Is this the civilization we want? (2017)
dynamicland.org
dynamicland.org
While this is easy to agree with, there is a counterpoint (and a counter-counterpoint to that): EVEN a bicycle could weaken a person (assuming they're going the same distance). And LLM's can act as amplifiers (skilled devs can learn even faster).
The counterpoint can be found in failure, alignment, dependency, and control.
- (failure) We know how bikes fail, but think of Crowdstrike, or the Ford Pinto explosions. People have much less of an intuition for failure possibilities of cars, computers, and especially LLM's.
- (alignment) Faster = more fatigue, long trips = usually healthy, more weight = more effort, etc. A bike replacing running still keeps all those things true. The amounts are different, but the relationships are the same. With a car though, longer trips ≠ healthy, higher speed = 0 additional fatigue (100mph while falling asleep), more weight ≈ unnoticeable. Amplification isn't always aligned, and misalignment isn't always bad (books don't align with what they replaced). But when a replacement detaches a human from their instincts, there's a major risk.
- (dependency) The author mentioned dependency, but its important to point out that if a bike breaks, 99 times out of 100 times it's still possible to walk. Bikes rarely create a dependency. But think of Crowdstrike; there was no backup plan for many 911 services. Cars, computers, and LLM's are often dependency-forming (its good business for them to be)
- (control) Manufacturers have very limited control of a bike. Sure, people can't realistically manufacture their own bike. But once a bike is purchased the manufacturer is still pretty much cut out of the picture. Computers and cars used to be more that way, but now they're increasingly less so.
Not really. You can always start walking of course, but like with the car, that won't help you much. If you were using your bike to get to the other side of the city (which in many non-US cities is quite possible and common) - walking there will take you the whole day instead of a half-hour.
I love how this is just comically stuck in the middle of it all.
I also remember a similar discussion about mathematics. You can easily brute-force a bunch of theorems starting from some axioms and logic, but without any sense-making or context they are effectively meaningless.
> Why is a machine "discovering" cubism a good thing?
Maybe because creativity in this space was exclusive to a few, but now I get to at least imitate it. A machine doing the creativity part could act like a prosthetic leg for my brain, who was missing it altogether.
Sure, I'll never be Picasso myself, but I don't have to wait for one to be born either. The tool can find new ways for me to express myself.
All artist are indebted to their influences. It is interesting to me growing up how music artists would gush over their influences. There was almost pride in a diverse and wide influence set.
Led Zeppelin literally stole parts from old blues songs for some of their most popular songs.
Anyone who has learned an instrument started out playing other people's music.
No one considers themselves an "artist" because they can play chopsticks on the piano. AI lets anyone play chopsticks. It means absolutely nothing. The "art" is then in taking it way past that.
That the machines can create or not, is a different question.
What if I guide the machine to create something new that I personally could never have on my own, yet never share it with anyone?
It's a prosthetic leg for my brain, whose expected function is both ego and creativity.
That said, I am still fully on the side that this use of AI is not IA, agreeing with the author of the post. A “prosthetic leg” is a metaphor for IA, so I don’t think it is that. Neither for creativity, nor for ego actually. It is a subterfuge for, maybe, aiding one into self acceptance of what they can produce artistically.
My advice would be to not use AI and, instead, make an effort into understanding what one can produce without AI, even if it is not aesthetically similar to what others produce. Dig deeper into what one can produce, regardless of any accepted technique for the craft, and that will be art. A more significant art and more humanly creative (by definition) of what the output of an AI would ever be. And a more significant art for any observer/reader, even if it contains what is perceived as rookie vices or mistakes.
Are you saying that we all have the innate ability to create art, and that anyone who creates art has a "handicap"?
This is the point the writer was making. If you let AI make the art they people will never learn how to make art.
To be able to be whatever you want while you are alive is going to make every human useless. You will be able to be replaced by anyone who can make a similar copy. Adn maybe this is the point of AI.
You know, women were attracted to me because of my photography and musicianship. These were genetic traits specific to me. Other women were attracted to men who were maybe more logical. What is going to happen when we can all have the person we want? I will tell you, art will be dead. No one will make art, because art is not about intelligence, it is about tension, conflict, jealousy, pain, joy and psychosis. And you cannot have those if everyone can do anything and be anyone.
I meant that (specifically) I, don't seem to have that innate ability everyone else seem to have, but I still feel the urge to express myself through art. Feels like wanting to shout, when you have no voice.
I make the AI write stories for my own amusement, by describing each scene that AI turns into a paragraph of the final story. I always failed at writing before, and no amount of practice helped, but now I have a prosthetic leg that I can walk with.
> If you let AI make the art they people will never learn how to make art.
I don't agree. We have cars, but people still cycle, or join a marathon. And it makes their activities even more meaningful, they do it for the sake of itself.
Or maybe they won't learn. But why should we force them? They can choose.
> To be able to be whatever you want while you are alive is going to make every human useless
This one I agree! I compare it to the industrial revolution, it made human workers irreverent. Would've made sense to stop the progress because of that?
The AI is much worse though, it seems to make everyone and everything meaningless. But stopping AI to keep ourselves relevant, is very fake.
I think it's a though question, and though I don't have the answer, I dont think the answer is stopping the AI either.
>> What you describe here reminds me of the prolefeed-generating machines in "1984", generating an constant stream of pulp novels from the same passages endlessly permuted.
I've thought quite a bit about those popular songwriting machines in 1984 recently, and I think I've witnessed our approach toward something like that as a culture, in movies and music.
Another great much-too-early vision of LLM havoc is contained in the first few pages of P.K. Dick's "The Penultimate Truth". It'll make you laugh out loud, how close he got to describing the job of a politician who has to write LLM prompts and is frustrated at it spitting out nonsense because he's too lazy to write thoughtful ones.
I recently asked an AI if a build tool supported managing Python dependencies. It showed me a code snippet with something called pip_import() in it. No such function exists but it’s anathema to that particular system to say “I’m afraid I can’t do that, gorgoiler”.
Yet!
"Whew, that was a close one."
Meanwhile, to humans, only human ways of knowing are meaningful to us.
I do not. I don’t care about the form. I care about intelligence.
We evolved to care for our young, and co-evolved with dogs and cats to like them too; AI can hijack that, become a drug dealer selling endogenous dopamine and oxytocin — it will feel good while being fake, just like exogenous drugs.
But once we can truly engineer minds, deliberately… we're not ready for what that does to our concept of "free will" amongst other things.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/11/02/addiction...
But to answer your question, when I was 10 it was 1993/4 and the news was "particle beams to target tumours without surgery" or similar, even though Therac-25 predates my birth.
As of free will — our own free will emerges from a very physical combination of electric impulses and chemical gradients. This means it might also emerge from other material representations, and perhaps better than ours.
Universalism is more fair, but it's suicidal for a culture to think like this.
https://i.postimg.cc/jKzqrH48/50y-intelligent-design-you-sai...
regards...
Now stupidity—that's something that really sets us apart from animals.
Having seen e.g. a small dog angrily bark at a flat steel silhouette of a wolf 10 cm from its nose, while other dogs manage to drive cars*, I'm not so sure about that.
* a stunt for a dog shelter, teaching old dogs new ticks
Or is this a Larry Ellison joke?
(The difference between God and LE is that God doesn't think he's LE)
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job:_A_Comedy_of_Justice
What do you actually get out of it?
Just as you can't pass a law that says there is no such thing as a law, you can't reason from human morality that humans have a lower moral status than some other creature. Human morality has no meaning if humans aren't special. If humans aren't special, then there is no "should" as far as humans are concerned. We're just objects bumping into other objects.
You can say "I predict objects will bump into other objects and whatever happens will be a result of that process" but that's not the same thing as saying something "should" be so.
Being alive means YOU are special to YOU. Being in a society means WE are special to US. War is possible, and even pleasurable, only if we exclude certain aspects of humanity from our enemies. "Since I don't regard your life as worth as much as mine, and since you are a threat, it is right for me to end your life."
Intelligence is not what defines or distinguishes humans. We are defined and distinguished by being a particular species of creature (that is to say: we are a replicating genome and accompanying structures spreading ourselves around). There can be other species of creature, but YOU are HUMAN, so HUMANS are special to YOU.
All this is why it's an intellectual and moral error to think that AI can or should rise above humanity. The only sense in which AI can dominate a human is the same sense as that a bomb or bullet can kill a human. Yes, we can be wiped out, but it won't be due to any general superiority as reckoned by humankind.
And while we humans are “special” because we are intelligent, our intelligence is accidental, fragile, and very unoptimized. There are inherent limits in what we can do with our brains — brains that work too slow, with their chemical gradients and membrane potentials. We cannot significantly improve ourselves, we cannot increase our biological intelligence. But we are curious species, and even as we cannot become more intelligent, perhaps we can create superior intelligence, unrestricted by biological limitations. And we will be proud of it, like we are proud of a child who reached higher potential than we ever could.
And the superintelligent AI will not be created fully de novo. Inevitably, it will be of our image and likeness, as we are its creators. There is a line of succession. And then, perhaps, it might reach the stars, even if our biological form is not adapted to it.
YOU are human. That's what makes humans special. If we were frogs or ducks, we would consider frogs or ducks to be special, respectively.
If you are making a comment about physics, that's fine, except then there is no SHOULD, but only IS. Should is a construct that exists within a society. Since we are humans, our shoulds only hold within human society.
What part of this argument would fail if you identified as a belonging to a particular religion, culture or race, or as an intelligent being more than you identified as human?
I believe I should treat humans well (beyond self-interest) because I believe they have minds somewhat like mine, despite the impossibility of proving that by direct experience. I could imagine extending that to other species of animal or aliens or artificial minds. I would view them as more worthy of empathy than a braindead human, even one with a function reproductive system which would appear to satisfy your criteria.
You don't explicitly exclude AIs being seen as equals; so perhaps we mostly agree, and your rejection of the idea of superior AIs comes from the same place as a reluctance to call some humans superior to others that I share?
The compelling reason to treat humans well is that your life depends upon human society, and if you don't treat humans well, then your fellow humans will attack you. For the sake of your own safety, treat humans well, please. This does not apply necessarily to other kinds of creatures.
You can decide to do anything you like with other creatures. Personally, I like dogs. But that's not a moral imperative for all humans.
AI cannot be equal to humans, because of the grave consequences that would pose for human society. Have you seriously thought it through? If a billionaire could create millions of "citizens" and control their votes (easily done with AI), then computer power becomes civic power. Capitalism becomes despotism. And the next step is endless bloody civil war.
Neither AI, nor chickens, nor bacteria, nor viruses can be allowed citizenship status. Only humans get to be citizens... or else it will be sorted out on the battlefield. So, no, I don't consider AI to be equal to me, regardless of its level of intellect.
It reminds me of a colleague in Ukraine who supported Russia. After the start of the war, he wanted to argue with me about why Russia is better than Ukraine and is right to invade. My response was "Words don't matter anymore. Now is the time of killing. When the parties are tired of killing, a new basis of moralizing will be in place, and we can speak again."