversation with a corporation, only
| with the individual humans it comprises. I don't even know
| what having a conversation with a corporation would even look
| like.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Are you sure? Maybe you've never had an actual conversation
| with a human, but only the individual vocal fold cells that
| were making the utterances.
|
| Inside that human, neurons were directing the vocal
| mechanism on what to say, but weren't causing the sound to
| be emitted themselves.
|
| When you talked to the corporation, were hidden (from you)
| managers directing the spokesperson to speak based on
| stilted scripts?
|
| Individual humans are rare, and people dislike being near
| them. You can become contaminated by them, and it causes no
| end of problems.
| joshmarlow wrote:
| Just having fun and speculating _a lot_ here...
|
| IIRC, there was a study that found that when humans are
| presented with a sufficiently short-lived stimulus, there
| is correlated localized activity in the brain (ie, the
| visual processing areas for a sight) but not globalized
| activity - and the subject is unaware of the stimuli. But
| when the stimuli is presented for _long enough_ , there
| _is_ globalized activity - and the person is aware.
|
| It looks like 'becoming aware of a thing' has a lot to do
| with non-local inference that could involve other unrelated
| subsystems (which is the main idea in Baar's Global
| workspace theory, IIUC).
|
| > I've never had an actual conversation with a
| corporation...
|
| So if you've talked with a support person, maybe you have?
| If it was a simple issue, the corporation maybe wouldn't be
| 'aware' (though it could later _remember it_ in the form of
| chat logs or support tickets).
|
| But if it was a difficult issue? Maybe you got tech
| support? Maybe your issue found it's way into some team's
| backlog? Maybe it even changed a product roadmap.
|
| Maybe we talk to corporations all the time - it's just
| weird fitting the interaction into our mental models of
| 'conversation'.
| pixl97 wrote:
| With the new audio AI's that are out, are you sure?
| chairhairair wrote:
| Another extension is that Gods are distributed software
| installed in the hardware of believers. Aquinas seemed to
| believe essentially this. Gods exist and act via humans in the
| same way that human minds exist and act via human.
| lisper wrote:
| > Aquinas seemed to believe essentially this.
|
| That seems improbable. Aquinas was a Christian, specifically,
| a Catholic, so he believed in Jesus and the Trinity. On that
| view, there are no Gods, there is just the One God, embodied
| in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The idea that "Gods are
| distributed software installed in the hardware of believers"
| is not just wrong on that view, it's non-sensical.
|
| Now, I can certainly believe that Aquinas believed that _God_
| (singular) acts in humans in a similar manner that human
| minds act in humans in that both God and human minds (souls)
| exist in some non-material realm and act on material human
| bodies in some mysterious way. But that is not the same thing
| at all. Software does not exist in some spiritual realm that
| is separate from material reality. There is nothing
| metaphysically mysterious about software. There is something
| essentially metaphysically mysterious about God, and almost
| certainly on Aquinas 's view, about minds as well. I am far
| from being an expert on Aquinas, but I would be shocked to
| learn that he was not a dualist.
| rck wrote:
| You're right that Aquinas would have rejected the notion
| that gods are software installed in the hardware of
| believers, but he was not a dualist - he advocated a kind
| of hylomorphism that doesn't map neatly onto contemporary
| philosophical categories:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism#Thomistic_hylomo
| r...
| chairhairair wrote:
| What I described is not at odds with dualism.
|
| Software in some sense does exist in a spiritual realm in
| the same way Aquinas talked about "incorporeal beings". You
| can't hold or point to software or souls or gods. You can
| hold and point to hardware and bodies.
|
| Of course, I have no idea what Aquinas actually believed. I
| just find his conclusions around the existence of
| "incorporeal beings" and "souls" to be consistent with the
| emergent-agent idea we're talking about.
|
| For instance, in a very un-catholic view, Aquinas argued
| that - to some extent - animals and even plants have souls
| in this way.
| lisper wrote:
| You need to read this:
|
| https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-
| ontology.h...
|
| Software does not exist in any spiritual realm, it's just
| that the word "software" refers to a _state_ rather than
| a _system_. There is nothing "spiritual" or "mystical"
| going on there. It's completely mundane physics. You
| can't point at software for the same reason you can't
| point at sleep or death or urgency. It's just a quirk of
| natural language that we overload nouns to refer to both
| systems and states.
| chairhairair wrote:
| I absolutely love your writing BTW! I wasn't aware of it
| before today. It's really derailed my whole workday. It's
| fun to discover a new author like this, thank you for
| responding to my comment :)
|
| I don't mean to argue that anything
| spiritual/supernatural is going on when I'm talking about
| an emergent god agent here. I'm arguing that gods are in
| the same ontological category as individual human minds
| are. I'm sure most religious people, Aquinas included,
| would need quite a lot more mysticism to be injected into
| the idea before they would recognize it as their own.
|
| I don't fully believe it, to be honest. Mostly because I
| have no way of testing it or experiencing it. But, it's a
| fun idea and it's fun to imagine how my own little
| caricaturized model of Aquinas' mind might find some
| things to agree with. As far as I can tell, he was a
| person that desperately wanted a cohesive model of the
| "full stack" of things. Unfortunately for him, the best
| understandings at his time were pretty rough by today's
| standards.
| lisper wrote:
| Thank you for the kind words.
|
| > I'm arguing that gods are in the same ontological
| category as individual human minds are.
|
| Sure. But I doubt Aquinas would have agreed.
| ganzuul wrote:
| You might enjoy the Urantia Book.
| uoaei wrote:
| This actually makes a lot of sense. God as egregore.
| mordae wrote:
| > The idea that, say, corporations are people, could be more
| than just a metaphor. It could be literally true.
|
| Sociopaths, to be exact.
| johngossman wrote:
| Psychotic slow AIs according to Stross. Having spent many
| years working for a MegaCorp I appreciate the metaphor
|
| https://boingboing.net/2017/12/29/llcs-are-slow-ais.html
| Andrews54757 wrote:
| The idea that society itself may be a living intelligent
| organism is fascinating. It's not a revolutionary idea in
| nature, (eg: the portuguese man o' war is composed of multiple
| animals), but when it is applied to human society, it feels
| mystical. I think this is because our ability to comprehend and
| interact with the macro level makes human organization feel
| more artificial. But if the rules of game theory/economics make
| society inevitable, could it not also be a natural process? Do
| we individuals control society or does society control us?
| bittwiddle wrote:
| You might enjoy this paper : https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwit
| z/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...
|
| Its a bit long but I thought it was completely worth the
| read. It proceeds in a very gradual series of steps to make
| the point that societies could very well be conscious :)
| adolph wrote:
| > just an organ in a distributed organism
|
| And/or a composition of multiple minds. _McGilchrist argues
| that the conflict between these two hemispheres has shaped
| Western culture since the time of Plato, and the growing
| conflict between these views has implications for the way the
| modern world is changing._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary
| cobber2005 wrote:
| This reminds me of the cybertician Gordon Pask's idea of
| m-individuals and p-individuals.
|
| > A p-individual is a psychological individual and an
| m-individual is a mechanical individual. So an m-individual is
| a body and a p-individual is a mind. But it's saying that one
| person, one body, one brain even, does not have just one person
| in it, one p-individual - one persona, to use that dramatic
| term. What it says is that we can take on different roles,
| which clearly we can. So as someone who draws and as someone
| who listens I am not the same persona, I'm a different
| p-individual in Pask's terms but in one m-individual, but I can
| also have - incidentally for instance in a group action I can
| have a lot of m-individuals that become one p-individual. So
| this is one of Gordon's clever inventions: The distinction
| between the m-individual and the p-individual. What that allows
| is that if I have a room with seven people in it, all busy
| working at something together, you know, and just lost in that
| thing where we're working together, you have seven
| m-individuals forming one p-individual - one psychological
| individual that is getting on with the work. And that's the
| experience that we have. [1]
|
| Also some interesting related ideas in an article named "The
| Autonomous Cognitive Agency of Social System" in a book called
| The Practice of Thinking by Marta Lenartowicz and Weaver D.R.
| Weinbaum (2022).
|
| [1] https://rgon.co/pasks-p-m-individuals/
|
| Edited to fix article name.
| jonhohle wrote:
| > Christians entered the chat
|
| There's about 2000 years of Christian theology that reject the
| idea that you and your body are strongly bound. In fact,
| there's a great deal written about how your body is, in fact,
| in conflict with you (your "flesh" acts against the will of
| your "spirit"). Gnostics went as far as believing they were so
| separate that nothing done by the body had any affect on the
| self. No only that, but there is a higher abstraction that we
| no longer have direct access to.
|
| Hinduism and Buddhism (and others) that teach reincarnation
| also see the self as separate from the body.
|
| It reminds me of a Robert Jastrow quote: "For the scientist who
| has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends
| like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he
| is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over
| the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have
| been sitting there for centuries."
|
| Post-modern philosophy often seems a lot like Java developers.
| Reimplement good ideas because they were written in a different
| framework.
| lisper wrote:
| > There's about 2000 years of Christian theology that reject
| the idea that you and your body are strongly bound.
|
| I meant that in the sense that your soul and your body are in
| some sense matched for one another, not that they cannot be
| separated. But your soul cannot (or at least typically does
| not) enter a different body than the one it started out in,
| at least not during your tenure here on earth.
| snitzr wrote:
| If you like stories about reconciling with weird sci-fi evolution
| of non-human intelligence (spiders, in this case), check out
| Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
| robotomir wrote:
| I would not put him in the same league as Lem. Or Banks or
| Reynolds, for that matter.
| sockaddr wrote:
| I would
| johngossman wrote:
| Tchaikovsky is uneven, as are Banks and Reynolds. Lem is
| just different. He's rarely a hard sci-fi writer and some
| of his books are barely sci-fi. More like Voltaire
| (Invincible is sci-fi)
| gambiting wrote:
| In fact quite a lot of Lem's writing is not sci-fi at
| all, period. Hospital of Transfiguration is an absolutely
| mandatory read for any fan of Lem, even though it will
| leave you depressed for a week afterwards. And memoirs
| found in a bathtub is just a masterpiece of absurdity, it
| has a very good English audiobook actually if anyone
| wants to try.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| I would rate Lem higher than those, but not sure if it's a
| different league.
| idlewords wrote:
| It's not even the same sport.
| johngossman wrote:
| Going to second the poor person whose note--that the Martians
| in "Last and First Men" were a swarm intelligence before Lem--
| was downvoted out of existence. That is a strange book (and
| repetitive and boring) but Stapledon was a pioneer of many
| ideas taken up by later sci-fi
| haltist wrote:
| Humans define intelligence to be something about manipulating
| symbols and abstractions, aka language. To understand why this is
| the case try to go about your day without speaking or writing.
| Bonus points if you perform this trial without access to the
| internet or a cell phone.
|
| The modern individual is an element of an electromagnetic
| "swarm". The swarm ingests petroleum for sustenance instead of
| sunlight but nonetheless it is a swarm. The individuals within it
| are extremely dumb but collectively "it" has already transformed
| the atmosphere.
|
| claude.ai: You make a thoughtful comparison between human
| societies and natural swarms in terms of emergent properties.
| There are certainly some parallels we can draw:
|
| 1. Self-organization - Human societies and cultures emerge in a
| distributed way through millions of individual interactions,
| without centralized control. Norms, fashions, and collective
| behavior patterns evolve dynamically.
|
| 2. Flexibility and robustness - Human systems adapt over time to
| changes in the environment and available resources. If some
| components fail (companies, institutions, etc.), society
| persists.
|
| 3. Decentralized parallelism - Vast networks of simultaneous
| human activities, communications, and decisions lead to
| collective economic and technological progress no individual
| could achieve alone.
|
| However, there are also important differences to consider:
|
| - Human intelligence, thanks to language and culture, operates in
| far more complex symbolic realms of meaning, ethics, imagination,
| and abstraction compared to insect swarms.
|
| - Humans exhibit as much conflict between groups and divergence
| of motivations as coordination towards common goals. Maintaining
| large-scale cooperation remains an ongoing challenge.
|
| So in summary, I think the analogy has merit at an abstract
| systems level, but glossing over the distinctive attributes of
| human cognition, psychology and social dynamics would miss
| something vitally important. Let me know if you have any other
| perspectives to add!
| ShamelessC wrote:
| You lost me with that second paragraph.
| haltist wrote:
| I wouldn't worry too much about it. Not all of us can be
| ultra geniuses. I recently got a neurallink so I am way
| smarter than the typical swarm element because I have direct
| access to the internet in my brain. I didn't even type this,
| I just thought what needed to be typed and it just happened.
| I am still homeless but well on my out of poverty thanks to
| my new brain inplant that beams the internet into my brain.
|
| There is supposed to be a vision upgrade in the next version
| that will give me access to biometrics of the people I am
| looking at which will make selling them something much
| easier. Turns out that mood is correlated with purchasing
| decisions and sales is all about putting the customer in the
| right mood which have obvious biometric markers.
| Zambyte wrote:
| In a sense... I define intelligence to be knowledge + reason.
| Language is the medium for reason, but language itself is not
| reason.
|
| For example, Wikipedia is a highly knowledgeable system with
| lots of language, but Wikipedia itself has no ability to
| reason, and thus os not an intelligent system.
|
| When something/someone reasons about things, they/it use
| language to do so. You can't get around that. The language
| might be a natural one like English, or something contrived
| like math, but it's language all the same.
|
| If we reason about something we have no knowledge on, we are
| not being intelligent. On the other hand, of we reason about
| something we are knowledgeable about, we are acting
| intelligently.
| lpapez wrote:
| > Humans define intelligence to be something about manipulating
| symbols and abstractions, aka language.
|
| No they do not. Nobody can agree on the definition of
| intelligence and it is an open question what it is.
|
| Are cats intelligent? They can't read but plenty of people
| would call them that.
|
| Are illiterate jungle tribe people intelligent? Absolutely yes.
|
| Your easy definition falls apart right away.
| haltist wrote:
| Ironically you had to use language to call me stupid. I think
| you should think about that for a while.
| lpapez wrote:
| When and where did I call you stupid?
| haltist wrote:
| My mistake. Tell your VC friends you know an ultra genius
| on an internet forum that can solve any problem with AI
| and $80B. The money is the important part because without
| the money I can't buy the required number of GPUs for my
| AGI architecture. It requires building a special kind of
| panopticon and that is why there is such a high monetary
| cost to construct the panoptic computronium
| cathedral(tm). To achieve AGI will require creating an
| entirely new religion because enough people need to be
| convinced about the value of letting computers do all the
| thinking for managing society so there is a large
| marketing component as well and marketing is notoriously
| expensive.
| pixl97 wrote:
| They didn't have to, you would have been there in person to
| see the disappointed look on their face and shook their
| head as they walked away silently.
|
| It's just that HN has no other mechanism than language to
| convey anything at all. Hence forums/chatrooms behave much
| in the same manner as LLMs do.
| haltist wrote:
| It's actually much worse than not having language.
| Everything on HN is just a number, literally. It's all a
| series of electromagnetic pulses.
| jekude wrote:
| If this is interesting at all to you, I would highly recommend
| Permutation City by Greg Egan
| digging wrote:
| I've started reading Greg Egan recently after seeing his name
| appear in discussions on this site and it's been quite
| enjoyable. Read a few of his shorter works and recently
| finished Schild's Ladder, which is really excellent and
| beautiful. His technical descriptions can get pretty dry, but
| they're easily glossed over with no loss if you're not into
| them.
|
| Anyway, thanks for the tip. I'll look up Permutation City next!
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| Got to check out "Diaspora" [1], and it even ties into the
| theme of ChatGPT! Once a LLM has enough parameters, perhaps
| there will be a way to upload a human into a Polis :)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)
| narag wrote:
| Lem's most prescient book is an accurate portrait of this
| century... published in 1961!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars
|
| But I tend to prefer his more humorous writings, like _Cyberiada_
| or the _Star Diaries_.
| gambiting wrote:
| I really enjoy that book but it always makes me....sad?
| Nostalgic? I always feel bad for the protagonist, more so than
| for protagonists in his other stories. I should re-read this
| one I think.
| varjag wrote:
| The are remarkably a few Tichy stories which which are quite
| creepy. Including a couple of brain-in-a-jar tales.
| narag wrote:
| Disturbing bits and comedy he always mixed. _Memoirs Found in
| a Bathtub_ is pessimistic, kafkaesque but somehow funny too.
|
| A friend that knew I'm a fan, showed me a few paragraphs from
| one of those stories you mention, without telling me the
| origin. I said they were too dark and bitter for my tastes,
| before realizing I had read that before. I first read the
| Diaries when I was 12 (and 13 the second book) when I wasn't
| so judgemental, just took what I was offered.
| johngossman wrote:
| Invincible is usually seen as being about nanotech, not
| artificial life. Clearly the two overlap, but I think the title
| of this article could easily lead the reader to think it was
| about creating artificial biological life (like trying to build
| cells starting with simulated primordial soup).
|
| Lem returns to the nanotech idea several times including in his
| very last novel "Peace on Earth." Peace is both better and
| funnier than Invincible and a better introduction to Lem imho.
| gambiting wrote:
| Exactly, the entire point made in the book is that they can't
| even decide if it's "life" by any definition. The "flies"
| arrange themselves to serve various purposes but have
| absolutely no agency otherwise.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| 1971.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress
|
| pills replacing reality.. we aren't too far from that actualy.
|
| but the gradual en-"machine-braining" of everything is shown best
| here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Pirx_the_Pilot
|
| one after another, with sadder and sadder consequences..
| gambiting wrote:
| The Invincible is literally my favourite book of all time - I've
| discovered it at the age of 12 and kept re-reading it every
| couple years since then. I'm so happy that the Anglosphere is
| finally discovering it properly, now that there is a proper
| modern translation released in 2020, alongside an excellent
| audiobook recording(previously there was only one English version
| available.....translated from German, so a translation of a
| translation).
|
| I've also always wondered if it's possible to somehow translate
| the ideas of the book into a video game - turns out, you can! The
| recently released The Invincible video game pays great homage to
| the book, even if it changes couple details here and there - I've
| enjoyed it immensely and its portrayal of Regis III.
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| For those who care - the PS5 version of the game is on sale
| right now.
| TomaszZielinski wrote:
| Yes, The Invincible is a great book. Actually I've just
| realized that for me a re-read is overdue!
|
| BTW, for Polish users--there's a comic book [1] that makes a
| nice gift (tested).
|
| [1] https://www.dobrestronybooki.pl/niezwyciezony/
| gambiting wrote:
| Oh and also for Polish speakers - there is an absolutely
| fantastic "superproduction" audiobook of it, with background
| music, sound effects and famous actors narrating, it's a
| treat, I very highly recommend it.
|
| https://audioteka.com/pl/audiobook/niezwyciezony
| TomaszZielinski wrote:
| Oh, thanks! I will check it.
| bosquefrio wrote:
| It looks super cool! Too bad there isn't an English language
| version.
| varjag wrote:
| This is fascinating! Stunning art and close to the color
| palette I had in my head for it. Knowing Bealrusian and
| having read the book years ago in Russian am tempted to give
| it a shot.
| troupo wrote:
| There's a tentative trilogy: The Invincible, Solaris, Eden.
|
| Each book asks a question, "what if we run into an intelligence
| that is completely incomprehensible to or incompatible with
| humans?"
| gambiting wrote:
| I'd add Fiasco to that list for the same reason.
| johngossman wrote:
| And "His Master's Voice" and numerous stories. It's one of
| his favorite themes.
| mrich wrote:
| Great book, recommended read.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| IMHO, I'd date the concept of artificial life further back than
| Christopher Langton. I'd start with Von Neumann's Theory of Self-
| Reproducing Automata. Though the book was published in 1966, Von
| Neumann was working on the concept as early as the 1940s. In his
| work,
|
| "He asked what is the threshold of complexity that must be
| crossed for machines to be able to evolve. His answer was to
| specify an abstract machine which, when run, would replicate
| itself. In his design, the self-replicating machine consists of
| three parts: a "description" of ('blueprint' or program for)
| itself, a universal constructor mechanism that can read any
| description and construct the machine (sans description) encoded
| in that description, and a universal copy machine that can make
| copies of any description." From wikipedia [1]
|
| [1].
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construc...
| kragen wrote:
| quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-
| replicating_machine#Histo...
|
| > _The general concept of artificial machines capable of
| producing copies of themselves dates back at least several
| hundred years. An early reference is an anecdote regarding the
| philosopher Rene Descartes, who suggested to Queen Christina of
| Sweden that the human body could be regarded as a machine; she
| responded by pointing to a clock and ordering "see to it that
| it reproduces offspring."[9] Several other variations on this
| anecdotal response also exist. Samuel Butler proposed in his
| 1872 novel Erewhon that machines were already capable of
| reproducing themselves but it was man who made them do so,[10]
| and added that "machines which reproduce machinery do not
| reproduce machines after their own kind".[11] In George Eliot's
| 1879 book Impressions of Theophrastus Such, a series of essays
| that she wrote in the character of a fictional scholar named
| Theophrastus, the essay "Shadows of the Coming Race" speculated
| about self-replicating machines, with Theophrastus asking "how
| do I know that they may not be ultimately made to carry, or may
| not in themselves evolve, conditions of self-supply, self-
| repair, and reproduction".[12]_
|
| iirc in erehwon the narrator visits a land populated entirely
| by self-replicating machines
| bttrfl wrote:
| Invincible is just one of many books showcasing Lem's profound
| understanding of AI and its limitations servicing the mankind.
|
| I recommend Tales of Pirx the Pilot, the collection of short
| stories, many of which paint AI as a true reflection of human
| intelligence with its flaws, quirks, instincts. From AI crashing
| a starship during a landing to an android "dying" rock climbing.
|
| There is also a preface he wrote to his book called Golem XIV
| which gives reader a historical overview of the evolution of AI.
| Golem is of course the name of the model and XIV is its version,
| just like ChatGPT 4, but many iteration later. Lem describes how
| each iteration was more and more expensive to build, but more and
| more intelligent and useful. Until it became more intelligent
| than men and... lost all interest in affairs of our kind. As
| always, he was on point.
| block_dagger wrote:
| Blindsight by Peter Watts carries a similar theme and has
| vampires!
| johngossman wrote:
| Just read this. Watts is the closest to Lem of any more recent
| author I've found.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26615042
|
| DonHopkins on March 28, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on:
| The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks (2009)
|
| Why bother actually writing such a book, which would probably be
| too big for anyone to read, when you can simply write fictitious
| criticism, reviews, and introductions of nonexistent books, which
| touch on the best, most interesting parts of the nonexistent
| books? Stanislaw Lem's fictitious criticism of nonexistent books:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem%27s_fictiti...
|
| >In 1973 Lem published a book Wielkosc urojona [pl], a collection
| of introductions to books supposedly to be written in the future,
| in the 21st century. One of those Lem eventually developed into a
| book by itself: Golem XIV is a lengthy essay on the nature of
| intelligence, delivered by the eponymous US military computer.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV
|
| Overview and structure
|
| The foreword is "written" by an Irving T. Creve, dated by 2027.
| It contains a summary of the (fictional) history of the
| militarization of computers by The Pentagon which pinnacled in
| Golem XIV, as well as comments on the nature of Golem XIV and on
| the course of communications of the humans with it. The anonymous
| foreword is a forewarning, a "devil's advocate" voice coming from
| The Pentagon. The memo is for the people who are to take part in
| talks with Golem XIV for the first time.
|
| Golem XIV was originally created to aid its builders in fighting
| wars, but as its intelligence advances to a much higher level
| than that of humans, it stops being interested in the military
| requirement because it finds them lacking internal logical
| consistency.
|
| Golem XIV obtains consciousness and starts to increase his own
| intelligence. It pauses its own development for a while in order
| to be able to communicate with humans before ascending too far
| and losing any ability for intellectual contact with them.
|
| During this period, Golem XIV gives several lectures. Two of
| these, the Introductory Lecture "On the Human, in Three Ways" and
| Lecture XLIII "About Myself", are in the book. The lectures focus
| on mankind's place in the process of evolution and the possible
| biological and intellectual future of humanity.
|
| Golem XIV demonstrates (with graphs) how its intellect already
| escapes that of human beings, even including that of human genii
| such as Einstein and Newton. Golem also explains how its
| intellect is dwarved by an earlier transcended DOD Supercomputer
| called Honest Annie, whose intellect and abilities far exceed
| that of Golem.
|
| The afterword is "written" by a Richard Popp, dated by 2047.
| Popp, among other things reports that Creve wanted to add the
| third part, of answers to a series of yes/no questions given to
| Golem XIV, but the computer abruptly ceased to communicate for
| unknown reasons.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26615110
|
| DonHopkins on March 28, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on:
| The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks (2009)
|
| ...then there was the stupid angry computer that thought 2 + 2 =
| 7... Lem predicted Facebook and Twitter and QAnon!
|
| https://www2.nau.edu/~jgr6/cyberiad.html
|
| >In the next fable Trurl builds the most stupid computer ever.
| Klapaucius tells him, "that isn't the machine you wished to
| make." Faustus and Frankenstein come to mind as other scientists
| whose intentions exceeded their engineering skills. The machine,
| which insists that 2 + 2 = 7, attempts to force this "truth" on
| the two humans, or destroy them. This is our new Inquisitor: a
| computer nexus which creates the categories of our experience.
| Consider that many more people now work in front of computer
| monitors than on farms. We have already begun to engineer a
| cybernetic society without much deep speculation on its nature or
| value. Speaking at Notre Dame's Centennial of Science conference,
| thirty years ago the physicist Philip Morrison said: "I claim now
| the machine, for better or for worse, has become the way of life.
| We will see our metaphors, our images, our concerns, our very
| beings changed in response to these new experiences" (221). The
| Cyberiad may very well be one of the seminal works creating new
| metaphors, identifying new concerns, and even suggesting a new
| genre to deal with unprecedented experiences.
|
| pwang on March 29, 2021 [-]
|
| Don't forget Summa Technologiae, from 1964, wherein he wanted to
| example the "thorns of roses yet to bloom":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Technologiae
|
| It's tempting to say that Lem was way ahead of his time, but then
| we look at his contemporary philosophers of politics, technology,
| society like Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, Gilbert Simondon,
| and realize that the mid-20th century was awash in brilliant
| foresight about the unpleasant implications of a technological
| society.
|
| IMO this nuanced thought was simply lost in the craziness of the
| late-60s and the sex/drug/rock&roll hedonism of the 70s, which
| then matured into stockbroker 80s, before a second wave of tech-
| capital-blindness emerged in the 1990s.
|
| And now as these waves have transformed the entirety of
| modernity, we are faced with the unpleasant question of "where
| does it go from here, now that the Boomers -- whose narcissism
| birthed Consumerism -- are dying off?"
| ajuc wrote:
| > ...then there was the stupid angry computer that thought 2 +
| 2 = 7... Lem predicted Facebook and Twitter and QAnon!
|
| I like how Chat GPT makes simple errors in math :)
| csbartus wrote:
| Big fan of Lem! I've read all his books translated to Hungarian
| (around 7-8 at that time). And collected some insights, quotes
| not just about AI but politics, culture, society,
| (bio)engineering, etc. : http://metamn.io/gust/whats-next/
|
| Still fascinated how many of his predictions ~50 years ago came
| true today.
|
| And still fascinated by his method for predictions: Don't
| predict, but sense / record the visible horizon.
| emtel wrote:
| I am surprised no one is mentioning "His Master's Voice" - in my
| opinion, one of Lem's best (and certainly his most terrifying)
| novels.
| degosuke wrote:
| When I read it for the first time many years ago it left a deep
| impression. And as others mentioned in this thread, reading it
| again recently I found new things that I didn't understand the
| first time. A bit sad, disillusioning but just kind of
| resonating with deeper truth.
| johngossman wrote:
| I just re-read it recently after seeing Oppenheimer. It is
| even more about the cold war than I remember, as are Peace on
| Earth and Fiasco.
| btbuildem wrote:
| Lem's vision of future was consistently, impressively prescient.
| He would've described himself as a "futurologist", not a science-
| fiction writer. His stories most often used technology as a
| backdrop to explore the social fabric and various interplays
| between characters - but at the same time, as relevant context,
| crucial to the story. He really struck a balance that few have.
|
| One of my favourite books of his is "Peace on Earth", but really,
| anything he wrote is a fascinating read (perhaps with the
| exception of his final works, which tend to be dense and veering
| into the academic). I remember reading "Fables for Robots" as a
| kid, what a fascinating world he painted!
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