AI, Heidegger, and Evangelion

> However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.

> We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement.

I don't think anyone will be waking up as long as their pronouns are 'we' and 'us' (or 'people', 'society'). Waking up or individuation is a personal, singular endeavour - it isn't a collective activity. If one hasn't even grasped who one is, if one is making a category error and identifies as 'we' rather than 'I', all answers will fail.

The Culture dives into this concept with the idea of hegemonizing swarms, and Bolstrom touches on this with optimizing singletons.

Humans are amazing min/maxers, we create vast, and at least temporarily productive mono cultures. At the same time a scarily large portion of humanity will burn and destroy something of beauty if it brings them one cent of profit.

Myself I believe technology and eventually AI were our fate once we became intelligence optimizers.

John Dewey on a similar theme, about the desire to make everything frictionless and the role of friction. The fallacy that because "a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned."

> The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one questions whether it might not be called the philosophical fallacy. It consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and conditions.

> Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned. Because the success of any particular struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action, therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless smooth activity endlessly maintained.

> It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfilment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.

I wonder if investors would have dumped the same amount of money in if it was pitched as something like "Semantic encoding and retrieval of data in latent space" vs "hey ex-machina though"

> if AI tools weren’t wrapped in a chatbot pretending to be a person

I don't think this is the central issue, considering all the generative AI tools that generates art pieces, including various takes on the cherished styles of still-living artists.

Yes, it would—the dialogic interface is an anchor weighing us down!

Yes, yes, it's an accessible demonstration of the technology's mind-blowing flexibility, but all this "I, you, me, I'm" nonsense clutters the context window and warps the ontology in way that introduces a major epistomological "optical illusion" that exploits (inadvertently?) a pretty fundamental aspect of human cognition—namely our inestimably powerful faculty for "theory of mind."

Install the industrial wordsmithing assembly line behind a brutalist facade—any non-skeumorphic GUI from the past 20 years aughta do.

Check out eg https://n8n.io for a quick way to plug one-shot inference into an ad-hoc pipeline.

it's just not there. Whether it's text, chat, images, video - the quality sometimes appear regular to cursory look, but aren't actually up there with that of humans. That's the problem.

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This gets into cheap scifi territory but: I think someone should put people in fMRI and make them watch live archive recordings of something consistent and devoid of meanings, like a random twitch channels on same theme, or foreign language sports, and sort results by date relative to time of experiment.

Expected result would be that the data is absolutely random, maybe except for something linked to seasons or weather, and/or microscopic trend shift in human speech, and/or narrator skill developments. But what if it showed something else?

>reads like so much pretentious claptrap

>my eyes would have rolled so far back that metacognitive mindfulness would have become a permanent passive ability stat

Yes, I agree it is impressively lifelike, just like it was written by a real flesh-and-blood New Yorker.

> reads like so much pretentious claptrap

Somewhere out there, there's an LLM that reads exactly like us pretentious HN commentators. All at once cynical, obstinate, and dogmatic. Full of the same "old man yells at cloud" energy that only a jaded engineer could have. After years of scar tissue, overzealous managers, non-technical stakeholders, meddling management, being the dumping ground for other teams, mile-high mountains of Jira tickets.

Techno-curmudgeonism is just one more flavor that the LLMs will replicate with ease.

I'd say it reads like propaganda for a place i do not live.

Sounds great to the target audience but everyone else just rolls their eyes.

Or a Ghost in the Shell perspective.

Sounds to me like a description of what it feels like to live in any sort of metropolis. Georg Simmel, one of the first sociologists, wrote similar observations on how city dwellers (in 1900s Berlin) would mentally adapt themselves within the context of this city in his 1903 work »The Metropolis and Mental Life«.

The anonymity and (from the POV of a country pumpkin: rudeness) is basically a form of self-protection, because a person would go mad if they had to closely interact with each human being they met. Of course this leads to its own follow-up problems of solitude within a mass of people etc.

But if you e.g. come from a close-knit rural community with strict (religious?) rules, a typical rural chit-chat and surveillance, simething like the anonymity of a city can indeed feel like a revalation, especially if you see yourself as an outcast within the rural community, e.g. because you differ from the expected norms there in some way.

I am not sure about the English translation of Simmels text as I read it in German, but as I remember it it was quite on point, not too long and made observations that are all still valid today, recommended read.

I see this "I can detect AI bcuz its cringe" view everywhere but all the double blind tests show that people like AI poetry and AI writing slightly more than the greats. Also the other comment is spot on in that this reads exactly like some op-ed articles in nyt's lol.

This is the most perplexing thing about AI. And it is not just their own work but also every product of culture they love, which they are ready to surrender for beeing „ahead of the curve“ in very shallow ways.

A philosophical lens can sometimes help us perceive the root drivers of a set of problems. I sometimes call AI humanity's great hubris experiment.

AI's disproportionate capability to influence and capture attention versus productive output is a significant part of so many negative outcomes.

"The Question Concerning Technology" [1] mentioned in this piece is dense but can be understood by the literate layman, I think, with patience and a bit of work.

Re: "call to action", part of Heidegger's project by my read is to interrogate such phrases. I think he would refute that "action" is what we need and that orienting ourselves towards the world in terms of "action" is obscuring the Question of Being. He himself offers no real way out. In his posthumously published Der Spiegel interview [2] he himself says "only a God can save us".

I assume you're making a snide reference to his involvement with Nazism, which I'm not going to attempt to downplay or respond to here. He himself in his later life, however, went and lived a humble life in the Black Forest. Can or should we all "return to the land"? No. But his writing certainly has expanded my view of the world and my "image of thought". He is a worthwhile study.

How to Read Heidegger [3] is a great primer for any who may be interested.

[1] https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil394/The%20Quest...

[2] https://www.ditext.com/heidegger/interview.html

[3] https://a.co/d/dK5dp2t

P.S. just noticed/remembered that my username is a Heidegger reference. heh.

Leave passivity behind. You should put work into understanding what's required of you. This is why it's so easy to fall back to passivity, but there are things that must be done just because it's the right thing to do. Doing anything other than that is akin to committing philosophical suicide.

I think it is creating a growing interest in authenticity among some. Although, it still feels like this is a minority opinion. Every content platform is being flooded with AI content. Social media floods it into all of my feeds.

I wish I could push a button and filter it all out. But that's the problem we have created. It is nearly impossible to do. If you want to consume truly human authentic content, it is nearly impossible to know. Everyone I interact with now might just be a bot.

Yeah, I would agree. NGE is like a reverse Garden of Eden story, where the Adam and Eve escape from society to some kind of idealistic paradise because they were the ones chosen by humans who essentially had created a modern day reverse Tower of Babel to become gods (remember Tokyo-3 is underground skyscrapers that can pop above ground?), and created their own fake plagues in the form of the Angels as justification to create the EVAs, which were merely a cover story to fight their fake plagues, but which were actually necessary to trigger the Human Instrumentality Project, so that they could become gods for real.

NGE is an allegory for our present, with something like 9/11 truther government coverup false flag attack paranoia, in the form of the one kid who always has a VHS camcorder, who is kind of a stand in for a conspiracy theorist who is accidentally correct, combined with Christian apocalyptic eschatology, combined with Japanese fears about being the only non-nuclear armed modern democracy in some hypothetical future, and some mecha fights and waifus. It’s us, the little people versus industrial gods.

Gendo was a true believer, he just became jealous of his own son because Shinji was able to pilot the EVAs, and thus was forced to confront his own poor treatment of Shinji. Once Gendo realized that S.E.E.L.E. (the U.N. group formed to fight the Angels) may not know what they’re doing, before they can trigger Instrumentality with themselves via the synthetic Angels, Gendo triggers Instrumentality with Shinji and Asuka. So in that way, I would say that Gendo was lying because he wanted to trigger Instrumentality himself so he could bring back his dead wife, but had to settle for indoctrinating his son to do it by proxy.

Gendo was lying, but not about the fact that the Human Instrumentality Project does what it says on the tin, but about how many eggs he had to break to make that omelet. Rather than trust Instrumentality and thus the literal future of humanity to literal faceless bureaucrats, Gendo put his son on the throne and told him to kill their false gods and become one himself, and trusted that love would conquer all in the end. Gendo lied to Shinji so that he could tell him a deeper truth that he could never say aloud in words, especially after the loss of his wife, that he loved his son, and he did that by allowing Shinji to create a world without pain, whatever that meant to him. Gendo was a flawed man and a genius who was duped to become a useful idiot for the deep state, a true believer of his own bullshit, but he loved his son in his extremely stereotypically warped Japanese way, and because his son was able to accept that love and learn to love himself, Shinji was able to love the world and his place in it, and thus achieved enlightenment via his realization that heaven was on earth all along.

“God’s in his heaven, all is right with the world,” indeed.

If anything, AI is part of what might one day become our own Human Instrumentality Project, but in and of itself, I don’t think it’s enough. AIs aren’t yet effectively embodied.

I think Final Fantasy VII would be a better story/setting to explore for ideas related to AI. Sephiroth is a “perfect” synthetic human, and he basically turns himself into a paperclip maximizer that runs on mako energy by co-opting Shinra Corp via a literal hostile takeover of the parent company of the lab that created him.

that's not the point at all, the question is that in the face of this inevitability of slop how do we create meaning for ourselves

I need to write something, then.

> LLMs are challenging the assumption, often unvoiced, that humans are special, unique even. A good chunk of people out there are starting to feel uncomfortable because of this.

I'm gonna be honest, after Copernicus, Newton and Darwin it's a bit hilarious to think that this one is finally going to do that worldview in. If you were already willing to ignore that we're upright apes, in fact not in the center of the universe and things just largely buzz around without a telos I'd think you might as well rationalize machine intelligence somehow as well or have given up like 200 years ago

yeah that made me stop too. Who, writing on these topics, does not know that the movie is 2001: A Space Odyssey.