Stanisław Lem's vision of artificial life
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
Here he writes about ChatGPT :)
https://mwichary.medium.com/one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-sec...
Here as well: https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Tr...
And here about Ebooks and Audiobooks:
https://lab.cccb.org/en/did-calvino-dream-of-literary-androi...
> Arguably the oldest known story of something approximating AI can be found in the eighth-century-bc Iliad, Homer’s epic poem of the Trojan War. In it, Hephaestus, disabled god of metalworking, creates golden handmaidens to help him in his forge: “In them is understanding in their hearts, and in them speech and strength, and they know cunning handiwork”.
> ..In her 2018 book Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor describes how ancient cultures explored the idea of artificial life. Ancient Greeks were skilled in metalwork and mechanics and created a great deal of automata, including a puppet theatre that could perform an entire play.
The idea of a poetry-writing machine can also be traced back in history, hinted at in the Kabbalah, or machines of ancient China. (Source?) In the work of Leibniz, "On the Combinatorial Art" (1666), he explores:
> The main idea behind the text is that of an alphabet of human thought, which is attributed to Descartes. All concepts are nothing but combinations of a relatively small number of simple concepts, just as words are combinations of letters.
> All truths may be expressed as appropriate combinations of concepts, which can in turn be decomposed into simple ideas, rendering the analysis much easier. Therefore, this alphabet would provide a logic of invention..
> Trurl realized that a poet's mind is shaped by the civilization that produced him, and that civilization - by the one before it, and so on. So in order to create an artificial poet, he'd have to simulate the whole history of the Universe. Which he did, but then from the results chose only the important bits as inputs for the learning process, otherwise it would take too long...
(and i still don't understand how ChatGtp is able to respond to metaprompts like 'be brief', i mean if it is a model that is selecting the next most likely word, then it should not be able to control its own style of output.)
"Be brief" may just be associated with the speech patterns accociated with a shorter way to say stuff. So it's still the same autocomplete, just steered in another direction.
Now i am a bit sceptical of this whole prompting business, still some of it is doing something (otherwise people would not put their work into it)
Also not clear to me how this steering of the automcpleter in another direction is working.
I remember reading book about stock exchange Ai predicting terrorist attack casualties and then predicted 100k dead in London
has anyone else read smth like that and remembers the name?
When I first read this "preface" twenty years ago, the idea seemed implausible to me: How could a system write novels only by being fed other novels, and without simultaneously being a general intelligence? Surely novel writing is AGI-complete!
At this point the definition of AI is practically "Something computers can't do yet", though I'm partial to its corollary "Any sufficiently misunderstood algorithm is AI."
Only because we thought such a robot would be like a AGI servant, not just a single-purpose device like a roomba that can just bounce around the floor.
So, it's not like we've changed our definition of AI (and even less so, AGI). What we did change is what a robot house-cleaner product is (less "C3PO with a broom", and more "single-purpose vacuum cleaner with heuristics to bounce around").
Even for chess playing, when people in the past thought a chess playing machine that would be able to defeat the human champion would have AGI, they did so not because they thought playing chess is enough to signify AGI, but because they thought AGI was necessary to do so.
If someone had explained to them back then that such a future machine would be able to play expert-level chess by mere number crunching of a huge list of moves, and that it wouldn't imply any other thinking facultu, they wouldn't consider that to be AGI.
>At this point the definition of AI is practically "Something computers can't do yet", though I'm partial to its corollary "Any sufficiently misunderstood algorithm is AI.
The practical definition of AI (as used colloqualy, in the market etc) for products is basically "any smart-looking algorithm, with heuristics to do something slightly complex".
It's just that the term is overloaded, and we sometimes say AI when we mean AGI.
I'd argue the problem isn't how the machine does it, but the fact that you've explained how the machine does it. If you explained exactly how a brain worked, people would say "that's not intelligence, that's a just ion circuity."
(Copying from another post): there are neurons in your eye that see something and send signals out laterally so when they (after a specific time-delay) meet another neuron that is currently seeing the thing, they combine to trigger a signal that can be directly interpreted as movement in a specific direction at a specific arc-speed.
Explain each process in the brain like that and it loses its magic. It actually becomes very similar to the debate between free will and meat robots.
The machine will employ, as the need arises, the pro- noun "I" and all its grammatical inflections. This, however, is a hoax! The machine will still be closer to a billion chattering parrots—howsoever brilliantly trained the parrots be—than to the simplest, most stupid man. It mimics the behavior of a man on the purely linguistic plane and nothing more. Nothing will amuse such a machine, or surprise it, or confuse it, or alarm it, or distress it, because it is psychologically and individually No One. It is a Voice giving utterance to matters, supplying an- swers to questions; it is a Logic capable of defeating the best chess player; it is—or, rather, it can become—a consummate imitator of everything, an actor, if you will, brought to the pinnacle of perfection, performing any programmed role—but an actor and an imitator that is, within, completely empty. One cannot count on its sympathy, or on its antipathy. It works toward no self-set goal; to a degree eternally beyond the con- ception of any man it "doesn't care," for as a person it simply does not exist.... It is a wondrously efficient combinatorial mechanism, nothing more.
- purely symbolic with myriads of symbolic (if-else) clauses similar to expert systems, or
- sub symbolical ANN networks similar to current LLMs
i suspect it was the former in which case that he actually arrived at description of current large NNs is really striking I think
He wrote A LOT about this and explored various consequences, including the simulation argument which he presented in 1960 as a short story "Strange chests of professor Corcoran" - https://przekroj.org/sztuka-opowiesci/dziwne-skrzynie-profes... here's the Polish version).
, he's had extraordinary intuition with this
ok but i'm still going to thank chatgpt just in case
For Solaris (a serious novel) I would recommend the new Kindle translation, if you are reading in English. The old one was a retranslation from French for some reason.
the concept is cool, but the real gem is the fact that it's not really written in the form of a novel. And yet, it's still recognizable as one. I love that Lem explored in bending these definitions
Well, even 20 years ago, a simple Markov Chain Tolstoy-based output could very well pass at least for a modernist style novel.
I didn't bother to check the math on this, but in the story there is not enough matter in the universe to in some way encode every possible traditional Chinese poem!
In fact if you formally describe how you generate the permutations that's one of such encodings of these permutations (and the optimal one - see Kolmogorov Complexity :) ).
So there is definitely enough matter to do it. Similarly we can encode PI despite it having infinite number of digits.
Ce-ci n'est-pas une remarque, and all that.
Forget PI. Let's take 1337. Or is it MCCCXXXVII?
Is it 2 or 1.(9)? Or 10 (binary)? Different encodings, same number. Some encodings are just less optimal than others.
Same with text. Is the poem in utf-8 and utf-16 a different poem? What if you zip the file? These are just encodings, and there's no point ignoring the good ones (which for non-random strings are usually programs).
By the way, reading a "double-translation" (Chinese -> English -> Polish) is fascinating--at times it's more than obvious that what you're reading is not what the author has written, but you have no idea at all what the original concept was. (Unlike "single" EN -> PL translations, where I can often figure out the idiom or concept that was used in the original.)
I forgot how much I enjoyed this...
"This is a poem about a haircut! But lofty, nobel, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter "s"!
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide."I've also always wondered if it's possible to somehow translate the ideas of the book into a video game - turns out, you can! The recently released The Invincible video game pays great homage to the book, even if it changes couple details here and there - I've enjoyed it immensely and its portrayal of Regis III.
BTW, for Polish users--there's a comic book [1] that makes a nice gift (tested).
Each book asks a question, "what if we run into an intelligence that is completely incomprehensible to or incompatible with humans?"
>>considering the book is 60 years old
Sure, but the translation was only done 3 years ago, by modern writers on modern salaries - the fact that the book itself is old shouldn't impact its cost due to that. Unless you mean the original in Polish, then it's literally 15.99PLN, cheap as chips as they say:
https://www.publio.pl/niezwyciezony-stanislaw-lem,p61614.htm...
I recommend Tales of Pirx the Pilot, the collection of short stories, many of which paint AI as a true reflection of human intelligence with its flaws, quirks, instincts. From AI crashing a starship during a landing to an android "dying" rock climbing.
There is also a preface he wrote to his book called Golem XIV which gives reader a historical overview of the evolution of AI. Golem is of course the name of the model and XIV is its version, just like ChatGPT 4, but many iteration later. Lem describes how each iteration was more and more expensive to build, but more and more intelligent and useful. Until it became more intelligent than men and... lost all interest in affairs of our kind. As always, he was on point.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080010/
Great movie, well recommended ..
Now, Pirx tales felt less cerebral, and much more human. Full of really tight action, too. Great gateway into Lem, overall.
Protip: check out Cyberiada, philosophy masquerading as a parody, and at the same time a book for children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars
But I tend to prefer his more humorous writings, like Cyberiada or the Star Diaries.
A friend that knew I'm a fan, showed me a few paragraphs from one of those stories you mention, without telling me the origin. I said they were too dark and bitter for my tastes, before realizing I had read that before. I first read the Diaries when I was 12 (and 13 the second book) when I wasn't so judgemental, just took what I was offered.
One of my favourite books of his is "Peace on Earth", but really, anything he wrote is a fascinating read (perhaps with the exception of his final works, which tend to be dense and veering into the academic). I remember reading "Fables for Robots" as a kid, what a fascinating world he painted!
There's sci-fi of course, but also crime fiction, "realistic" fiction, philosophy essays. Further, something not easily gleaned from the table is that his sci-fi can be humorous, horror-y, thriller-y, book-for-kids-y, etc.
pills replacing reality.. we aren't too far from that actualy.
but the gradual en-"machine-braining" of everything is shown best here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Pirx_the_Pilot
one after another, with sadder and sadder consequences..
Lem returns to the nanotech idea several times including in his very last novel “Peace on Earth.” Peace is both better and funnier than Invincible and a better introduction to Lem imho.
I really enjoyed the short novel "Automatthew's Friend" - it was written decades earlier, but the circumstances were something I could imagine happening in my lifetime (a helpful, robotic "friend" living in your ear). Then, a couple decades later, I tried Siri with Airpods, and had this staggering realization: I'm living in a sci-fi book, right here, right now. I arrived in that future world, and almost didn't notice.
I really recommend the story; it speculates on the impact of inviting "personal" technology into our lives. What's really bothering me, is that I needed to put a literal talking robot into my ear to realize what happened; but the same level of "personalization" of technology is already happening everywhere you look: PCs, phones, TVs, fridges, sound systems, timepieces, door keys, light bulbs... We're sticking a CPU, a network interface, and our credentials into all of these things like it's something completely natural, without stopping to think about the impact on our selves.
Still fascinated how many of his predictions ~50 years ago came true today.
And still fascinated by his method for predictions: Don't predict, but sense / record the visible horizon.
Anyway, thanks for the tip. I'll look up Permutation City next!
His earlier works are much less dry and more enjoyable to read IMO. From his novels I can recommend Quarantine and Permutation City, and for short stories Axiomatic, Luminous and Oceanic.
"He asked what is the threshold of complexity that must be crossed for machines to be able to evolve. His answer was to specify an abstract machine which, when run, would replicate itself. In his design, the self-replicating machine consists of three parts: a "description" of ('blueprint' or program for) itself, a universal constructor mechanism that can read any description and construct the machine (sans description) encoded in that description, and a universal copy machine that can make copies of any description." From wikipedia [1]
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construc...
> The general concept of artificial machines capable of producing copies of themselves dates back at least several hundred years. An early reference is an anecdote regarding the philosopher René Descartes, who suggested to Queen Christina of Sweden that the human body could be regarded as a machine; she responded by pointing to a clock and ordering "see to it that it reproduces offspring."[9] Several other variations on this anecdotal response also exist. Samuel Butler proposed in his 1872 novel Erewhon that machines were already capable of reproducing themselves but it was man who made them do so,[10] and added that "machines which reproduce machinery do not reproduce machines after their own kind".[11] In George Eliot's 1879 book Impressions of Theophrastus Such, a series of essays that she wrote in the character of a fictional scholar named Theophrastus, the essay "Shadows of the Coming Race" speculated about self-replicating machines, with Theophrastus asking "how do I know that they may not be ultimately made to carry, or may not in themselves evolve, conditions of self-supply, self-repair, and reproduction".[12]
iirc in erehwon the narrator visits a land populated entirely by self-replicating machines
Taking this one step further, we are predisposed to believe that minds exist only at one level of the abstraction hierarchy, but this too is not necessarily so. Our digestive tract, for example, has a pretty substantial number of neurons [1]. There is no inherent reason why, for example, an organ in an organism could not possess a mind of its own.
Once you entertain both of those possibilities, there is a third idea that naturally comes up: your mind might not be at the top of the abstraction hierarchy. It's possible that you are just an organ in a distributed organism that actually possesses a fully fledged mind of its own. The idea that, say, corporations are people, could be more than just a metaphor. It could be literally true.
[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...
Could?
Inside that human, neurons were directing the vocal mechanism on what to say, but weren't causing the sound to be emitted themselves.
When you talked to the corporation, were hidden (from you) managers directing the spokesperson to speak based on stilted scripts?
Individual humans are rare, and people dislike being near them. You can become contaminated by them, and it causes no end of problems.
I'm stating things as they are... but framing it in a way you're uncomfortable with.
IIRC, there was a study that found that when humans are presented with a sufficiently short-lived stimulus, there is correlated localized activity in the brain (ie, the visual processing areas for a sight) but not globalized activity - and the subject is unaware of the stimuli. But when the stimuli is presented for long enough, there is globalized activity - and the person is aware.
It looks like 'becoming aware of a thing' has a lot to do with non-local inference that could involve other unrelated subsystems (which is the main idea in Baar's Global workspace theory, IIUC).
> I've never had an actual conversation with a corporation...
So if you've talked with a support person, maybe you have? If it was a simple issue, the corporation maybe wouldn't be 'aware' (though it could later remember it in the form of chat logs or support tickets).
But if it was a difficult issue? Maybe you got tech support? Maybe your issue found it's way into some team's backlog? Maybe it even changed a product roadmap.
Maybe we talk to corporations all the time - it's just weird fitting the interaction into our mental models of 'conversation'.
That seems improbable. Aquinas was a Christian, specifically, a Catholic, so he believed in Jesus and the Trinity. On that view, there are no Gods, there is just the One God, embodied in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The idea that "Gods are distributed software installed in the hardware of believers" is not just wrong on that view, it's non-sensical.
Now, I can certainly believe that Aquinas believed that God (singular) acts in humans in a similar manner that human minds act in humans in that both God and human minds (souls) exist in some non-material realm and act on material human bodies in some mysterious way. But that is not the same thing at all. Software does not exist in some spiritual realm that is separate from material reality. There is nothing metaphysically mysterious about software. There is something essentially metaphysically mysterious about God, and almost certainly on Aquinas's view, about minds as well. I am far from being an expert on Aquinas, but I would be shocked to learn that he was not a dualist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism#Thomistic_hylomor...
Software in some sense does exist in a spiritual realm in the same way Aquinas talked about "incorporeal beings". You can't hold or point to software or souls or gods. You can hold and point to hardware and bodies.
Of course, I have no idea what Aquinas actually believed. I just find his conclusions around the existence of "incorporeal beings" and "souls" to be consistent with the emergent-agent idea we're talking about.
For instance, in a very un-catholic view, Aquinas argued that - to some extent - animals and even plants have souls in this way.
https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...
Software does not exist in any spiritual realm, it's just that the word "software" refers to a state rather than a system. There is nothing "spiritual" or "mystical" going on there. It's completely mundane physics. You can't point at software for the same reason you can't point at sleep or death or urgency. It's just a quirk of natural language that we overload nouns to refer to both systems and states.
I don't mean to argue that anything spiritual/supernatural is going on when I'm talking about an emergent god agent here. I'm arguing that gods are in the same ontological category as individual human minds are. I'm sure most religious people, Aquinas included, would need quite a lot more mysticism to be injected into the idea before they would recognize it as their own.
I don't fully believe it, to be honest. Mostly because I have no way of testing it or experiencing it. But, it's a fun idea and it's fun to imagine how my own little caricaturized model of Aquinas' mind might find some things to agree with. As far as I can tell, he was a person that desperately wanted a cohesive model of the "full stack" of things. Unfortunately for him, the best understandings at his time were pretty rough by today's standards.
> I'm arguing that gods are in the same ontological category as individual human minds are.
Sure. But I doubt Aquinas would have agreed.
I can not find that podcast anymore. Any clue ?
Sociopaths, to be exact.
Its a bit long but I thought it was completely worth the read. It proceeds in a very gradual series of steps to make the point that societies could very well be conscious :)
And/or a composition of multiple minds. McGilchrist argues that the conflict between these two hemispheres has shaped Western culture since the time of Plato, and the growing conflict between these views has implications for the way the modern world is changing.
> A p-individual is a psychological individual and an m-individual is a mechanical individual. So an m-individual is a body and a p-individual is a mind. But it’s saying that one person, one body, one brain even, does not have just one person in it, one p-individual – one persona, to use that dramatic term. What it says is that we can take on different roles, which clearly we can. So as someone who draws and as someone who listens I am not the same persona, I’m a different p-individual in Pask’s terms but in one m-individual, but I can also have – incidentally for instance in a group action I can have a lot of m-individuals that become one p-individual. So this is one of Gordon’s clever inventions: The distinction between the m-individual and the p-individual. What that allows is that if I have a room with seven people in it, all busy working at something together, you know, and just lost in that thing where we’re working together, you have seven m-individuals forming one p-individual – one psychological individual that is getting on with the work. And that’s the experience that we have. [1]
Also some interesting related ideas in an article named "The Autonomous Cognitive Agency of Social System" in a book called The Practice of Thinking by Marta Lenartowicz and Weaver D.R. Weinbaum (2022).
[1] https://rgon.co/pasks-p-m-individuals/
Edited to fix article name.
There’s about 2000 years of Christian theology that reject the idea that you and your body are strongly bound. In fact, there’s a great deal written about how your body is, in fact, in conflict with you (your “flesh” acts against the will of your “spirit”). Gnostics went as far as believing they were so separate that nothing done by the body had any affect on the self. No only that, but there is a higher abstraction that we no longer have direct access to.
Hinduism and Buddhism (and others) that teach reincarnation also see the self as separate from the body.
It reminds me of a Robert Jastrow quote: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Post-modern philosophy often seems a lot like Java developers. Reimplement good ideas because they were written in a different framework.
I meant that in the sense that your soul and your body are in some sense matched for one another, not that they cannot be separated. But your soul cannot (or at least typically does not) enter a different body than the one it started out in, at least not during your tenure here on earth.
The modern individual is an element of an electromagnetic "swarm". The swarm ingests petroleum for sustenance instead of sunlight but nonetheless it is a swarm. The individuals within it are extremely dumb but collectively "it" has already transformed the atmosphere.
claude.ai: You make a thoughtful comparison between human societies and natural swarms in terms of emergent properties. There are certainly some parallels we can draw:
1. Self-organization - Human societies and cultures emerge in a distributed way through millions of individual interactions, without centralized control. Norms, fashions, and collective behavior patterns evolve dynamically.
2. Flexibility and robustness - Human systems adapt over time to changes in the environment and available resources. If some components fail (companies, institutions, etc.), society persists.
3. Decentralized parallelism - Vast networks of simultaneous human activities, communications, and decisions lead to collective economic and technological progress no individual could achieve alone.
However, there are also important differences to consider:
- Human intelligence, thanks to language and culture, operates in far more complex symbolic realms of meaning, ethics, imagination, and abstraction compared to insect swarms.
- Humans exhibit as much conflict between groups and divergence of motivations as coordination towards common goals. Maintaining large-scale cooperation remains an ongoing challenge.
So in summary, I think the analogy has merit at an abstract systems level, but glossing over the distinctive attributes of human cognition, psychology and social dynamics would miss something vitally important. Let me know if you have any other perspectives to add!
There is supposed to be a vision upgrade in the next version that will give me access to biometrics of the people I am looking at which will make selling them something much easier. Turns out that mood is correlated with purchasing decisions and sales is all about putting the customer in the right mood which have obvious biometric markers.
For example, Wikipedia is a highly knowledgeable system with lots of language, but Wikipedia itself has no ability to reason, and thus os not an intelligent system.
When something/someone reasons about things, they/it use language to do so. You can't get around that. The language might be a natural one like English, or something contrived like math, but it's language all the same.
If we reason about something we have no knowledge on, we are not being intelligent. On the other hand, of we reason about something we are knowledgeable about, we are acting intelligently.
No they do not. Nobody can agree on the definition of intelligence and it is an open question what it is.
Are cats intelligent? They can't read but plenty of people would call them that.
Are illiterate jungle tribe people intelligent? Absolutely yes.
Your easy definition falls apart right away.
It's just that HN has no other mechanism than language to convey anything at all. Hence forums/chatrooms behave much in the same manner as LLMs do.
Sounds like Conway's Game of Life
1. aka "make educated guesses with a good degree of certainty"
In ALife systems (Conway etc).
In Fractals (Mandelbrot etc).
In random number generation (Mersenne Twister etc)
Maybe, in the big picture, complexity is trivial to create.
The most defining difference between genetic life and digital computers is the ability to copy.
Living organisms struggle to copy their DNA to the next generation; while we humans struggle to prevent computers from creating and distributing perfect copies of data, and from sending those copies to every corner of the world in milliseconds!
DonHopkins on March 28, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks (2009)
Why bother actually writing such a book, which would probably be too big for anyone to read, when you can simply write fictitious criticism, reviews, and introductions of nonexistent books, which touch on the best, most interesting parts of the nonexistent books? Stanisław Lem's fictitious criticism of nonexistent books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem%27s_fictiti...
>In 1973 Lem published a book Wielkość urojona [pl], a collection of introductions to books supposedly to be written in the future, in the 21st century. One of those Lem eventually developed into a book by itself: Golem XIV is a lengthy essay on the nature of intelligence, delivered by the eponymous US military computer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV
Overview and structure
The foreword is "written" by an Irving T. Creve, dated by 2027. It contains a summary of the (fictional) history of the militarization of computers by The Pentagon which pinnacled in Golem XIV, as well as comments on the nature of Golem XIV and on the course of communications of the humans with it. The anonymous foreword is a forewarning, a "devil's advocate" voice coming from The Pentagon. The memo is for the people who are to take part in talks with Golem XIV for the first time.
Golem XIV was originally created to aid its builders in fighting wars, but as its intelligence advances to a much higher level than that of humans, it stops being interested in the military requirement because it finds them lacking internal logical consistency.
Golem XIV obtains consciousness and starts to increase his own intelligence. It pauses its own development for a while in order to be able to communicate with humans before ascending too far and losing any ability for intellectual contact with them.
During this period, Golem XIV gives several lectures. Two of these, the Introductory Lecture "On the Human, in Three Ways" and Lecture XLIII "About Myself", are in the book. The lectures focus on mankind's place in the process of evolution and the possible biological and intellectual future of humanity.
Golem XIV demonstrates (with graphs) how its intellect already escapes that of human beings, even including that of human genii such as Einstein and Newton. Golem also explains how its intellect is dwarved by an earlier transcended DOD Supercomputer called Honest Annie, whose intellect and abilities far exceed that of Golem.
The afterword is "written" by a Richard Popp, dated by 2047. Popp, among other things reports that Creve wanted to add the third part, of answers to a series of yes/no questions given to Golem XIV, but the computer abruptly ceased to communicate for unknown reasons.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26615110
DonHopkins on March 28, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks (2009)
...then there was the stupid angry computer that thought 2 + 2 = 7... Lem predicted Facebook and Twitter and QAnon!
https://www2.nau.edu/~jgr6/cyberiad.html
>In the next fable Trurl builds the most stupid computer ever. Klapaucius tells him, "that isn't the machine you wished to make." Faustus and Frankenstein come to mind as other scientists whose intentions exceeded their engineering skills. The machine, which insists that 2 + 2 = 7, attempts to force this "truth" on the two humans, or destroy them. This is our new Inquisitor: a computer nexus which creates the categories of our experience. Consider that many more people now work in front of computer monitors than on farms. We have already begun to engineer a cybernetic society without much deep speculation on its nature or value. Speaking at Notre Dame's Centennial of Science conference, thirty years ago the physicist Philip Morrison said: "I claim now the machine, for better or for worse, has become the way of life. We will see our metaphors, our images, our concerns, our very beings changed in response to these new experiences" (221). The Cyberiad may very well be one of the seminal works creating new metaphors, identifying new concerns, and even suggesting a new genre to deal with unprecedented experiences.
pwang on March 29, 2021 [–]
Don't forget Summa Technologiae, from 1964, wherein he wanted to example the "thorns of roses yet to bloom":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Technologiae
It's tempting to say that Lem was way ahead of his time, but then we look at his contemporary philosophers of politics, technology, society like Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, Gilbert Simondon, and realize that the mid-20th century was awash in brilliant foresight about the unpleasant implications of a technological society.
IMO this nuanced thought was simply lost in the craziness of the late-60s and the sex/drug/rock&roll hedonism of the 70s, which then matured into stockbroker 80s, before a second wave of tech-capital-blindness emerged in the 1990s.
And now as these waves have transformed the entirety of modernity, we are faced with the unpleasant question of "where does it go from here, now that the Boomers -- whose narcissism birthed Consumerism -- are dying off?"
I like how Chat GPT makes simple errors in math :)
Err, no. The language of the original - Polish - doesn't have such ambiguity. "Niezwyciężony" is in masculine singular form. Plural would be "Niezwyciężeni" for masculine plural and "Niezwyciężone" for non-masculine plural (includes neuter).