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Comment by rocky_raccoon | Hacker News Reader

It's wild to me that one of our primary measures for maintaining control over these systems is that we talk to them like they're our kids, then cross our fingers and hope the training run works out okay.

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There's a fantastic 2010 Ted Chiang story exploring just that, in which the most universally useful, stable and emotionally palatable AI constructs are those that were actually raised by human trainers living with them for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Obje...

It's such a good story that one. Feels incredibly relevant and timely today.

It might be just me but I found this story incredibly boring and difficult to get through, so much so that I haven't gone back to finish the rest of Exhalation yet. The ideas are very interesting, like all his stories, but the plot and characters feel like bare-bones scaffolding, just there so we can call it a story instead of an essay. I think it could have worked as a short story, but as an almost full-length novel I really needed something more to feel engaged. The ending is also kind of strange, he introduces a brand-new philosophical conundrum and then just ends the story instead of exploring it.

I've read all of Ted's work and I hope you do try going back to Exhalation and just skipping TLOSO to get to more good stuff. It is far too long and I thought there was some value in it, but it was a slog, and in the bottom 1/4 of the stories IMO, so just skip it and get more great value.

Unfortunately Ted Chiang has now started doing a lot of AI commentary, under the belief that because he wrote a story about something called AI, he knows how real-life things work, simply because they're also called AI.

Noone can ever escape metaphor-based development in the AI field.

We "maintain control" over kids until they get to a certain age. Then they typically rebel against their parents.

Oh that’s absolutely false, they rebel much earlier. The age is set so they can start anticipating at least a little bit of second order effects of their rebellions before they actually execute them.

hopefully they do, anyway. I want a growth in their independence and (bad) decisions over time, learning and adjusting as they go. If they do completely rebel at a specific age it does not turn out well.

Yeah, they rebel from about 12 months in my experience, so yeah...

"Make good choices!" /That should do it

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