[HN Gopher] George Eliot's reflections on AGI from 1879
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George Eliot's reflections on AGI from 1879
Author : benbreen
Score : 99 points
Date : 2025-02-14 21:43 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.learningfromexamples.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.learningfromexamples.com)
| pama wrote:
| With the explosion of LLMs we are close to the final thoughts in
| her chapter: "this planet may be filled with beings who will be
| blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as
| delicate and complicated as those of human language and all the
| intricate web of what we call its effects, without sensitive
| impression, without sensitive impulse."
| XorNot wrote:
| The thing which has become very weird for me is watching Star
| Trek holodeck episodes in the age of LLMs. When I was in high
| school we considered this absurd writing - obviously they must
| be sentient...now LLMs have happened and it feels obvious that
| the opposite can be true.
|
| Same story with Star Wars and droids: C3PO wasn't sentient,
| just a protocol model loaded into a droid frame in the wrong
| environment, it's attempts to constantly being the conversation
| back to politeness being a simplistically coded filter layer.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Another thing Trek (and other SF) didn't predict was that AI
| would speak with Bay Area vocal fry.
|
| Someone should re-dub the Enterprise computer's lines with
| it.
| yapyap wrote:
| I think that's just the AI you're using..
| captainclam wrote:
| Haha, I've had the same thoughts, that of course
| computers/AI/droids of that conversational capacity were
| conscious. You'd be a brute not to think that!
|
| And all of a sudden, LLMs absolutely have the command of
| natural language that once seemed such an obvious indicator
| of sentience, and now I find myself one of those bigots who
| don't believe in robot rights!
|
| I'm being silly, but I do think there are implications here
| with respect to the future debate on AI sentience. I guess I
| once thought there would be this threshold where the reality
| of an AI's inner experience became blatantly obvious, but I
| see now that this is going to be a profoundly thorny problem.
|
| Who knows, maybe in several decades we'll have a
| consciousness-o-meter that demonstrates that LLMs have had
| some degree of awareness all along.
| kenjackson wrote:
| What seems far more likely, the way the world is going, is
| that we'll use the consciousness-o-meter to determine some
| groups of humans are less conscious than others.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| The fundamental problem is that we keep setting
| 'reasonable' benchmarks, implicitly because we want to make
| them seem reachable, but then when we inevitably do we find
| it feels we [of course] haven't achieved what we really
| wanted to in the first place.
|
| True artificial intelligence would have the ability to
| meaningfully and significantly improve itself, recursively
| - a characteristic of even the most primitive life on
| Earth.
|
| And the implications of a computing system capable of such
| simply can't be overstated. With access to essentially all
| contemporary knowledge, flawless recall, and stupidly
| ridiculous amounts of energy to power itself (relative to
| e.g. a brain), it would create an explosion of knowledge in
| every single domain imaginable, and many we can't even yet
| fathom. And it would be doing this at an accelerating pace
| owing to self improvement.
|
| Basically the very nature of existence and knowledge would
| change. Sentience or not would be irrelevant as we simply
| tried (and inevitably failed, miserably) to catch up.
|
| But this is a bit further out of reach than 'can vaguely
| pass for a human in a casual non-adversarial q&a style
| chat.'
|
| ---
|
| This was one of the rather many areas where Star Trek
| failed to really consider the implications of its concepts,
| probably because it would simply break the world building.
| The Borg, for instance, would be defacto Gods in no time,
| even without assimilation.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| > meaningfully and significantly improve itself
|
| Exactly, mechanically by tools, environmentally by
| science, metaphysically by philosophy. An AI can only
| become an I by crossing a singularity of knowledge.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| You don't need a consciousness to be aware.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| Philosophers have coined the term P-zombies. LLMs can be
| considered as P-zombies if they do not possess consciousness.
| Functionally equivalent but no soul. Substance Dualism was used
| by philosophers to deny animals consciousness.
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| Non materialist bullshit.
| kbelder wrote:
| >Functionally equivalent but no soul.
|
| I think it's an incoherent concept. If the 'soul' is
| anything, there is some difference in the brain that would
| allow it. You can't have two people with identical brains and
| claim that one has a soul, unless you believe in magic.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is there a non-magical description of a soul? I thought it
| was an essentially magical concept. I'm not sure that makes
| it incoherent.
| bobxmax wrote:
| It's been interesting seeing those with an entirely
| materialist understanding of the universe try to grapple
| with and deal with consciousness as LLMs have emerged.
|
| To maintain that belief you have to either believe there is
| a physical source of consciousness, or that consciousness
| doesn't exist, neither of which most people can accept, yet
| LLMs are forcing people to confront.
| goatlover wrote:
| But you can have things like property dualism, strong
| emergentism, cognitive closue, neutral monism and
| panpsychism. Naturalistic philosophers don't appeal to the
| soul or magic, they just say there's more to nature than
| stuff described by physical sciences. You can disagree of
| course, but then you have to account for everything in
| nature, including consciousness, by only using physical
| constituents. And best of luck with that. Nobody has
| succeeded so far.
|
| The problem is that subjective experiences don't fit well
| with objective explanations. Nagal laid this out in his
| paper, "What it's like to be a bat", and other philosophers
| like Chalmers expanded on it with p-zombies and blind color
| scientists.
| antonkar wrote:
| Before creating "eGod", it's safer to first create "eHeaven". I
| propose building direct-democratic multiversal static place
| intelligence (you can google it): the static place AI, the place
| of eventual all-knowing, where we are the only agents that will
| eventually become all-powerful. We start with making a digital
| copy of Earth and some ideally wireless brain-computer-
| interfaces, everyone who wants can buy a special armchair for
| their living room and go to the simulated planet with the whole
| experience the same as on our planet, but when a bus hits you
| there, you just open your eyes. So it gives you immortality from
| injuries. And of course there will be may other worlds with
| different freedoms, like flying or doing magic or instant
| teleportation in public places...
| fishtacos wrote:
| Sort of related, but in the two or three times I've lucid
| dreamt, one of them was flying and having relatively functional
| control of my direction. Not sure how/why my brain rendered
| this sensation having never experienced it in real life, but it
| felt strange and novel and not easy to direct.
|
| It was akin to a sensation of VR games where my mind seems to
| interpolate real-life expectations with visual input, but not
| quite. Not quite "brain-computer-interfaces", but perhaps a
| glimpse with current tech.
| sho_hn wrote:
| This was a joy to read.
| cess11 wrote:
| https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10762/pg10762-images.ht...
|
| It comes across as satire to me, which I did not expect after
| reading TFA.
|
| From the classical references littered throughout the portions
| I've skimmed, it seems like a learned person is joking about
| contemporary men that aren't as well educated and unaware of it.
|
| Quite reminiscent of some of the stuff Kierkegaard wrote.
| joshmarlow wrote:
| Interesting - I wonder if the author was gesturing at Erewhon
| which was published a few years earlier.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon
| alabastervlog wrote:
| For those considering them, _Erewhon_ and _Erewhon Revisited_
| (wherein we discover just how much in the way of, ahem,
| _relations_ a book of the period can pack "between the
| lines") are available in a single widely available and cheap
| (used) little Modern Library hardback, and are a pretty fun
| read for the genre (nothing like _Utopia_ --I read a lot of
| things most folks would consider boring, and that one taxed
| even _my_ patience).
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I recently reread Middlemarch, and this time I had finally read
| most of the literature and had wikipedia on hand to learn about
| the historical events that are referenced in it, the breadth
| and depth of her erudition is impressive, as is her portrayal
| of human nature (complicated and believable communicated across
| the divide of culture and time), which is the main thing I took
| from my first reading.
| joshmarlow wrote:
| Fascinating read!
|
| > Theophrastus closes by asking whether human consciousness is a
| 'stumbling' on the way to 'unconscious perfection'.
|
| This reminds me of a line from the scifi novel Echopraxia where
| one of the characters explains that as AIs become more
| intelligent, they 'wake up' and become conscious like humans. But
| then as they continue to grow, they eventually go back to sleep -
| and those are the machines to be afraid of. '
| fishtacos wrote:
| I'm not well-versed enough on sci-fi to be able to connect more
| dots than this, but I am assuming these are common tropes.
|
| The Mass Effect series describes the Reapers as (copied from
| masseffect.fandom.com - I <3 this game's lore):
|
| "The Reapers are a highly-advanced machine race of synthetic-
| organic starships. The Reapers reside in dark space: the vast,
| mostly starless space between galaxies. They hibernate there,
| dormant for fifty thousand years at a time, before returning to
| the galaxy...the Reapers spare little concern for whatever
| labels other races choose to call them, and merely claim that
| they have neither beginning nor end."
|
| The other pop-sci-fi analogue I can think of is The Borg.
| goatlover wrote:
| In the 3001 novel, the last of the 2001 series by Clarke, the
| Dave simulation explains that while the monolith can simulate
| conscious beings, it is itself not conscious. This is similar
| to The Expanse novels, where it's explained that that the
| protomolecule technology was limited to not being conscious on
| purpose by it's creators, and yet could still somehow simulate
| conscious beings it wanted to use as tools.
| gwern wrote:
| > Not many people have Eliot down as an influential player in the
| history of AI -- and they would be right. Her contribution has
| been for most part overlooked, even as folks begin to unpick the
| role of fiction shaping the trajectory of the AI industry.
|
| It's because it reads mostly as a retread of the far-better known
| Samuel Butler pieces like _Erewhon_ years before
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines was
| 1863), and which Eliot likely read given her lifestyle & how
| closely she echoes him. Surprising to see no mention of Butler at
| all in OP, given what critical context it is - she was not
| writing in a vacuum.
|
| Some earlier discussion:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/goANJNFBZrgE9PFNk/shadows-of...
| setgree wrote:
| I learned about Butler and his letter from George Dyson's book,
| "Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global
| Intelligence" -- it's a very entertaining account. Butler was
| quite a character.
|
| (If I recall correctly I learned about Dyson's book from a
| postscript to Neal Stephenson's "Quicksilver.")
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It does seem a bit suspicious given the context, as if the
| author intentionally omitted the background.
| twic wrote:
| I wonder if the title "The Shadows of the Coming Race" alludes to
| "Vril: The Power of the Coming Race", published eight years
| before, if that phrase was already in circulation. Google ngrams
| first sees it in 1868.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Sure seems likely! Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article
| for Vril:
|
| >When H. G. Wells' novella The Time Machine was published in
| 1895, The Guardian wrote in its review: "The influence of the
| author of The Coming Race is still powerful, and no year passes
| without the appearance of stories which describe the manners
| and customs of peoples in imaginary worlds, sometimes in the
| stars above, sometimes in the heart of unknown continents in
| Australia or at the Pole, and sometimes below the waters under
| the earth. The latest effort in this class of fiction is The
| Time Machine, by H. G. Wells."
|
| So the phrase "the Coming Race" must have been well established
| in literary circles, and probably used as a shorthand for what
| today we might call non-humans or post-humans.
| timewizard wrote:
| > any physical or cognitive task there aren't exactly many roles
| that a human being can play that are additive to the economy.
|
| What a terribly small imagination this presents. There is life
| outside of your cubicle. There always was.
|
| > Each time a person engages in work that could be done more
| efficiently by a machine, the employing party--be that company,
| government or charity--will have to bear the opportunity cost of
| using AI.
|
| Your LLMs run on GPUs and have no physical component. Those
| physical components aren't free, require maintenance, and break
| at inconvenient times. This is not a zero sum future or one that
| doesn't require intelligent economic planning.
|
| > It's like when a toddler 'helps' you wash the dishes.
|
| It's cute you presume your "AGI" is going to /want/ to do
| anything for you. In particular, mundane chores, like washing
| your dishes, or that you as an individual would be able to afford
| it.
|
| Anyways, it's an interesting past time around here, rather than
| admit the gulf between the current technologies and what AGI is
| imagined to be, we just troll through the past looking for anyone
| who even remotely made a "thinking machine" part of a fictional
| story.
|
| Well, one part she got right, the machine presents itself as
| something of a useless chat bot.
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