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Comment by 13years | Hacker News Reader

> AI is not inevitable fate. It is an invitation to wake up. The work is to keep dragging what is singular, poetic, and profoundly alive back into focus, despite all pressures to automate it away.

This is the struggle. The race to automate everything. Turn all of our social interactions into algorithmic digital bits. 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. Not sure how that is going to play out, but we certainly aren't slowing down yet.

For example, take a look at the short clip I have posted here. It is an example of just how far everyone is scaling bot and content farms. It is an absolute flood of noise into all of our knowledge repositories. https://www.mindprison.cc/p/dead-internet-at-scale

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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.

Our societies and our people are overdosing on convenience and efficiency.

Agreed.

I remember a few years back, here on HN everyone was obsessed with diets and supplements and optimizing their nutrients.

I remember telling someone that eating is also a cultural and pleasurable activity, that it's not just about nutrients, and that it's not always meant to be optimized.

It wasn't well received.

Thankfully these days that kind of posts are much less common here. That particular fad seems to have lost its appeal.

Oh yeah, it’s both funny and understandable how we’ve swung from the mania of huel-esque techbro belief of nutrition to the current holistic eating “beef tallow” and no-seed oils movement. I think we realized guzzling slop alone is spiritually empty.

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.

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

Yes, everyone talks about the Singularity, but I see the instrumental point of concern to be something prior which I've called the Event Horizon. We are optimizing, but without any understanding any longer for the outcomes.

"The point where we are now blind as to where we are going. The outcomes become increasingly unpredictable, and it becomes less likely that we can find our way back as it becomes a technology trap. Our existence becomes dependent on the very technology that is broken, fragile, unpredictable, and no longer understandable. There is just as much uncertainty in attempting to retrace our steps as there is in going forward."

>but without any understanding any longer for the outcomes.

A concept in driving where your braking distance exceeds your view/headlight range at any given speed. We've stomped on the accelerator and the next corner is rather sharp.

Isaac Asimov did a fictional version of this in the Foundation trilogy.

Yes, that's an excellent description.

That's a very idealistic view to believe there ever was something as a point were some people had a really more clear and precise representation which was accurate of what was going to come.

Iirc Eva's Instrumentality comes from Cordwainer-Smith..

Subtlety missed by TFA but not necessarily Eva: Government is meant to be the Instrument (like AI), NOT the people/meat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentality_of_Mankind#Cul...

Eva's optimization: Human instrumentality=> self governance. Which is not that ambiguous, one could say, less so than Star Child (2001)

"Of the people" vs <of the people>

> We are optimizing, but without any understanding any longer for the outcomes.

That's how the Vile Offspring is born.

I feel confident humans could not define intelligence if their survival depended on it.

Tbh, the only thing I see when looking at Terminator is a metaphor for the market. It makes more sense than any literal interpretation

> 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.

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