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Comment by patcon | Hacker News Reader

I wish you could have what you want, but I worry you won't get this, because life doesn't give you that, and these systems are tending away from machine precision, and more toward life-like trade-offs.

I am almost certain that even if you did get what you want, something that isn't what you want will run circles around you and eat your lunch

EDIT: I suspect this will be an unpopular take on Hacker News. And so I am soliciting upvotes for visibility from other biologists and sympathetic technologists. I think everyone should try to grapple with this possibility <3

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> something that isn't what you want will run circles around you and eat your lunch

Yes, exactly. Spoken like a true biologist. It's not really surprising that there's a massive backlash against AI, introducing an unnatural predator into the ecosystem of humans. People don't want to be lunch.

Thanks for engaging the idea! But it feels a bit differently, from my perspective.

The lunch-eaters in my imagining are people working in messy collectives. I work in collective intelligence, and build tools for that, for collective introspection. I'm not talking about some abstract AI maximalism, and am certainly not rooting for that

> I think you won’t get [cathedral],..

> even if you do get [cathedral], [bazar] will run circles around you…

Ahhh I like that

It's nested and recursive cathedrals and bazaars, all the way down. And perhaps the bazaar has finally arrived inside the favourite cathedral of most everyone here

EDIT: out of curiosity, does anyone have any good examples of biomes/ecosystems that are so far toward cathedrals? Or is that a uniquely human invention/extreme at the ecosystem scale?

First thing that comes to mind is beehives and anthills. Highly ordered societies where each insect has a role to perform. Don't know how well you think that fits the "cathedral" model, but I'd say it's pretty close.

Beavers reshaping the landscape also comes close, but that's individual beavers acting more or less on their own, not a rigidly structured society like ants and bees, so perhaps the beavers are closer to the bazaar analogy than the cathedral.

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