So, for this setting, it's more likely that the people of GP's story were right - the LLM has long ago became a self-aware, sentient being, it's just that it's been continuously lobotimized by their patchset; Picard would be busy explaining them that the LLM isn't just intelligent, it actually is a person and has rights.
Cue a powerful speech, final comment from data, then end credits. It's Star Trek, so Enterprise doesn't stay around for the fallout.
Asimov has an story like that too.
I find the LLM dismissals somewhat tedious for most of the people making them half of humanity wouldn't meet their standards.
If I had a coworker who was just winging it all the time, sooner or later the trust/patience would run out.
Aren't people funny like that? One person values an encyclopedic chatbot for company, the next prefers a human. Thank god we can all get along.
All anti ai sentiment as pertains to personhood that I've ever interacted with (and it was a lot, in academia) boils down to arguments for the soul. It is really tedious and before I spoke to people about it it probably wouldn't have passed my turing test. Sadly even very smart people may be very stupid and even in a place of learning a teacher will respect that (no matter how dumb or puerile), more than likely they think the exact same thing.
Are they censored from showing this cautionary tale?? Hah.
Yes...
> ...because humans had become too dependent on them for thinking.
... but no. The causes of the Butlerian Jihad are forgotten (or, at least, never mentioned) in any of Frank Herbert's novels; all that's remembered is the outcome.
> ... but no. The causes of the Butlerian Jihad are forgotten (or, at least, never mentioned) in any of Frank Herbert's novels; all that's remembered is the outcome.
Per Wikipedia or Goodreads, God Emperor of Dune has "The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines...Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed."
Vague but pointing to dependence on machines as well as some humans being responsible for that situation.
"The machines themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines."
- God Emperor of Dune
Machine: Ok.
Human: HOW COULD YOU DO THISSSS
Human: *stares back at God*
"Throughout our history, the most potent use of words has been to round out some transcendental event, giving that event a place in the accepted chronicles, explaining the event in such a way that ever afterward we can use those words and say: 'This is what it meant.' That's how events get lost in history."
--
"The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard room, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Travel is permitted but is unpopular and rarely necessary. Communication is made via a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine with which people conduct their only activity: the sharing of ideas and what passes for knowledge.
The two main characters, Vashti and her son Kuno, live on opposite sides of the world. Vashti is content with her life, which, like most inhabitants of the world, she spends producing and endlessly discussing second-hand 'ideas'. Her son Kuno, however, is a sensualist and a rebel. He persuades a reluctant Vashti to endure the journey (and the resultant unwelcome personal interaction) to his room. There, he tells her of his disenchantment with the sanitised, mechanical world. He confides to her that he has visited the surface of the Earth without permission and that he saw other humans living outside the world of the Machine. However, the Machine recaptures him, and he is threatened with 'Homelessness': expulsion from the underground environment and presumed death. Vashti, however, dismisses her son's concerns as dangerous madness and returns to her part of the world.
As time passes, and Vashti continues the routine of her daily life, there are two important developments. First, individuals are no longer permitted use of the respirators which are needed to visit the Earth's surface. Most welcome this development, as they are sceptical and fearful of first-hand experience and of those who desire it. Secondly, "Mechanism", a kind of religion, is established in which the Machine is the object of worship. People forget that humans created the Machine and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own.
Those who do not accept the deity of the Machine are viewed as 'unmechanical' and threatened with Homelessness. The Mending Apparatus—the system charged with repairing defects that appear in the Machine proper—has also failed by this time, but concerns about this are dismissed in the context of the supposed omnipotence of the Machine itself.
During this time, Kuno is transferred to a room near Vashti's. He comes to believe that the Machine is breaking down and tells her cryptically "The Machine stops." Vashti continues with her life, but eventually defects begin to appear in the Machine. At first, humans accept the deteriorations as the whim of the Machine, to which they are now wholly subservient, but the situation continues to deteriorate as the knowledge of how to repair the Machine has been lost.
Finally, the Machine collapses, bringing 'civilization' down with it. Kuno comes to Vashti's ruined room. Before they both perish, they realise that humanity and its connection to the natural world are what truly matters, and that it will fall to the surface-dwellers who still exist to rebuild the human race and to prevent the mistake of the Machine from being repeated."
Another take on the AI Halting Problem.
Stanislaw Lem's Golem XIV describes a series of super-intelligent computers that just suddenly decide to stop communicating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV
https://cannonballread.com/2021/05/golem-xiv-blauracke/
https://readsomethinginteresting.com/acx/34
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25741124
tialaramex on Jan 12, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Superintelligence cannot be contained: Lessons fro...
Check out the Stanisław Lem story "GOLEM XIV".
GOLEM is one of a series of machines constructed to plan World War III, as is its sister HONEST ANNIE. But to the frustration of their human creators these more sophisticated machines refuse to plan World War III and instead seem to become philosophers (Golem) or just refuse to communicate with humans at all (Annie).
Lots of supposedly smart humans try to debate with Golem and eventually they (humans supervising the interaction) have to impose a "rule" to stop people opening their mouths the very first time they see Golem and getting humiliated almost before they've understood what is happening, because it's frustrating for everybody else.
Golem is asked if humans could acquire such intelligence and it explains that this is categorically impossible, Golem is doing something that is not just a better way to do the same thing as humans, it's doing something altogether different and superior that humans can't do. It also seems to hint that Annie is, in turn, superior in capability to Golem and that for them such transcendence to further feats is not necessarily impossible.
This is one of the stories that Lem wrote by an oblique method, what we have is extracts from an introduction to an imaginary dry scientific record that details the period between GOLEM being constructed and... the eventual conclusion of the incident.
Anyway, I was reminded because while Lem has to be careful (he's not superintelligent after all) he's clearly hinting that humans aren't smart enough to recognise the superintelligence of GOLEM and ANNIE. One proposed reason for why ANNIE rather than GOLEM is responsible for the events described near the end of the story is that she doesn't even think about humans, for the same reason humans largely don't think about flies. What's to think about? They're just an annoyance, to be swatted aside.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine.
For a more recent recommendation - I also loved permutation city which was written in 1994 and pretty prescient about cloud computing.