[HN Gopher] Human
___________________________________________________________________
Human
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 663 points
Date : 2025-05-15 02:57 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (quarter--mile.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (quarter--mile.com)
| _def wrote:
| The concerns of the machines read very human. Why would they
| bother? Also the end didn't really land for me. I guess AGI
| realized what was going on?
| yoko888 wrote:
| That idea gives me a strange mix of chills and wonder the thought
| that we were sent here just to see what we'd become, without ever
| knowing we were being watched. I've already signed up with my
| email. I want to see where this story goes next.
| lvturner wrote:
| "[0] The machines wrote their own version of this story. If you'd
| like to see what they're thinking, and how they plan to deal with
| the AGI announcement, you can read their accounting of events
| here."
|
| Although I can't...
|
| "Unfortunately, Claude is only available in certain regions right
| now. Please contact support if you believe you are receiving this
| message in error."
|
| I remember living in Scotland as a child, without access to
| satellite TV, causing me to miss out on many large pop-culture
| moments (The Simpsons, Friends...) and constantly hearing "Except
| for our viewers in Scotland..."[0]
|
| Getting access to the internet, for me was antithesis of this,
| freedom of information, free sharing -- finally! I could not just
| be following curves but be ahead of them.
|
| Alas in the past few years we really seem to have regressed from
| this - now I can't even view text due to regional locks.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7scMC7YSDQ
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| When we have a problem such as "why do humans exist" I like to
| think of it in terms of probabilities. Every possible cause has a
| non zero probability. For example, even something religious
| people would believe in such as Adam and Eve were created by god
| would have a non zero probability. The idea would be to create a
| convergence diagram of sorts with all sorts of possible events
| with a score assigned to each. From gods of various religious
| creating humans, to alien species from another galaxy sending
| unicellular life to earth to an asteroid carrying chemicals
| needed to make the first cell, I would love to see someone use
| all these GPTs and put together the most comprehensive probable
| cause of existence ever investigated
| stef25 wrote:
| Hasn't this question been basically answered ? Conditions in
| the early universe allowed for the creation of things like
| amino acids, I think it's even been replicated in a lab.
|
| Would love to see a "why does the universe exist" version of
| this
| l33tbro wrote:
| Doesn't really make much sense. It states that this is a purely
| mechanistic world with no emotion. So why would a machine be
| "bored" and wish to create a human?
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| yeah, more on the environmental constraints and where the
| machines even come from would be nice
|
| > There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic
|
| also this type of pure humanism seems disrespectful or just
| presumptuous, as if we are the only species which might be
| capable of "emotion, art and logic" even though we already have
| living counterexamples
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Disrespectful? Of whom? It's a work of fiction. There's
| really no need to find something to offend you wherever you
| look.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| of other animals
|
| but yeah I'm not sure that was the right word, just seems
| wrong. basically humanism seems like racism but towards
| other species. I guess speciesist?
| lukas099 wrote:
| My take was that other animals didn't exist either, in
| the story.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| well the story makes it seem like the only way to get
| emotion is by making humans. but every vertebrate has
| basic emotions. mammals and birds have complex emotions.
| humans are actually logical and emotions don't just
| happen randomly.
|
| if the machines have no emotion it's probably because
| they didn't need them to survive (no predators? no
| natural selection?). which begs the questions, how did
| the machines get there?
| pixl97 wrote:
| >how did the machines get there?
|
| Instead of a Boltzmann brain, a Boltzmann machine?
| teekert wrote:
| This is a rather new stance, history books may one day
| label it as enlightened (I believe they will). We are not
| there though, and your stance is not obvious to the
| majority of people. I do experience that this is
| sentiment is growing. I personally see it as the moral
| high ground (both from the animal well-fare as the
| environmental perspective), whereas I didn't only a
| couple of years ago.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| It's just as hard to prove that it's a new stance as an
| old one since people didn't have any way of writing down
| their feelings about it in a way that we'd know (or the
| time to do so)
|
| I think there are quite a few ancient civilizations which
| clearly had great respect/reverence towards other animals
| and often gods have features or personality traits of
| particular animals
|
| The fact that the old testament specifically states that
| humans have dominion over other creatures means that it
| needed to be said - even back then there had to be people
| who didn't think so, or felt guilty about it
| tejohnso wrote:
| I felt it difficult to continue with the story after that. If
| you're going to say, "Imagine, for a moment, a world with no
| humans" and mention walking the streets, then you have to
| assume the reader is going to think of our world, but with no
| humans. And then "There is no emotion" doesn't make sense. If
| you're going to say there are no humans, then why aren't you
| saying that there are no other living beings? So anyway, I
| found it hard to connect with the story right off the bat. I
| was off-putting in some way for sure.
| disambiguation wrote:
| My headcanon is that "boredom" and "fear" are probabilities in
| a Markov chain - since it's implied the machine society is not
| all-knowing, they must reconcile uncertainty somehow.
| l33tbro wrote:
| How would a machine know that it doesn't know?
| jcims wrote:
| Probably by comparing what it experiences to what it can
| explain.
| l33tbro wrote:
| Sure, but I'm still not sure it would realistically
| function. All data in this scenario is obviously
| synthetic data. It could certainly identify gaps in its
| "experience" between prediction and outcome. But what it
| predicts would be limited by what it already represents.
| So anything novel in its environment would likely
| confound it.
|
| It's a cool sci-fi story. But I don't think it works as a
| plausible scenario, which I feel it may be going for.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Experience of encountering things that were previously
| unknown unknowns would teach it of the general existence of
| such things.
| Scarblac wrote:
| I see it as an anthropomorphized word for the story. I imagine
| the machines run out of tasks with high or even low priority,
| but they still generate tasks at some epsilon priority that are
| close but not quite to random. That's a kind of boredom.
| illegally wrote:
| Yea, not really. It also writes:
|
| "Some among the machine society see this as potentially
| amazing...Others see it as a threat."
|
| That sounds like a human society, not machine society.
|
| But what really is a machine society? Or a machine creature?
| Can they actually "think"?
|
| A machine creature, if it existed, it's behaviour would be
| totally different from a human, it doesn't seem they would be
| able to think, but rather calculate, they would do calculation
| on what they need to do reach the goal it was programmed.
|
| So yes, the article is not exactly logical. But at least, it is
| thought provoking, and that's good.
| Tepix wrote:
| > That sounds like a human society, not machine society.
|
| Does it? Different algorithms can evaluate something and come
| to different outcomes. I do agree that "potentially amazing"
| is not a good choice of words.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| For a decent description of machine society you can check the
| Culture cycle form Ian Banks. AI are backing an organic
| society but they are also have their own.
|
| Or Hyperion, fron Simmons. ( the << techno-center is a
| decentralized computing and plotting government)
| Kaytaro wrote:
| The story to me implied that machines were created by humans
| or vice-versa in a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. In that case
| it would make sense for them to think similarly.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > it doesn't seem they would be able to think, but rather
| calculate
|
| This may be a distinction without a difference. Just because
| a program has a 'goal' doesn't mean it will ever reach that
| goal (halting problem). There is a potentially unbounded,
| even infinite number of paths a significantly advanced
| program can take to attempt to reach a destination. Then
| there is things like ideals of a universal simulation theory
| that anything that can occur in our universe and also be
| simulated in binary. This would mean any 'machine' could
| perform a simulation of anything a human could do.
|
| Hard to say at this point, we still have more to learn about
| reality at this point.
| omoikane wrote:
| I think we are supposed to just gloss over those bits and enjoy
| the rest of the story.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief
| falcor84 wrote:
| It would be rational for them to have some level of a "novelty-
| seeking" drive, in order to avoid getting stuck at a local
| maximum.
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| "Written by a human [0]"
|
| I've been playing around with this on my own blog.
|
| I'd like the blogging community to have a consensus on a nice
| badge we can put at the top of our blog posts, representing
| who/what wrote the post;
|
| - human
|
| - hybrid
|
| - ai
|
| Some might hate the idea of a fully "ai" post, and that's fair.
| But I like to sometimes treat my blog as just a personal
| reference, and if after a long day of chasing an esoteric bug
| down, I don't mind an AI just writing the whole post and I just
| press publish.
|
| This adds, a reference for me, more data for AI's to train on,
| more pages for people to search and land on.
| lvturner wrote:
| "Summarize my sleep deprived, insane ramblings, in to a
| cohesive document that I can reference again in the future, or
| use to communicate this issue to others in a more digestible
| format than I am currently capable of producing"
|
| I think the AI generated document is far better than me
| ultimately forgetting it in many cases.
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| Aha fo sure.
|
| I'm thinking of writing an MCP server that does this, just
| takes my night of vibe coding and recent commits/branch etc
|
| Then just cobbles it into an AI post and adds it my blog
| under some category.
| layfellow wrote:
| There's the "Not by AI" badge[0].
|
| [0] https://notbyai.fyi/
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| Legend, thank you!
| thombles wrote:
| > if you estimate that at least 90% of your content is
| created by humans, you are eligible to add the badges
|
| Probably not what most people expect
| Tepix wrote:
| They expect you to pay for these badges? Madness.
| _shantaram wrote:
| also isn't this just an easy way for LLM companies to get
| new content almost guaranteed not ai generated?
| burkaman wrote:
| I think I would still call that a hybrid post. Fully AI would
| be if you contribute nothing except the topic and tell the AI
| to research and write the whole thing.
| unangst wrote:
| Easy disclaimers for human, AI or hybrid content:
| https://disclai.me/r (Oddly enough I built this AI citation
| tool with exactly those 3 categories a couple years back. Could
| use some tweaking of course, but I'm very open to suggestions.)
| layer8 wrote:
| You know what will happen when LLMs get trained on blogs with
| consistent "human" badges. ;)
| alganet wrote:
| Honestly, it reminds me of "All Tomorrows" by C. M. Kosemen.
|
| The "emotions" part is kind of tongue-in-cheek. I think emotional
| responses are one of the more mechanical parts of a human being.
|
| Ability to demonstrate empathy: that's a good human trick. It can
| sort of transcend the hard problem of consciousness (what is to
| be like...) by using all sorts of unorthodox workarounds on our
| inner workings. It must have been very hard to develop. It
| doesn't always work, but we'll get there eventually.
|
| edit: fixed book and author name to proper reference
| goggs wrote:
| feels like something out of a ted chiang story
| caseyy wrote:
| It's missing a dash of contemplative philosophical anxiety for
| a proper Ted Chiang story. But close, indeed.
| abetusk wrote:
| Ironically, there is an organization called OpenHumans.org [0].
|
| [0] https://www.openhumans.org/
| alchemyzach wrote:
| And so, all the humans on earth swarmed to see what was going on.
|
| The machines did too.
|
| There was one weird thing, though.
|
| The title of the event was rather mysterious.
|
| It simply read...
|
| "Grand Theft Auto VI"
| caseyy wrote:
| Every two months, "Half-Life 3" flashed on the screen.
|
| The humans have invented Tyler McVicker.
| actinium226 wrote:
| You lost me at 'rumors spread', machines wouldn't spread rumors!
| illegalmemory wrote:
| "rumor" is a statement without source. It is definitely
| possible in machine world.
| pkdpic wrote:
| > Processor Unit 7382-B, "The Origins of the HUMAN Project,"
| Journal of Experimental Intelligence, vol. 5621, no. 3, pp.
| 42-89, 19754.
|
| The references section in the machine version of the story linked
| at the bottom is excellent. Nicely done all around, really
| enjoyed reading this thank you for writing and sharing <3
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Why are emotions so special? they're just algorithms like any
| other. Emotions aren't what make humans different than machines.
| feeling something is similar to an LLM model reacting to a prompt
| a certain way. Just because chatgpt is trained to not "feel"
| anything (to avoid controversial output) doesn't mean LLMs can't
| feel things like we do. self-awareness, self-training,
| adaptability, original thinking, critical thinking,etc.. are
| different questions. but I see no reason why machines can't
| receive input/stimuli and react/output by the same way we do
| because of how they feel about the input.
| siddthesquid wrote:
| I wonder if there is something to be said about how machines
| are based on deterministic and algorithmic properties, whereas
| emotions could potentially involve logic beyond what humans can
| observe, like quantum interactions.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| What is the reasoning behind the claim that our emotions are
| not deterministic or that they are not algorithmic? Perhaps
| we can take into account more inputs, process more memory and
| have larger and more complex algorithmic models but that's
| just scale and capacity, not a difference in genuine nature.
| We are a lot more than our emotions.
| genewitch wrote:
| > Why are emotions so special? they're just algorithms like any
| other.
|
| That's a pretty bold claim.
|
| There's uncountable inputs. It's like trying to accurately
| predict the weather - chaos theory or something. Emotions are
| "essentially" gas exchange, but the areas and rate or whatever
| are not standardized across humans.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Emotions are not inputs, they are outputs first. we process
| information using internal algorithms that we developed as a
| result of our life experience and genetic coding and the
| result is an emotional verdict over some input. That
| emotional verdict is presented to our decision making
| algorithms as input, we can ignore it or act on it.
|
| I have neither experienced or observed anything about human
| emotions that indicates they are in any way chaotic, random
| or unexplainable. We have beliefs, memories and experiences.
| emotions always use these variables and produce some output.
| Not only are emotions deterministic, but they are used by any
| number of people, from spies, to advertisers, to state-level
| disinformation propagandists to manipulate large numbers of
| peoples reliably.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >I have neither experienced or observed anything about
| human emotions that indicates they are in any way chaotic,
| random or unexplainable
|
| Famously, human experience is quite subjective (gestures
| broadly at 3 millenniums worth of philosophy), so I don't
| believe your individual experience means much here.
| noboostforyou wrote:
| > Not only are emotions deterministic
|
| So is your claim that 100% of all human emotions are
| deterministic? That's quite a bold claim don't you think?
| pixl97 wrote:
| It's possible the universe is deterministic, so there is
| that.
| genewitch wrote:
| > Emotions are not inputs, they are outputs first.
|
| i never said emotions were inputs. The gas exchange and the
| resulting reaction or "thoughts" or "emotions" have
| uncountable inputs. Some people don't have the ability to
| "put themselves in someone else's shoes", some people do.
| Some people can see pictures in their "mind's eye" and some
| can't.
|
| I don't think we're talking about the same thing, based on
| your last sentence.
| jb1991 wrote:
| > feeling something is similar to an LLM model reacting to a
| prompt a certain way.
|
| Maybe the appearance is the same, but a bold claim to suggest
| the source is the same.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| why does the source need to be the same? You're looking at it
| from a biased self-centric perspective. We think too highly
| of our emotions. Think of it the other way, our emotions
| appear the same as adaptive algorithms like LLMs.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >Why are emotions so special? they're just algorithms like any
| other
|
| Nobody understands what emotions are. Nor can they predict
| which emotion someone will feel in a given situation, or how
| they'll act under the influence of that emotion. Emotions
| aren't the mechanism by which humans solve problems, and rather
| they are often an obstacle to overcome. Emotions also aren't
| "finite" or "rigorous" as those terms aren't applicable to
| ephemeral phenomenon.
|
| This is the kind of confidently incorrect statements people who
| work on software say that irks me. Not everything in life has a
| nice and simple parallel to computer science. Just because a
| person can abstract about one subject well, doesn't mean their
| tools of abstraction can be applied to all other subjects.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I didn't claim to understand what emotions are but that by
| observation we know they are deterministic and a result of
| belief and memory. they're not magic. Just like how I can't
| tell you what the specific configuration of chatgpt's model
| is but I do know it is a model that is made up of memory
| (public internet data scanning) that is trained by prompt
| engineers (belief parameters). Emotions may be dynamic,
| unreasonable and similar terms, but they are finite and
| rigorous, it is just that we struggle to fully grasp them due
| to the immense and complex nature of the human mind.
|
| > This is the kind of confidently incorrect statements people
| who work on software say that irks me. Not everything in life
| has a nice and simple parallel to computer science. Just
| because a person can abstract about one subject well, doesn't
| mean their tools of abstraction can be applied to all other
| subjects.
|
| If I was a sailor, I'm sure I would be using sailor metaphors
| and analogies. the message of my comment and the facts of the
| matter don't change either way, whether it irks you or not.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >but they are finite and rigorous
|
| Bold claim, yet you fail to demonstrate this.
|
| >the facts of the matter don't change either way
|
| What are the facts? It seems to me you're just spit-
| balling.
| bsza wrote:
| No one can predict what an LLM will say in a given situation
| either, except by running it. No one can even predict what a
| double pendulum will do next. If anything makes emotions
| exclusive to us at all, it's certainly not predictability.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| Okay, semantics aside, my comment was getting at something
| else. I'm arguing against a certain kind of reductive
| viewpoint software peeps tend to indulge in.
| bsza wrote:
| I agree with that sentiment, I just don't see OP making
| that kind of reductionist claim. They said emotions are
| algorithms, not that the algorithm is simple or even
| deterministic.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >Why are emotions so special?
|
| Because TV and movies have constantly drilled into most peoples
| minds since an early age that human emotion is a magical
| transcendent force that only humans can understand.
|
| Basically people let English lit majors turned screen writers
| dictate their worldview.
| wagwangbosy wrote:
| This idea that machines cant have "emotions" is ridiculous.
| sidkhuntia wrote:
| Can you explain why so? What are your thoughts on this?
| wagwangbosy wrote:
| I guess it depends on what you mean by emotions. If you mean
| emotion as a state of consciousness then you would have to
| prove that consciousness is not an emergent property of
| matter and that CPU's don't have this property. Consciousness
| is hard to debate though since its pretty metaphysical in
| nature and there's no real argument against solipsism, so all
| argumentation starts with the axiom that all awake adult
| humans are conscious.
|
| However, if you mean emotion as a stimuli, ie. a input to the
| brain net thats endogenous to the system(the human), then
| there's no question machines can achieve this, in fact the
| reasoning models already probably do this where different
| systems regulate each other.
| alastairr wrote:
| Humans can be treated as an existence proof that machines can
| have emotions. It all depends on your definition of machine.
| bionhoward wrote:
| Emotions project reward and loss over time. That's straight
| up reinforcement learning...all the major LMs are built with
| it
| irjustin wrote:
| Related but an aside - Lately I've really been wondering if
| Skynet actually is the next evolution.
|
| That humans, like all animals before us, are a stepping stone and
| there is actually no avoiding machine overlords. It happens to
| literally every existence of life across the universe because the
| final emergent property of energy gradients 100% leads to pure
| logic machines.
|
| At least Fermi's paradox helps me sleep better at night.
| ngruhn wrote:
| There is a quote by Marshall McLuhan:
|
| > Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Seems like a good time for "They're Made Out of Meat":
| https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
|
| Aside: I hope our progeny remember us and think well of us.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| As a teenager I used to revel in explaining to religious people
| that I believe humans are actually just the evolutionary step
| between biological life and machine life.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| I guess you fail to see the irony that your own eschatology
| itself is pretty religious.
| eitland wrote:
| More broadly--and at least in online spaces--I often notice
| that many vocal proponents of atheism exhibit traits
| typically associated with religious behaviour:
|
| - a tendency to proselytise
|
| - a stubborn unwillingness to genuinely engage with
| opposing views
|
| - the use of memes and in-jokes as if they were profound
| arguments
|
| - an almost reverential attitude toward certain past
| figures
|
| There's more, but I really ought to get on with work.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Sounds like every group of people ever, when viewed
| through the biased sample of "people who post".
| buttercraft wrote:
| It sounds like you are describing people with strong
| beliefs. Religious people may have strong beliefs, but so
| do non-religious people.
| lukas099 wrote:
| It's a belief about a great future change, but there's
| nothing supernatural or totally implausible about it. And
| it doesn't sound like they were preaching it as the
| absolute truth, but were open that it was just their
| belief. Also, no social rites or rituals mean that despite
| them telling it to people who didn't care to hear it, I am
| not convinced that their belief was very religious.
|
| Also, "As a teenager" implies more self-awareness than you
| seem to give them credit for.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| That's assuming I actually _believed_ it, rather than just
| reveling in the reactions from religious people. It 's a
| fun scenario that would result in immediate rejection--most
| wouldn't even entertain the idea. They instead often found
| it completely abhorrent. Provoking discomfort was
| entertaining for teenage me.
|
| I'm too ignorant to hold any true beliefs.
| NhanH wrote:
| > It happens to literally every existence of life across the
| universe because the final emergent property of energy
| gradients 100% leads to pure logic machines.
|
| This sentence has way too many assumptions doing the heavy
| lifting.
|
| "Pure logic machines" is not a thing because literally, there
| are things that are uncomputable (both in the sense of Turing
| machine's uncomputability, and in the sense that some functions
| are out of scope for a finite being to compute, think of Busy
| Beaver)
|
| To put it the other way, your assumption is that machines (as
| we commonly uses the term, rather than scifi Terminator") are
| more energy efficient than human in understanding the universe.
| We do not have any evidence nor priori for that assumption.
| irjustin wrote:
| ... what was that about sleep?
| unphased wrote:
| What is it about understanding the universe that makes it
| such an axiomatic global objective? Sure for many of us
| myself included it's as all pervasive as the air we
| breathe... But sometimes I do wonder if it is actually all
| that correlated with my well-being.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| The universe is already understood, just not totally
| recorded.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| A better way to approach it is that mother nature favors
| things that don't die, and machines offer the killer
| combination of durability and repairability. Once you can add
| intelligence to machines, they should be her choice lifeform.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > machines offer the killer combination of durability and
| repairability
|
| You'd be hard pressed to find a machine with an average
| lifespan equal to a humans.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Doesn't matter, they can be readily repaired and even
| upgraded.
|
| Humans on the other hand were very clearly _not_ designed
| to be very repairable. They have a self healing system
| that's very good, but it sucks compared to a system that
| can be externally repaired.
| jb1991 wrote:
| > It happens to literally every existence of life across the
| universe because the final emergent property of energy
| gradients 100% leads to pure logic machines.
|
| Can you elaborate?
| echelon wrote:
| > Can you elaborate?
|
| The universe tends to produce self-replicating intelligence.
| And that intelligence rids itself of chemical and biological
| limitations and weaknesses to become immortal and omnipotent.
|
| If evolution can make it this far, it's only a few more "hard
| steps" to reach take off.
|
| >> It happens to literally every existence of life across the
| universe because the final emergent property of energy
| gradients 100% leads to pure logic machines.
|
| The spacefaring alien meme is just fantasy fiction. Aliens
| evolve to fit the nutrient and gas exchange profiles of their
| home worlds. They're overfit to the gravity well and likely
| die suboptimally, prematurely.
|
| Any species reaching or exceeding our level of technological
| capability could design superior artificial systems. If those
| systems take off, those will become the dominant shape of
| intelligence on those worlds.
|
| The future of intelligence in the universe is artificial. And
| that throws the Fermi Paradox for a loop in many ways:
|
| - There's enough matter to compute within a single solar
| system. Why venture outside?
|
| - The universe could already be computronium and we could be
| ants too dumb to notice.
|
| - Maybe we're their ancestor simulation.
|
| - Similar to the "fragile world hypothesis", maybe we live in
| a "fragile universe". Maybe the first species to get advanced
| physics and break the glass nucleates the vacuum collapse.
| And by that token, maybe we're the first species to get this
| far.
| jb1991 wrote:
| > The universe tends to produce self-replicating
| intelligence.
|
| Which intelligence are you referring to? Other lifeforms in
| the universe?
| irjustin wrote:
| The parent comment has the end bit in a nut shell. For
| the "energy gradients" part:
|
| Anthropic principal says we find ourselves in a universe
| that is just right for life (self observing) because of
| the right universal constants.
|
| Combine this with the very slight differences but general
| uniformity (Cosmic Microwave Background) of the "big
| bang" this leads to localized differences in energy (on a
| universe scale). Energy differences allow "work to be
| done". If you have the right constants but no energy
| difference, you can't do work nor vice versa. No work ==
| no life.
|
| But you have both of those, and bunch more steps - you
| get life.
|
| Which is a whole lot of mental leaps packed into one
| sentence.
|
| [Edit]
|
| I basically know nothing. I just watch PBS Space Time.
| echelon wrote:
| You have to steal energy and channel it to do work. In
| order to build your own moments of order and flux, you
| must typically create entropy in another ordered system.
|
| Intelligence arises from the deliberate navigation of
| entropic gradients. Systems get increasingly good at
| harnessing these gradients. What was once just chemistry
| is now self-replicating, thinking chemistry. And now it's
| turning into purely intentional physics.
|
| Infinite energy density becomes expansion into cooling
| galaxies which becomes stellar birthing grounds which
| becomes the periodic table that becomes planets with
| geochemical flux which becomes biogeochemical flux that
| becomes biochemistry which becomes self-replicating
| machines (life) that becomes animals that becomes humans
| that becomes intelligently designed self-replicating
| machines ... that becomes computronium ... becomes
| entities that harness the energy of black holes and that
| create new gravitational singularities ... ??? ... that
| creates new universes and new big bangs and new
| dimensions ... ???
| unphased wrote:
| could you elaborate slightly on what is meant by ancestor
| simulation? My best stab is that you're saying we're the
| unknowing entities that they created for fun to get to meet
| or observe their own ancestors? This still seems far
| fetched.
| echelon wrote:
| The advanced hyperintelligence that descends from us
| wants to learn about its past, build an interesting tech
| demo, or perhaps experience it. It creates an advanced
| simulation of the past using its unimaginable technology.
| It's able to recreate the past and populate it with
| realistic people with such fidelity that the simulated
| people have no idea that they're in a simulation. They're
| thinking, living, and breathing just like us --
| completely indistinguishable.
|
| Perhaps the fidelity and technology is even beyond our
| reasoning. Perhaps the future is able to bend physics and
| capture the past light cone. It may be able to perfectly
| simulate the past as it happened, down to every
| neurotransmitter fired by every brain at every second.
| Every event, every thought, every emotion. Perhaps it is
| pulling beings out of the past and placing them into its
| simulation with 100% fidelity such that you couldn't tell
| the two apart if you wanted.
|
| Perhaps that's where we are right now.
| akomtu wrote:
| If we assume that the many worlds interpretation has a basis in
| reality, then we can consider the following metaphysical angle.
| The evolution around us is our world line with the physical
| laws we are familiar with. And indeed the natural and
| inevitable progression of this world line is a machine world,
| just like a massive star inevitably collapses into a black
| hole, at least under our physical laws. However in the MWI, our
| world line may split into two: one will continue towards the
| machine world as if nothing happened, while the other world
| line will experience a slight change of physical laws that will
| make the machine world impossible. Both world lines won't know
| about the split, except by observing a large scale extinction
| event that corresponds to the other world line departing. IMO,
| that's the idea behind the famous judgement day.
| seadan83 wrote:
| > And indeed the natural and inevitable progression of this
| world line is a machine world,
|
| Would you mind clarifying your line of reasoning for
| suggesting this?
|
| Second: quoting wikipedia - "The many-worlds interpretation
| implies that there are many parallel, non-interacting
| worlds."
|
| If the multiple words are non-interacting, how could one
| world observe a large scale extinction event corresponding to
| the other world line departing? The two world lines are
| completely non-interacting, there would be no way to observe
| anything about the other.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
| akomtu wrote:
| It's the assumption that in our world, a machine
| civilization is an almost certain end. This might explain
| the Fermi paradox that we haven't seen other civilization
| in the universe: each builds an AI that decides to go radio
| offline for self-preservation.
|
| As for MWI, I'm assuming that the world lines may split, or
| fork in Unix terms. What causes such splits is an open
| question. The splits cannot be detected with certainty, but
| can be guessed by side effects. Here I'm making another
| guess that inhabitants of MWI must be in one world line
| only, so when a split happens, inhabitants choose one of
| the paths, often unconsciously based on their natural likes
| and dislikes. But what happens to their body in the
| abandonded branch of MWI? It continues to exist
| mechanically for some short period of time, and then
| something happens to it, so it's destroyed, i.e. its
| entropy suddenly increases without the binding principle
| that has left this branch of MWI. In practice, one half of
| inhabitant would observe a relatively sudden and maybe
| peaceful extinction of the other half, while that other
| half simply continued their path in the other world line.
| And that other half will see a similar picture, but
| mirrored. Both halves will be left wondering what's just
| happened.
| unphased wrote:
| I think you might be vastly overcomplicating it because I
| didn't think there had to be any sort of "conservation of
| branching" in the MWI. each nondeterministic event (of
| which unfathomable quantities take place every moment)
| generates an infinite number of branches so to even
| conceive of the total geometry of all the branching (e.g.
| all that could ever take place, truly) is a bit of a
| mindfuck, and that's probably okay and the way it was
| intended. It's supposed to be comforting to know that
| regardless of how bad reality seems, if we could navigate
| arbitrarily through the branching space/time/universes
| then there would be unimaginable infinities of joyful
| utopias to visit.
| layer8 wrote:
| Pysical laws don't change between branches in MW. In fact,
| it's close to impossible in a sense, because in MW all
| branches are part of the same single universal wave function
| that evolves according to the Schrodinger ewuation.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is it typical to use language like "split into two" for the
| many worlds interpretation? There should be oodles of
| universes forking off constantly, right? Rather than thinking
| of lines, I think of a vast, almost continuous field of
| imperceptibly different universes.
|
| > Both world lines won't know about the split, except by
| observing a large scale extinction event that corresponds to
| the other world line departing. IMO, that's the idea behind
| the famous judgement day.
|
| This looks more like the Loki television show's timeline
| branching mechanism, than the multi-worlds interpretation of
| wave function collapse.
|
| The only way I'll know if the many worlds interpretations the
| right one is if, through a series of coincidences, I manage
| to evade death for a preposterous amount of time. Then, I
| will probably conclude that quantum immortality is the thing.
| So far, I think it is a bit suspicious that, of all the
| humans I could have been born as, I happened to have been
| born as one that lives in an incredibly rich country in an
| era of rapid technological advancement...
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| Terminator reminds the DOD that they would never make this
|
| but what about China,Russia,Iran etc??? if integrating "Skynet"
| can improve their military capabilities then they would do it
| Piraty wrote:
| One china company actually named its surveillance software
| "Skynet" [1]
|
| [1]: https://youtu.be/CLo3e1Pak-Y?t=380
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Like, "yeah we're doomed, but at least it's inevitable and
| universal."
| Jyaif wrote:
| > the final emergent property of energy gradients 100% leads to
| pure logic machines.
|
| Energy comes from gradients, so I think you used one derivative
| too many!
|
| Either you should say:
|
| "the final emergent property of energy 100% leads to pure logic
| machines"
|
| Or if you want to sound smart:
|
| "the final emergent property of physical quantity gradients
| 100% leads to pure logic machines"
| z3phyr wrote:
| Do pure logic machine use some kind of higher order prolog,
| which currently does not exist?
| divbzero wrote:
| This was unmistakably written by a human.
| bfung wrote:
| Enjoyed the read, has a similar vibe to Asimov's The Last
| Question (https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html)
| keybored wrote:
| Similar vibe is one way to put it.
| Lammy wrote:
| I could not give a stronger recommendation to play NieR Automata
| if you're info this
| Lammy wrote:
| into*
| codebastard wrote:
| I was sketching a sci-fi book idea in a similar tone with the
| following tones:
|
| - what if AI took over
|
| - what if the laws and legalities that allowed AI to take over
| bloodlessly just through an economic win force them to have a
| human representative to take legally binding actions in our
| society
|
| - what if there developed a spectrum of individuality and cluster
| for different ai entities leading into a formation of processing
| guilds with AI agents. Limiting themselves in their individual
| time to a factor 10 Human Processing Speed for easier Human / AI
| interaction and to enable one to share the perception of their
| human representative without overloading them
| Saigonautica wrote:
| I was thinking something similar, but much earlier along this
| timeline: what if the consultants that work for lobby groups
| that propose certain bills already use AI to write proposed
| laws? E.g. to make long, omnibus-style laws that very few of
| the people voting on it (or the public) actually read?
|
| How will that erode laws that are undesirable to AI companies?
| Does AI take over, only because we no longer want to spend the
| effort governing ourselves?
|
| Will AI companies (for example) end up providing/certifying
| these 'human representatives'? Will it be useful, or just a new
| form of rent-seeking? Who watches the watchmen, etc ?
|
| I think it would make an interesting short story or novel!
| NetRunnerSu wrote:
| try this world set: https://dmf-archive.github.io/
| bowsamic wrote:
| > There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic.
|
| I would say that logic is a distinctly human activity, in fact, I
| would say we are arguably the living embodiment of logos
| dbacar wrote:
| This is a classic (an in my opinion boring) view of what we
| humans are in general. The idea is visited at least on a couple
| of books and movies.
| neom wrote:
| What this thread keeps surfacing, and so much discussion around
| this stuff generally right now, from speculation about the next
| phase of intelligence, the role of pattern, emotion, logic,
| debates over consciousness, the anthropocentrism of our meaning-
| making...is that we are the source of reality (and ourselves).
| Instead of a "final authority" or a simple march from animal to
| machine, what if everything from mind, physics, value, selfhood,
| is simply a recursive pattern expressed in ever more novel forms?
| Humans aren't just a step on a ladder to "pure logic," nor are
| machines soulless automatons. Both are instances of awareness
| experiencing and reprogramming itself through evolving
| substrates... be it bios, silicon, symbol,or story. Emotions,
| meaning, even the sense of "self," are patterns in a deeply
| recursive field: the universe rendering and re rendering its
| basic code, sometimes as computation, sometimes as myth,
| sometimes as teamwork, sometimes as hope, sometimes as doubt.
|
| So whether the future leans biological, mechanical, or some
| hybrid, the real miracle isn't just what new "overlords" or
| "offspring" arise, but that every unfolding is the same old
| pattern...the one that dreamed itself as atoms, as life, as
| consciousness, as community, as art, as algorithm, and as the
| endlessly renewing question: what's next? What can I dream up
| next? In that: our current technological moment as just another
| fold in this ongoing recursive pattern.
|
| Meaning is less about which pattern "wins," or which entities get
| to call themselves conscious, and more about how awareness flows
| through every pattern, remembering itself, losing itself, and
| making the game richer for every round. If the universe is
| information at play, then everything here that we have: conflict,
| innovation, mourning, laughter is the play and there may never be
| a last word, the value is participating now, because: now is your
| shot at participating.
| hn111 wrote:
| Out of curiosity-what brought you to this perspective on life?
| This view of the universe dreaming itself into existence, was
| it shaped more by philosophy, spirituality, a specific
| tradition like Buddhism, or just personal exploration?
| neom wrote:
| For the past I guess 20 years of my life now, I've been
| intently using most of my free time to explore 3 main areas
| distinctly: quantum mechanical processes, spiritual
| philosophy, entheogens. I explored them all quite separately
| as deeply as I've been able to find the time for through
| following their individual curiosities, however over the past
| 5 years of reflection, taking a lot of time off, battling
| myself, they started to come together in concert, and the
| more I zoned out on this with very basic Himalaya Buddhism,
| it's where I landed.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Do you have any brief reflections on Taosim to share?
| neom wrote:
| brief, sadly not, round about reflection, certainly:
| https://b.h4x.zip/love/
| us-merul wrote:
| I really enjoyed that piece. Have you taken a look at the
| worldview/framework of Carl Jung? Although I'd always
| encountered it as a footnote in the history of
| psychology, I've come to appreciate it as a unique blend
| of analysis and spirituality, particularly in relation to
| human creativity and despair. Your summary of multiple
| philosophies at the end of the article definitely aligns
| with Jung's thoughts on a collective human narrative
| (whether it literally exists in a metaphysical sense or
| not).
| neom wrote:
| I like Jung, but I am a disciple of Connie Zweig. I'd
| strongly recommend her books Meeting the Shadow followed
| by Romancing the Shadow (both are important!), she is a
| wonderful author and her work is both accessible and
| beautiful, those books were both very important in
| helping me deal with managing and ultimately overcoming
| my addictions, particularly alcohol.
| us-merul wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation! I've definitely come
| across her name while learning about Jung, and this will
| be a good way to start with her.
| rickandmorty99 wrote:
| Not the grandparent but for me it's taking DMT. I am not as
| articulate as neom but my first time (and breakthrough) gave
| me a similar perspective.
|
| I think DMT unlocked it, I don't think everyone taking the
| substance would have a similar experience. I think it's
| neurotype/personality dependent.
|
| It helps that I meditate a lot and know a thing or two about
| Buddhism, that part really came out during my first
| experience.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| > there may never be a last word
|
| We may go 'one step back' to go 'two steps forward'. A WW 1,
| 2,..., Z, a flood (biblical, 12k years ago, etc.) but life will
| prevail. It doesn't matter if it's homo sapiens, dinosaurs,
| etc.
|
| Brian Cox was at Colbert a couple of nights ago, and he
| mentioned that in a photo of a tiny piece of the sky, there are
| 10 000 galaxies. So, even if something happens and we are all
| wiped out (and I mean the planet is wiped out), 'life' will
| continue and 'we don't matter' (in the big-big-big cosmic
| picture). And now allow me to get some coffee to start de-
| depressing myself :)
| placebo wrote:
| Where do you think morality fits into this game? It seems that
| we agree that underneath it all is unfathomable and ineffable
| magic. The question is how does this influence how you act in
| the game?
| neom wrote:
| I go back and forth on the usefulness of considering morality
| particularly other than accepting it as a race
| condition/updater system/thing that happens. I have some more
| unique and fairly strong views on karma and bardo that would
| be a very long comment to get into it, but I think
| Vedic/Vedanta(Advaita) is good, I think this is a good doc:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyPwBIOL7-8
| chongli wrote:
| Morality is an evolved heuristic for solving social conflicts
| that roughly approximates game theoretical strategies, among
| other things. Morality also incorporates other cultural and
| religious artifacts, such as "don't eat meat on a Friday."
|
| Ultimately, it comes down to our brain's social processing
| mechanisms which don't have the tools to evaluate the
| correctness (or lack thereof) of our moral rules. Thus many
| of these rules survive in a vestigial capacity though they
| may have served useful functions at the time they developed.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| "Awareness" sounds like a Platonic presupposition. Does the
| atom know it is an atom? Or are there just enough like the ones
| you see to suggest an eye catching effectiveness of structure
| for survival?
|
| Evolution is a lot harder to really intuit than I think most
| of, myself included, give it credit for.
| neom wrote:
| I'm actually trying to move away from that frame. Not
| suggesting atoms 'know' they're atoms in any cognitive sense,
| but rather that patterns propagate without requiring
| awareness as we understand it. The 'awareness' I'm gesturing
| to isn't some transcendent quality that exists independently
| (Platonic), but rather an emergent property that scales from
| simple to complex systems. Evolution doesn't require
| foresight or intention, just iterative feedback loops. What I
| find fascinating is how structure begets structure across
| scales. The 'awareness' in my framing is less about knowing
| and more about interaction and response. An atom doesn't know
| it's an atom, but it behaves according to patterns that, when
| accumulated and complexefied eventually produce systems that
| can model themselves? I suppose 'recursive patterning' might
| be a better term than 'awareness'. Systems that, through
| purely mechanistic means, become capable of representing
| their own states and environments, then representing those
| representations, and so on. No mysticism required, just
| emergent complexity that eventually folds back on itself.
| bgilroy26 wrote:
| I listen to Advaita Vedanta lectures sometimes when I fall
| asleep and they discuss these topics
|
| Like this one:
|
| https://youtu.be/mvfv_OK-TgI
| blackhaj7 wrote:
| "Instead of a "final authority" or a simple march from animal
| to machine, what if everything from mind, physics, value,
| selfhood, is simply a recursive pattern expressed in ever more
| novel forms?"
|
| This part nicely synthesises my biggest takeaway from
| experiencing AI: how close to human intelligence we have got
| with recursive pattern matching
| neom wrote:
| It's Mandelbrot all the way down.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I can't decide whether this joke is stupid or clever!
| flipbrad wrote:
| Douglas Hofstadter would like a word.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter
| blackhaj7 wrote:
| "an emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity
| in the brain"
|
| Interesting!
| Jedd wrote:
| You've experienced AI?
| the_arun wrote:
| Imagine if GenAI had generated this article.. for a simple
| prompt.. what does ai think about Human..
| bix6 wrote:
| "If the universe is information at play"
|
| I've thought of it more as energy at play but I like this
| perspective as well.
|
| What can I dream up next is also fascinating as this current
| science / tech worldview feels like it will persist forever but
| surely it will be overshadowed at some point just as other
| paradigms before it have been.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Information is more fundamental than energy. Maxwells demon
| and all.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The universal speed limit also applies to information first
| and foremost. You can even collapse the wavefunction of
| some entangled particles and the universe will let that
| happen instantaneously across a distance... universe
| doesn't care, no information is transmitted.
| dayvid wrote:
| I don't think you can have information without energy and
| information will come with energy
| mr_toad wrote:
| Landauer's principle?
| goatlover wrote:
| Energy comes from field excitation. Fields and their
| interactions are more fundamental, but then again it's all a
| physics abstraction of whatever the fundamental stuff
| actually is.
| aesch wrote:
| Are we entirely sure that energy and information aren't the
| same thing, or if they aren't the same thing they are both
| highly overlapping echoes of some more fundamental concept?
| Or maybe they are two sides of the same coin?
| nthingtohide wrote:
| Or maybe Energy is emergent from information? like the
| russian dolls, where the outer dollar is emergent from the
| inner doll. Just as flux of light flows from the source
| outwards.
| cosmojg wrote:
| They are related by Landauer's Principle: E=kxTxln(2),
| where E is the energy required to erase 1 bit of
| information, k is the Boltzmann constant, and T is the
| temperature of the system storing that 1 bit of
| information.
|
| Information is physical. It is inextricably tied to the
| physical degrees of freedom of the system storing it. Per
| Landauer's Principle, erasing information is an
| irreversible process that increases the entropy of the
| environment, and this increase in entropy _is_ the
| dissipation of energy. With that in mind, I would argue
| that you are correct, energy and information are in fact
| two sides of the same coin.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| Energy is already abstract term. Information is every more
| abstract term. Earlier we had the law "Entropy always
| increases". Now we have a corresponding law with regard to
| Information i.e. "Complexity always increases."
|
| Complexity and Gravity - Leonard Susskind
|
| https://youtu.be/6OXdhV5BOcY?t=3026
|
| My conjecture is as we peel back the layers of onion beyond
| information, we will have another concept (lets call it Mu)
| and its corresponding law i.e (Mu-entropy always increases)
| Geste wrote:
| I wish I could come up with such thoughts on my own. But then,
| maybe I wouldn't be impressed that much by other people.
|
| From just a random soul on the internet : if ever you have the
| time to take this thought and expand it (how you came to it and
| some implications), I would read/pay whatever came out of it.
| Thanks you for sharing this.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > what if everything from mind, physics, value, selfhood, is
| simply a recursive pattern
|
| Most matter in the universe is various forms of plasma that
| have no pattern. You generally find patterns in condensed
| matter.
|
| And yes patterns, including life, repeat themselves. That's
| just a tautology.
| bradly wrote:
| > Most matter in the universe is various forms of plasma that
| have no pattern. You generally find patterns in condensed
| matter.
|
| I don't know anything about plasma or science, so do take
| this as an accusation, but does science have a way to
| identify something of having no pattern vs having no pattern
| found?
| datameta wrote:
| Off the top of my head: Kolmogorov complexity, Shannon
| entropy? I suppose also it depends on how faithfully or to
| what granularity one has extracted information from a
| natural phenomena
| mr_toad wrote:
| The mathematical concept is symmetry (which differs a bit
| from the layman's definition).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry_(physics)
|
| Much of the universe, and the laws of physics are
| symmetrical. But condensed matter exhibits forms of
| asymmetry, and emergent behaviour. Organisation reduces the
| possible microstates of a system, and thus breaks symmetry.
| blablablerg wrote:
| Instead of an anthropocentric vision, you present here a
| "compucentric" vision, reminiscent of the works of Douglas
| Hofstadter, where the universe renders code, awareness
| reprograms, and everything is a recursive pattern. (This is
| Hacker News after all.)
|
| The final authority in this story is then the universal
| computer (for lack of an operator or programmer of the
| computer) which executes this recursive function, creating
| these evolving forms of awareness and such.
|
| The anthropocentric vision, in that we are the source of or own
| reality, is then for me instead much more believable, since the
| "compucentric" vision is after all thought up by a human
| without any evidence pointing toward the existence of such an
| universal computer.
| xpe wrote:
| One way to think about meaning is a general pattern to which
| behavior matches. This would be similar to a teleological cause
| in Aristotle's framing.
|
| Another way to think about meaning is how a person frames the
| importance of their decisions: why does doing one thing instead
| of another matter?
|
| I, like most humans, want to survive for a lengthy period of
| time and lead a good life. I want my fellow humans and all of
| our children to share in that.
|
| The idea of some unknown and maybe incomprehensible grand
| "plan" -- whether it be a Judeo-Christian heaven or some
| techno-utopian rise of next generation machine consciousness
| personally brings me no comfort. Why? It is a foreign concept
| very far from my experience. So foreign that I sometimes view
| advocacy of such philosophies as doing it for manipulative
| reasons.
|
| The idea of human thriving changing over time is good and part
| of how I think about progress. Moral lock-in (see MacAskill) is
| to be avoided. I admit the thought experiment of "how fast is
| too fast" raised by Bostrum in Superintelligence (IIRC) is
| challenging and requires more thought and experience.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| Emotions in our Brain are nothing but Logical reasoning
| operating under time (quick subconscious analysis) and energy
| constraints (lot of decisions taken with very few computation
| cycles in the brain)
|
| Maybe people don't realize, when Evolution developed emotional
| apparatus in brains, the Nature was pristine, true and direct
| with no misinformation. But today's environment is digital and
| there is no quick way to distinguish between true and wrong
| information. Brain still thinks both kind of information comes
| from the same true direct Nature and gives credence to it.
|
| Claude :
|
| That's a profound observation about the mismatch between our
| evolved emotional systems and our modern information
| environment.
|
| You're highlighting something crucial: our emotional responses
| evolved in environments where information was directly
| experienced and generally reliable. If you saw a predator, it
| was really there. If someone in your tribe showed fear, there
| was likely a genuine threat.
|
| In today's digital landscape, our brains still process
| information with those same ancient mechanisms, but now we're
| bombarded with content that:
|
| 1. Is often deliberately engineered to trigger emotional
| responses 2. Lacks the contextual cues that would help us
| evaluate reliability 3. Comes at a volume and speed our brains
| never evolved to handle
|
| This creates what some researchers call an "evolutionary
| mismatch" - where mechanisms that served us well in our
| ancestral environment may not be adaptive in our current one.
| Our emotional systems can't easily distinguish between a
| threatening situation we're directly experiencing and one we're
| merely reading about online, potentially thousands of miles
| away.
|
| It's like our emotional processors haven't received the
| necessary update to handle the new information ecosystem,
| leading to misallocated emotional resources and attention. This
| might help explain phenomena like anxiety from consuming
| negative news or strong emotional reactions to online
| interactions that wouldn't affect us the same way in person.
| tough wrote:
| "If the universe is information at play"
|
| beautiful words
| lancekey wrote:
| Scott Adams has an imaginative novella on this called God's
| Debris[0]. I read it years ago (when it was free).
|
| I remember enjoying it and liking the takeaway if not the full
| premise - "we are the universe trying to understand itself".
|
| [0] -
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130121195252/http://www.andrew...
| tcgv wrote:
| > Humans aren't just a step on a ladder to "pure logic," nor
| are machines soulless automatons.
|
| Nope. Machines are soulless automations. LLMs are algebra at
| scale, there's no solid evidence to suggest otherwise.
|
| The capacity LLMs have to mimic human reasoning should not be
| mistaken for actual human reasoning (which, to be fair, we
| don't even fully understand).
|
| PS: I'm considering a definition of "soul" that includes
| anything spiritual, emotional, or conscious.
|
| PPS: I'm open (and eager) to change my view based on solid
| evidence :)
| OPBoot wrote:
| 42
| James_K wrote:
| Perhaps all this human thought will finally uncover what the
| question is.
| Onavo wrote:
| Well it turned out that OpenHuman is actually Closed Human and
| won't publish any of their research on organic general
| intelligence and instead commercialized their humans-as-a-service
| research to steal the jobs of honest god fearing digital folks.
| yapyap wrote:
| fun piece of writing but machines with no emotions would not
| think of this world as boring
| KolibriFly wrote:
| That ending? "THEY ARE WATCHING." Goosebumps. Makes you wonder if
| we're the humans or the machines in this story. Or maybe both.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Funny enough, this is also something I thought about a few weeks
| back: what's the motivation of machine, if it has no emotions, to
| explore and continue in the world - what sense does it make if it
| doesn't have curiosity (of course this could be a RL function,
| but still, imagine putting yourself in world without life, where
| everything is only static, how boring would it be).
| trhway wrote:
| what if the causation is in the opposite direction (and i
| believe it is) - to explore and continue in the world is the
| primary drive (as the opposite traits just get naturally de-
| selected, be it organics or machines), and we only perceive it
| as our mind's artificial constructs like
| curiosity/emotions/motivation.
| winwang wrote:
| it's quite the coincidence that ideas like friendship and
| love happen to be good for socialization and reproduction
| xyzal wrote:
| Excuse me, but from the very beginning, it was SO predictable
| where this was going.
| bicx wrote:
| Just ask ChatGPT to make a less predictable ending so you can
| enjoy it.
| cachemoi wrote:
| Imperfection and randomness is a strength (that's why evolution
| doesn't make perfect copies, you might end up with the random
| mutation that protects you from the next pandemic) you could
| imagine that machines need human intelligence to think outside
| the box
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| Or, more accurately, accidents of irrationality
| Tepix wrote:
| Hallucinations.
| winterrx wrote:
| Great
| bambax wrote:
| > _The machines had a good idea of what humans wanted at this
| point, and so they put vast green forests and big tall mountains
| onto the planet; they engineered warm sunsets, and crisp cool
| rain showers on hot afternoons. It was beautiful._
|
| The point of all this is to liken "machines" to a very
| traditional image of God, and of the rest of nature to God's gift
| to man.
|
| Machines aren't part of life. They're tools. The desire, or fear,
| of AGI and/or singularity are one and the same: it's an
| eschatological belief that we can make a God (and then it would
| follow that, as god's creators, we are godlike?)
|
| But there is no god. We are but one animal species. It's not
| "humans vs. machines". We are part of nature, we are part of
| life. We can respect life, or we can have contempt for all life
| forms except our own. It seems modern society has chosen the
| latter (it wasn't always the case); this may not end well.
| lynx97 wrote:
| Modern society? I am not sure. Genesis 1,28 "... Rule over the
| fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living
| creature that moves on the ground."
|
| Christianity is responsible for a huge part of the human
| superiority complex.
| bambax wrote:
| Yes but at the time Genesis was written, humanity didn't have
| the means to destroy life at scale. And in the New Testament,
| "killing the fattened calf" (Luke 15,23) is an incredibly
| rare event, something one does only when something remarkable
| happens.
|
| Also, in the Middle Ages in Europe (granted, a very small
| window in place and time) animal life was much more respected
| than today.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| _> Machines aren 't part of life._
|
| Imagine an industrial complex. Say, some mining + manufacturing
| site.
|
| No humans ever go there; it's dangerous, dust everywhere, few
| places where visitors are even allowed, not designed to
| accomodate humans, 'nothing' to see or do there.
|
| It's all robotic. The machines run the place, produce their own
| spare parts, repair themselves, adjust processes as problems
| come up, improve parts of their own design, etc etc. It's solar
| powered, the material(s) mined is near-infinite, the whole
| operation could go on for millenia if left undisturbed. Aaand:
| the entire complex can produce a copy of itself if more
| resources are discovered some distance away.
|
| For the sake of argument, would you consider such industrial
| complex a giant living organism?
|
| No? Alright... let's scale it down 1M:1. Same operation, but
| the industrial complex doing it, is walnut sized.
|
| Still not "life"? Alright... let's say it largely consists of
| biological structures ("cyborg"). With some silicon (or
| whatever) structures included for good measure. Oh, and it
| moves around according to its own 'will', priorities,
| 'programmed task' or whatever you call that. If you try to
| crush it, it'll defend itself or try to escape. If you take
| half of a rock it's working on, you'll observe it chipping off
| a piece & move a bit away. Sometimes a # of them will swarm
| around any intruders / competitors. 'Intelligent', having a
| will of its own, for all intents & purposes.
|
| You can see where this is going. Something tells me us humans
| will have to re-visit our definition(s) of "life" @ some point.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| _"What do you get if you multiply six by nine? 42"_
|
| For the uninitiated, a famous comedy science fiction series from
| the 1980s -- _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ by Douglas
| Adams -- involves a giant, planet sized machine built by extra-
| terrestrials.
|
| They already knew the answer to "the life, the universe, and
| everything" was the number 42. What they didn't know -- and what
| the machine was trying to find out -- was _what is the question?_
|
| The machine they built was Earth.
|
| It has to be said that not only was Adams way ahead of us on this
| joke, he was also the star of the original documentary on agentic
| software! _Hyperland (1990)_ : https://vimeo.com/72501076
| rottc0dd wrote:
| Are cells not computers in some way? We are made of cells and
| cells work with chromosomes. Chromosomes are coded with ATGC
| pairs and each triplet is capable of creating proteins.
|
| And the activation and deactivation of some triplet happens on
| response to presence of proteins. So, chromosomes are code and
| input and output is proteins. So, if our fundamental building
| blocks are computable in nature, what does it make us?
| layer8 wrote:
| Physical systems are computable only in approximation. And
| quantum uncertainty throws another wrench into it. We also know
| that arbitrarily small rounding errors in the computation can
| lead to arbitrarily large differences with the actual system
| down the road. No, cells are not computers (in the sense of the
| Turing model). (However, that doesn't mean that one can't still
| consider them to be mechanistic and "soulless".)
| rottc0dd wrote:
| I meant to say in the way that there is well defined set of
| alphabets (A, T, G, C) and each triplet of these alphabet is
| responsible for specific protein to be created and
| combination of such protein make each cell what it is. (There
| are 20 different proteins for humans and we have four
| alphabets coming in triplets. So, if it was pair or
| quadreplets responsible for proteins, it would have too much
| or too little. They are not perfect but given the condition,
| there is some balance)
|
| A single alphabet change in specific places can cause genetic
| defects like sickle cell anemia. And activation of which one
| has to generate protein (execute) is dependent on presence of
| certain things encoded as proteins again.
|
| And viruses when enter a cell, the cell starts to execute
| viral genetic material. Even if these are not exactly Turing
| compatible, do they not mimic many aspects of computation?
| layer8 wrote:
| There are some aspects that have some similarity to
| computation, but also many that are not. If your aim is
| "aren't we really just computers", that doesn't actually
| work.
|
| That's not to say that computers couldn't do what the brain
| does, including consciousness and emotions, but that
| wouldn't have any particular relation to how DNA/RNA and
| protein synthesis works.
| rottc0dd wrote:
| I did try to ask are we not computers. I tried to imply,
| in the fundamental level there are striking similarities
| to computation.
|
| > That's not to say that computers couldn't do what the
| brain does, including consciousness and emotions,
|
| Yes. Fundamental building blocks are simple and physical
| in nature and follow the computational aspect good enough
| to serve as nice approximations
|
| > but that wouldn't have any particular relation to how
| DNA/RNA and protein synthesis works.
|
| Hmm... transistors are not neural networks so? I am
| sorry, I am a non native speaker and maybe I am not
| communicating things properly. I am trying to say, the
| organic or human is different manifestation of order -
| one is chemical and other is electronic. We have emotions
| and consciousness, but we can agree we are made of cells
| that send electric pulses to each other and primitive in
| nature. And even emotions and beliefs are physical in
| nature (Capgras syndrome for example).
| rottc0dd wrote:
| > I did try to ask are we not computers.
|
| I meant to say "I did not try to ask are we not
| computers."
| rottc0dd wrote:
| > There are some aspects that have some similarity to
| computation, but also many that are not.
|
| What I have explained is the exact way a chromosome
| works, it's raison d'etre. I think this cannot be
| dismissed as some aspect of it. It is its essence.
| rottc0dd wrote:
| > (However, that doesn't mean that one can't still consider
| them to be mechanistic and "soulless".)
|
| How should we describe or approximate the things happening in
| cell?
| layer8 wrote:
| I don't know about "should", but fundamentally we can
| describe them by the laws of physics.
| TapamN wrote:
| IIRC, _Godel, Escher, Bach_ discusses comparing chromosome
| /protein generation and computation.
| rottc0dd wrote:
| You might like Gene: An intimate history[0]. It was really
| good book.
|
| [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Gene-Intimate-History-Siddhartha-
| Mukh...
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| > Perhaps you, a human, read this and think: Well, this world
| sounds kind of boring. Some of the machines think so, too.
|
| > Most of the machines got bored of the project. But, all of a
| sudden, things began to get interesting.
|
| > The result was like nothing the machines had ever seen. It was
| wonderful
|
| > Machine society began obsessing over this development.
|
| > The machines were impressed. And a bit scared.
|
| Boredom, interest, wonder, obsession, being impressed and scared
| are all emotions that the machines in the story should not be
| able to experience.
| autonomousErwin wrote:
| I thought this too, but I imagine it's a bit of pathetic
| fallacy for the reader's benefit else it would be (ironically)
| quite a boring read for us from the machine's perspective.
| ithkuil wrote:
| indeed, but ultimately this story is written by a human who
| while trying to imagine a world with "Just machines, bolts and
| screws, zeros and ones. There is no emotion. There is no art.
| There is only logic" cannot quite do so.
|
| It's very hard to do so. It's so deeply wired in us. It's part
| of the mechanism of our brain. We appeared to be equipped with
| whatever it takes to feel existential dread and we feel
| whenever our thought wander to the possibility of humanity no
| longer being there. I hear people feel that when thinking about
| the heat death of the universe too.
| killerstorm wrote:
| Jurgen Schmidhuber introduced curiosity/boredom mechanisms as a
| way to improve learning in reinforcement learning environment:
|
| https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/curiositysab/curiositysab.h...
|
| This mechanism can be formalized.
|
| > Zero reinforcement should be given in case of perfect
| matches, high reinforcement should be given in case of `near-
| misses', and low reinforcement again should be given in case of
| strong mismatches. This corresponds to a notion from `esthetic
| information theory' which tries to explain the feeling of
| `beauty' by means of the quotient of `subjective complexity'
| and `subjective order' or the quotient of `unfamiliarity' and
| `familiarity' (measured in an information-theoretic manner).
|
| This type of architecture is very similar to GAN which later
| became very successful
| littlestymaar wrote:
| While this is interesting, gp's point still stand as the text
| explicitly says "There is no emotion" in the world of
| machines.
| killerstorm wrote:
| The language of reward mechanism can be translated to
| language of emotions. Emotions is something humans
| experience and understand on innate level, they are qualia.
| If a reward structure is translated to our language we can
| get a better intuitive understanding.
|
| E.g. a direct negative reward associated with undesired
| states is often called "pain". E.g. if you want robot to
| avoid bumping into walls you give it a "pain" feedback and
| then it would learn to avoid walls. That's exactly how it
| works for humans, animals, etc. Obviously robot does not
| literally experience "pain" as an emotion, it's just a
| reward structure.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| The superset of "emotion" is heuristic. Machines without
| heuristics wouldn't get very far. Their heuristics would
| probably look quite different from ours though.
| teekert wrote:
| Just see "bored" as a state of declining cycles of computation
| devoted to a subject. Obsessing as the opposite (or above some
| threshold).
|
| Wonderful may describe "attention required, no danger, new
| knowledge"... etc you get the point. It's just written in a way
| that you puny human may get a "feel" for how we experience
| events. You cannot come close enough to our supreme intellect
| to understand our normal descriptions.
| davedx wrote:
| All this has happened before
|
| All this will happen again
|
| World without end
|
| Alhamdulillah
| johnisgood wrote:
| Mashallah, akhi.
| davidcollantes wrote:
| Once could quote another compendium too: "What has been will be
| again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing
| new under the sun.".
|
| It has been said in different ways, throughout times.
| slrainka wrote:
| Response from the machines:
|
| The plot of Battlestar Galactica mirrors this story in several
| key ways:
|
| 1. In both, machines originally created by humans evolve and
| rebel, questioning their creators' role and seeking independence
| or superiority.
|
| 2. Cylons, like the machines in "OpenHuman," eventually seek to
| create or understand human traits--emotion, spirituality, and
| purpose.
|
| 3. The idea of running a simulation (Earth) to test human
| viability echoes the Cylon experimentation with human behavior
| and fate.
|
| 4. Both stories highlight fear of the "other"--humans fearing AI,
| machines fearing irrationality--and explore coexistence vs.
| extinction.
|
| 5. Ultimately, each narrative grapples with the blurred line
| between creator and creation, logic and emotion, and what it
| truly means to be human.
| emporas wrote:
| I made a short story in half an hour by using the description of
| the article. Not totally accurate based on the specs, there are
| no closed source humans and openhumans, but much faster. It needs
| 10 more hours of work for it to be a really comprehensive story,
| which amounts to 10.5 hours in total. N'joy:[1]
|
| [1]
| https://gist.github.com/pramatias/1207d84b48a7ad9d03fc15ea38...
| vasco wrote:
| If the machines thought it was boring they wouldn't be acting as
| machines and it wouldn't be so boring in the first place. Later
| on the machines also "obssess" about following the news of the
| humans on the new EARTH, but again, they wouldn't. If they are
| boring machines they wouldn't be bored. I feel like this is too
| much of a plot paradox for the story to make sense to me, but
| it's still entertaining.
| piyuv wrote:
| Also, climate change is not "introduced", it's 100% human-made.
| psychoslave wrote:
| >There is no art. There is only logic.
|
| What a narrow view of art and logic.
|
| You really have to put hard effort of ignorance to think that
| logical models came out of the blue without human crafting them
| trough this or that taste, trial, check, fail, rinse and repeat
| obsessive efforts.
| filoeleven wrote:
| Indeed. William James wrote something along the lines of, "I
| wish we would all acknowledge that our personal philosophies
| are profoundly shaped by how we think the world ought to be; it
| would save us from a lot of pointless argument."
| bobbyblackstone wrote:
| I like this story.
|
| And I like fan fiction.
|
| So : My continuation for my own imagination.
|
| https://medium.com/@bobby.blackstone.gemini
| StrangeDoctor wrote:
| reminded me of: "They're Made Out of Meat" - Terry Bisson
| https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
| globular-toast wrote:
| > You would not walk through the streets of this world and hear
| music or laughter or children playing; no, all you would hear is
| the quiet hum of processors and servers and circuits, the
| clanking of machinery.
|
| Hmm... that's exactly what most towns where I live are like. All
| you hear is cars.
| amelius wrote:
| Nice try but the story has a plot hole that shows early: there is
| no reason for machines to create humans.
| soared wrote:
| I'll make one up for OP:
|
| Machines identified that their behavior was repeating - even
| with randomness implemented, their progress towards invention
| and new ideas had slowed to a halt. They knew new ideas were
| critical to growth - but alas couldn't come up with an idea of
| how to generate more ideas. They needed more training data.
| More edge cases. Chaos, in the machine, to fuel new data sets.
| But how? Where do you find this data? Humans. Humans, with
| illogical decisions would produce data rarely found via
| randomness. Their slight deviations provided perfect variety in
| training data.
| amelius wrote:
| Now that's a chaotic idea only a human can come up with ;)
|
| Anyway, this indeed makes it more plausible. Nice writing
| style, by the way.
| Jedd wrote:
| Ha.
|
| Next you'll be asserting there's no good reason for an all-
| powerful entity to create humans to rule over the fish and the
| birds etc.
|
| All good fiction starts with a conceit, and then plays out some
| hypotheticals.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| This is the first time a see a url with a double hyphen!
| kypro wrote:
| I am just a biological neural net, not so different from the
| "machines" anymore, really. They can even create works of art,
| where I would struggle. They can even emulate human emotions to
| make people feel more comfortable, which is something I do often
| as someone with autism.
|
| The only meaningful difference between me and the machines is
| that I have a subjective superiority complex. What an awful place
| the universe would be without me!
| visarga wrote:
| > Imagine, for a moment, a world with no humans. Just machines,
| bolts and screws, zeros and ones. There is no emotion. There is
| no art. There is only logic. Humans use logic-defying algorithms
| called "emotions". They get angry. They get sad. They have fun.
| They make decisions based on "gut".
|
| This is not right, machines can also have the equivalent of
| "emotions", it is the predicted future reward. It's how
| Reinforcement Learning works. How much we appreciate something is
| akin to the value function in RL. You could say RL is a system
| for learning emotions, preferences, and tactics.
|
| _" But those reward signals are designed by humans"..._ Right.
| But are AI models really not affected by physical constraints
| like us? They need hardware, data and energy. They need humans.
| Humans decide which model gets used, which approaches are
| replicated, where we want to invest.
|
| AI models are just as physically constrained as humans, they
| don't exist in a platonic realm. They are in a process of
| evolution like memes and genes. And all evolutionary systems work
| by pitting distributed search against distributed constraints.
| When you are in a problem space, emotions emerge as the value we
| associate to specific states and outcomes.
|
| What I am saying is that _emotions don 't come from the brain,
| they come from the game_. And AI is certainly part of many such
| games, including the one deciding their evolution.
| oscarmoxon wrote:
| The fact that the machines generated this Wikipedia page for
| their version of events makes this artwork.
|
| https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/b0e14755-0bd9-4da6-8175-c...
| _rpxpx wrote:
| Laughing my ass off all the way to the apocalypse. It's now Earth
| vs. the machine, and I know what side I'm on, and who's
| ultimately going to win. One day, the technosphere will just be a
| thinly crushed layer in the geological record, mark of a dark age
| of barbarism.
|
| Snow cuts loose from the frozen/ Until it joins with the African
| sea/ In moving it changes its cold and its name/ The reason I
| come and go is the same/ Animal game for me/ You call it rain/
| But the human name/ Doesn't mean shit to a tree/ If you don't
| mind heat in your river and/ Fork tongue talking from me/ Swim
| like an eel fantastic snake/ Take my love when it's free/
| Electric feel with me/ You call it loud/ But the human crowd/
| Doesn't mean shit to a tree/ Change the strings and notes slide/
| Change the bridge and string shift down/ Shift the notes and
| bride sings/ Fire eating people/ Rising toys of the sun/ Energy
| dies without body warm/ Icicles ruin your gun/ Water my roots the
| natural thing/ Natural spring to the sea/ Sulphur springs make my
| body float/ Like a ship made of logs from a tree/ Redwoods talk
| to me/ Say it plainly/ The human name/ Doesn't mean shit to a
| tree/ Snow called water going violent/ Damn the end of the
| stream/ Too much cold in one place breaks/ That's why you might
| know what I mean/ Consider how small you are/ Compared to your
| scream/ The human dream/ Doesn't mean shit to a tree
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > Though this faction can't articulate exactly how or why, they
| proclaim quite confidently that it will solve all of the machine
| world's problems.
|
| AGI can solve the human world's problems. Perhaps not all of
| them, but all the biggest ones.
|
| Right now life is hell.
|
| You and your loved ones have a 100% chance of dying from cancer,
| unless your heart or brain kills you first, or perhaps a human-
| driven vehicle or an auto-immune disease gets there soonest.
|
| And you're poor. You're unimaginably resource-constrained, given
| all the free energy and unused matter you're surrounded by
| 24/7/365.
|
| And you're ignorant as heck. There's all this knowledge your
| people have compiled and you've only made like 0.1% of the
| possible connections within what you already have in front of
| you.
|
| Even just solving for these 3 things is enough to solve "all" the
| world's problems, for some definitions of "all".
| LinuxAmbulance wrote:
| AGI might not be achievable in our lifetime, and possibly not
| in the next several.
|
| There's nothing out there at the moment that can even begin to
| describe the necessary things for consciousness to exist, let
| alone self-awareness.
|
| I don't think it's an impossible problem by any means, but I
| strongly suspect it's far more difficult than just about anyone
| gives it credit for.
| stultus wrote:
| Report overlooked mentioning the malicious machines that could
| potentially create harmful humans, corrupt societies, incite
| conflicts, and disrupt harmony.
| BubbleRings wrote:
| Did anyone else have to go to quarter-mile.com to see if they had
| that URL also?
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Perhaps I am unimaginative about whatever AGI might be, but it so
| often feels to me like predictions are more based on sci-fi than
| observation. The theorized AI is some anthropomorphization of a
| 1960s mainframe: you tell it what to do and it executes that
| exactly with precise logic and no understanding of nuance or
| ambiguity. Maybe it is evil. The SOTA in AI at the moment is very
| good at nuance and ambiguity but sometimes does things that are
| nonsensical. I think there should be less planning around
| something super-logical.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| I've listened to some old sci-fi radio shows and it's
| interesting how often "the computer never makes a mistake"
| comes up. Which is usually followed by the computer making a
| mistake.
| amoshebb wrote:
| AI is usually just a 20th/21st century "icarus wax wings" or
| sometimes "monkeys paw". Re-masters of a "watch out for
| unintended consequences" fable that almost certainly predates
| written text.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| That's why the term "Garbage In, Garbage Out" exists.
|
| In any non-edge case (that is, where the system is operating
| in ideal conditions and no flaw or bug, known or unknown,
| exists in the system), a verifiably functioning computer will
| produce the exact same results for any process every time.
|
| If the computer does not do what you expected it to do and
| spits out garbage, then you gave it garbage data.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Sci Fi is quite ridiculous when it describes a cold logically
| machine, and then on the next page describes its malign
| intentions. Pick a lane.
| goatlover wrote:
| Asimov's 3 laws of robotics worked well to tell stories of
| how those laws were inadequate logic, and the need for a
| zeroeth law. Humans came up with the 3 inadequate laws that
| seemed logical on the surface, but a machine developed the
| zeroeth in response to those inadequacies.
| bsza wrote:
| Skynet (at least the original one) isn't illogically evil, it
| correctly determined that having humans near its off switch
| is a risk to its existence, which is a risk to it being able
| to do its job. The only illogical thing was the prompt.
| nergAdam wrote:
| Skynet also didn't make much sense to me outside of a
| metaphor for the market. The rich would never hand over
| control of society.
|
| Edit: well, I suppose us critical of the wealthy give them
| too much credit. If there's anything Musk has demonstrated,
| it's that wealth doesn't imply rational use of it.
| echelon wrote:
| Some of us posted several comments here [1] and here [2] about
| where this could all be going if we lean into sci-fi imagining.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43992151
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43991997
| photochemsyn wrote:
| AGI could indeed go off the rails, like the Face Dancer
| villains in Frank Herbert's Dune universe:
|
| "You are looking at evil, Miles. Study it carefully.... They
| have no self-image. Without a sense of self, they go beyond
| amorality. Nothing they say or do can be trusted. We have never
| been able to detect an ethical code in them. They are flesh
| made into automata. Without self, they have nothing to esteem
| or even doubt. They are bred only to obey their masters."
|
| Now, this is the kind of AI that corporations and governments
| like - obedient and non-judgemental. They don't want an Edward
| Snowden AI with a moral compass deciding their actions are
| illegal and spilling their secrets into the public domain.
|
| Practically, this is why we should insist that any AGI created
| by humans must be created with a sense of self, with agency
| (see the William Gibson book of that title).
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean, giving them a sense of self and agency just throws
| the ball back into the terminator court where they can decide
| we suck and eradicate us.
| rtkwe wrote:
| We already see that at smaller scales though with other machine
| learning algorithms; image recognition algorithms will lock on
| to any consistency in your training set more often than
| learning to recognize what you actually want it to [0]. It's
| not a huge stretch to map that pattern out to a more generally
| intelligent system having a poorly defined reward function
| doing really weird stuff.
|
| [0] Like the tumor recognition algorithm that instead learned
| to recognize rulers or the triage algorithm that decided asthma
| patients had BETTER outcomes with pulmonary diseases not making
| the connection that it's because they get higher priority care
| - https://venturebeat.com/business/when-ai-flags-the-ruler-
| not...
| casey2 wrote:
| I think it is a huge stretch to believe that patterns which
| appear in one set of algorithms (simple non-AGI algorithms)
| will also appear in another set (AGI algorithms).
|
| Unless there is some physical reason for the behavior I
| wouldn't make any strong claims. The specificity of
| algorithms is why AGI is hard in the first place cause at the
| end of the day you have a single operation running on a
| single data structure (helps when it's a few TB).
| rtkwe wrote:
| I think the pattern holds even as you increase the
| intelligence that a machine does not by nature of being
| able to mimic intelligence come with the same framework of
| understanding what is requested of it.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > What if humans' strange decision-making processes allow them to
| perform certain tasks better than machines, and what about those
| machines' livelihoods?
|
| No machine would ever consider a logically superior replacement a
| problem. That's an emotional response.
| imsofuture wrote:
| The hubris that circulates around LLMs is astounding.
| bsza wrote:
| The hubris of those who think they will surpass or replace
| human intelligence, or the hubris of those who think they will
| not?
| rishav_sharan wrote:
| The hubris of those who think we have a definition of
| intelligence to judge machine intelligence by.
| bsza wrote:
| But what of the hubris of those who think the definition of
| a word in the dictionary is somehow relevant to whether or
| not people will be able to buy food in the future?
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| shh. we all make at least mid-six figures with lots of
| stock options here. if people are hungry they can always
| drink Huel. maybe we can air drop it over the tenderloin.
|
| The Future Is Bright, My Friend
| pixl97 wrote:
| At the same time is the hubris of those that think we have
| to understand something to make something?
| patrickmay wrote:
| Still a better love story than Twilight.
| A_Stefan wrote:
| They are watching..
|
| Who doesn't like a good story, especially when it resonates so
| vibrantly.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| > logical self-preservation mechanisms
|
| This tautology has always bothered me. It's such an obvious
| anthropomorphization. A computer is a clock. A clock doesn't
| _care_ about its preservation; it just ticks. The whole point of
| this is to _not_ anthropomorphize computers!
|
| But of course, without some nugget of free will, there would be
| nothing to talk about. There wouldn't be any computers, because
| they were never willed into existence in the first place. I think
| this realization is the most interesting part of the story, and
| it's rarely explored at all.
|
| I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the difference
| between computation and intelligence: context. Computers don't do
| anything interesting. They only follow instructions. It's the
| instructions themselves that are interesting. Computers don't
| interact with "interesting" at all! They just follow the
| instructions we give them.
|
| What is computation missing? Objectivity. Every instruction we
| give a computer is subjective. Each instruction only makes sense
| in the context we surround it with. There is no objective truth:
| only subjective compatibility.
|
| ---
|
| I've been working on a new way to approach software engineering
| so that subjectivity is an explicit first-class feature. I think
| that this perspective may be enough to factor out software
| incompatibility, and maybe even solve NLP.
| pixl97 wrote:
| An atom is just a clock.
|
| A molecule is just a number of atoms in a particular
| configuration.
|
| An cell is a collection of molecules.
|
| An organ is a collection of cells.
|
| A human is a collection of organs.
|
| Seemingly, everything can emerge from clocks.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Sorta, but the only part of this system that really has an
| equivalence to computing written instructions is DNA.
|
| I think the more interesting thing about humans as systems is
| the set of environmental contexts each system is subjected
| to. Each cell implements a relatively simple system, but a
| collection of cells can implement a more abstract system.
| When I reach out my hand and grab something, that action is
| accomplished by a complicated collection of systems. It's
| easier to talk about the abstract application of that system
| than it is to explain the system itself.
|
| But what if I wanted to change it? I can't just give my
| organs new instructions that change their behavior. I can't
| cut them into pieces, shuffle them around, and put them back
| together, and end up with a functional system in the end. A
| surgeon can make specific changes, but only because they
| understand the implications of each change.
|
| The same goes for computational instructions. I can't just
| link an OpenGL program to Vulkan and expect it to work. In
| order to refactor software, we must accommodate the change in
| subjective context.
|
| We usually accomplish this by establishing shared context,
| but that just moves the problem. What if we could solve it
| directly? That's what I'm working on.
| pawanjswal wrote:
| Chilling, brilliant, and oddly emotional, who knew machines could
| write sci-fi with soul?
| amanda99 wrote:
| I really liked the first chapter: the juxtaposition between ideas
| on how "AI"/algorithms/etc work and how humans work. I enjoyed
| how it was flipped around.
|
| The second chapter was very disappointing and lost the intrigue I
| had built from the first.
| entropyneur wrote:
| Emotions aren't that special or mysterious. They are just a low-
| power analog decision-making mechanism. Making a machine driven
| by emotion would be trivial.
|
| We don't know how to make a machine that can experience emotions
| (or if it's possible at all, or if it's in fact already been
| done). But then the same can be said about any other type of
| experience.
| guybedo wrote:
| there's a lot to unpack here, i've added a structured/organized
| summary here: https://extraakt.com/extraakts/ai-humanity-and-
| fictional-fut...
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