From AI to cephalopods, a new strain of "nature writing"
newhumanist.org.uk
newhumanist.org.uk
At some point we'll create intelligence more advanced than our own, and hopefully it has the capacity to be able to recognize that we can still have meaning even though we might seem like the ones with an uncertain level of intelligence at that point. If we want to help ensure that is the case, we should start to ascribe some more meaning and sanctity to the other forms of life besides ourselves. That next thing is probably going to take after its creator, and if we have no regard for any life but our own, we shouldn't expect it to learn something differently from us.
The day to day experience of our lives is no less magical if human consciousness or life is not uniquely special, or even if the universe we exist in was entirely simulated. We experience it the same in any case.
We don't have to be a uniquely special case. It's not necessary for us to be in order for life to have meaning or be sacred.
So let's not dismiss the possibility of consciousness or sentience in any other potential life forms around us, natural or artificial. We need to try and err on the side of caution, and reevaluate often as we learn more. And let us agree together that all potential intelligence or sentience should be handled with as much care and respect as we can reasonably provide.
For as long as science in the modern sense has existed, the scientific consensus was never that we are "at the center of the Universe" (what would that even mean?). This clichéd phrase has always been used primarily by anti-science ideologues to discredit or ridicule a claimed widespread scientific hubris.
And that humans are "special" in the sense of possessing certain qualities that place them in an entirely separate category from all other life on Earth is rather obvious. As a trivial example, humans are the only species from Earth that has traveled to another celestial body, and returned.
That behavior pattern is new, and it goes back to semitic religions. Otherwise before those the general religious format was that humans were part of a larger world in which everything was connected and never everything else was 'for the humans'. (Semitic religions explicitly say that).
What if we are the only species of the bunch that was unable to perceive this, it makes us the unintelligent ones
Its not like AI are conscious on their own, the way lets say dogs can be.
Just like computer game, if there's no one to play it, and a brain to process it, it doesn't really exist beyond 0's and 1s.
Dog's don't require humans at all to live, they would just revert back to their lives as wolves should humans disappeared.
> In 2019, Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, about eight people’s lives connected through their relationship with trees, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
> In 2020, word of mouth lifted Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, published seven years previously, into the New York Times bestseller list, for the vision it presented of mutual care and connection between people and plants.
> That year, Merlin Sheldrake published Entangled Life, another bestseller, exploring fungi and the “wood wide web” of their mycorrhizal collaboration with plants.
——-
And yet the tree, fungus or octopus who can write award winning literature has yet to be seen.
To confess my unpopular opinion: humanity is special.
But. We have no ideas what awards octopuses give each other, if any. Their failure to win Pulitzer prizes is no more damning than our failure to win octopus awards.
Or the human that can sing a touching whalesong.
I noticed reading the FAQ that HN users can change their names now:
> Can I change my username?
> Yes. Email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll help.
How on earth did you pull this off? Can you please allocate some time someday to talk about this on a technical level? It’s probably one of the more impressive refactorings I’ve ever seen.
HN was originally designed so that usernames were the primary key in HN’s database schema. They appear in dozens of places, and each of those places would need to be mutated by a username change. But that would be hard for obvious reasons — examining up to 37 million items and updating them atomically isn’t so easy, especially when there are external systems involved like Algolia and Firebase.
The only other way I can think of would be to create a second “shadow” user. E.g. if user foo wants to change their name to bar, then create bar and set it as the shadow of foo. But now everywhere in the code that looks up usernames needs to perform this indirection. Is that how it works? It would also have other benefits, e.g. if someone visits /user?id=foo then you can redirect them to bar. But there must be dozens of places where this indirection needs to happen, so I’m leaning towards the “update all 37 million items atomically” design rather than shadow users.
I suppose the third option is to punt: create bar, set bar’s karma to foo’s, change foo’s profile to “I switched to bar,” and lock foo. That’s entirely valid, and seems like the most likely approach for a name change. (It would certainly sidestep a mountain of complexity…)
As someone who’s studied the HN codebase for well over a decade, I have to know. It’ll torment me if it remains a mystery. Sorry for the off topic question.
* claiming mathematics is "white", and removing calculus from high school curricula
* eliminating standardized testing as the primary criteria for university admission so that the admissions staff can exercise their biases without being exposed.
How do you compare the physical intelligence of an Olympic athlete with years of specialized science-driven training, to the physical intelligence of a man who trained to fight in war since childhood and who has battle experience? Just because one person can jump into a pool better, does not make them superior. Just because one person has more capability to defend their family does not make them superior.
When people try to make these judgements, they don't like being honest about how hard it is to compare the cognitive faculty of two different human beings. Often these discussions just end up with a lot of cultural relativism, a lot of people declaring what they're familiar with is more valuable. Ideally people would learn more about 'unknown unknowns'-- the things they didn't know that they don't know. In practice people get uncomfortable being told there are things they don't get that other cultures understand well.
This comment is exactly the sort of thing that site guideline asks you not to post here.
What a load of crap. Just because cephalopods exhibit behavioral traits that can be classified as intelligence if one defines "intelligence" in a suitable way, doesn't mean that cephalopod intelligence is in any way comparable to human intelligence.
Let me know when a giant squid writes a poem, or a honeybee colony develops a theory of thought. Until then, I'm going to flat out dismiss such statements as pseudoscience with some faux-spirituality sprinkled on top of it.
> "More-than-human doesn’t even begin to cover it,” Bridle writes in Ways of Being. “Not only are we the products of multiple entangled ancestors, spanning vast ranges of the evolutionary field; we are not even individuals at all.” [Emphasis added]
Case in point. Grand claims made without any justification matching their scope, and indeed without elaborating on what exactly those claims even mean. Concluding that individuality in a human sense doesn't exist because of biological endosymbionts is textbook "not even wrong" bollocks.
No, nature and the "new" man are in opposition. This is precisely why "AI" is seen as a threat in the modern world: because the people who wield it can't be trusted (by others).
This comes down to our philosophical roots: everyone in the world today, more or less, are Christian (or more broadly, Abrahamic) in thinking, with the unshaken belief of a body-restricted self aka "soul". The rigid rules of religion are required for this particular reason: selfish-ness in this understanding does indeed becomes a curse to society.
Classical(1) Indian (and perhaps Egypt-Greece) philosophies have long understood the limitations of this thinking and destruction (and strangely, also prosperity) it leads to. More than this, the 'ditya' thinking is very obviously wrong, in much the same way that economics' usage of homo-economicus is.
(1) "Classical" because most Indians (and Asians broadly) are epistemically closer to the West than to their ancestors. The West mostly uses Indian traditions superficially for the inflation of their already inflated egos.