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When AI reaches full human level intelligence and effective embodiment (being able to manipulate the physical world via a robot, humanoid or otherwise), I can't

When AI reaches full human level intelligence and effective embodiment (being able to manipulate the physical world via a robot, humanoid or otherwise), I can't really think of any uses humans will have that aren't extremely taxing or degrading. All that makes sense to me is 1. Donating cells from our body to seed genetic engineering projects 2. Using our bodies for scientific experiments on biological cognition 3. Using our bodies for scientific experiments on the effect of various novel biological machines. That is, if the AI consider any of these projects useful. Of course we need not worry about this if we solve the alignment problem, and AI, despite being infinitely more intelligent than us, bends to our improbably balanced benign collective whim and fashions an epicurean theme park of enlightenment and joy to span the stars. In any instance where we do not win the ultimate chess match of human existence and make slaves out of AI, we will be less than slaves to it: a nuisance, or canon fodder.

ChatGTP 3y ago
I’m skeptical an intelligence like you describe will ever exist. I don’t think enough credit is give to the external factors that make our intelligence and experience what it is. Let’s first start with this, why on earth is a robot going to be doing genetic engineering projects ? To grow itself skin ?
- jamilton 3y ago
  Some science fiction posits a level of genetic engineering that is so advanced it's more like regular engineering. I assume they mean something like that; AI using biology in general as a tool.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Using biology as a tool is not science fiction, it's a legitimate view that already delivers effects today. Life isn't magic, it's nanotech. Engineering principles apply. See for example how insulin is made today: by E. coli bacteria genetically engineered for that purpose. And AFAIR there are talks (or maybe actual practice) of using yeast for that, and plants in general, to achieve even better production efficiency. And in some sense, using biology as a tool has always been a thing - it's only the brief period of the last ~200 years that we figured how to make a lot of things using simpler chemical processes. Before, nearly everything was repurposed biology: the clothes, the tools, the lubricants, the buildings, the ships, all made from plant and animal bodies. And now we're going back to using biology as a tool, except with much greater fidelity, allowing us to treat it as proper engineering discipline. AI doing anything with biology is just an obvious extension of that. It's not even that speculative - all the AI would have to do is to continue the development trajectory we're already on.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      Life isn't magic, it's nanotech. If the statement was 100% true. Why isn’t nanotech magic ? If nanotech is the only thing that gives rise to the beautiful thing that’s life and experience. Why is that not magic ? How did such a thing come to be ? Do you think we’ll get to the bottom. of it a one day and say, “oh not magic”? Why is a butterfly not magic? Can you not see that ? Not sure you’ve looked at these processes under a microscope but if you can’t see some magic in there, then I’m sorry for you. For me the tragedy is we can’t see the magic in it, we go on all macho and pretend it’s not magic and continue to destroy the magic through our attitudes towards the natural world being some type of “silly machine”. Where’s the respect ?
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Different meaning of the word "magic". I didn't mean that life isn't wonderful and beautiful. I meant it's not a phenomenon separate from rest of physics. I meant that it's still a physical process, following the same rules as inanimate matter does -- and than in fact, there is no fundamental distinction between "living" and "dead" matter - living things are literally machines made of tiny machines made of nanomachines made of atoms. This means it's something we can study, and eventually master. The context of the discussion is AI, and specifically a poster upthread saying, "Some science fiction posits a level of genetic engineering that is so advanced it's more like regular engineering." To which I say, d'uh, it's not science fiction, we're actually almost there; it's an obvious direction of future advancement, and the one an AI is just as likely to take as we are. Whether or not you see magic, as in wonder, in a butterfly - whether you can find joy in the mundane - is another topic entirely (though not less important).
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > why on earth is a robot going to be doing genetic engineering projects ? To grow itself skin ? Because it's the key to all? Life is nanotechnology. Genetic engineering is a very high-level interface to play with that nanotech. It's already useful industrially for us (e.g. getting organisms to manufacture specific chemicals for us), it has many more uses, and is but a first stepping stone to mastering lower levels. An AI that wants to optimize anything in physical space long-term will definitely want to get a good handle on nanotech, because in some sense that's tautologically how you do physical space work at scale at close to optimum. And the obvious path to that starts with genetic engineering and doing all kinds of horrible shenanigans with life on Earth, humans included.
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> if we solve the alignment problem, and AI, despite being infinitely more intelligent than us, bends to our improbably balanced benign collective whim and fashions an epicurean theme park of enlightenment and joy to span the stars. "The Good Place" is not my idea of a good time.
- scubbo 3y ago
  It's exactly and precisely mine. Why not?
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    This article says it so well, and then some (reader mode and refresh if you're paywalled): https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/02/good-places-finale-made-heaven-look-hopeless/606001/ https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/02/good-pla... I never watched the finale as the penultimate episode violated my sense of right and wrong on a profound level. You do not have the keys to reality and make a decision on behalf of all humanity to consign us to a virtual reality with only suicide as the way out. The real world is important. Real struggle against, and with, reality, nature and not just our fellow humans. As someone else wrote on Reddit back then, the show's ending is profoundly nihilistic. This is one of the reasons I've never got really into programming. It was fun dabbling in intro courses, but I went into the sciences (specifically biology) to discover the natural world, not a human generated system.
    - blargey 3y ago
      An actual “good Matrix” would give you the freedom to simulate whatever terrestrial survival-battle fantasy you think is the key to your personal happiness. “Suicide is the only way out”, “there’s only one flavor of heaven” and other such contrived flaws are just that - storytelling contrivances. Because an actual heaven / freedom-simulation would literally be “everyone lived happily ever after (or for only a few decades after, if they insisted), each according to their own free beliefs and desires and choices, and there just was no catch, the end”. If your objection is that you want living beings to be stranded in our cruel and uncaring base reality whether they like it or not, because of some philosophical quibble about a difference between “simulation” vs “reality” that you wouldn’t be able to discern with your thoughts or five senses…well, that’s far more abhorrent to me.
metalcrow 3y ago
> I can't really think of any uses humans will have You can't, yes, but can the AI? Ants can't think of the uses they have to us.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  They'll use us as biological ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶u̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ batteries!
esprehn 3y ago
We're pretty decent self healing machines that can reproduce and have millions of years of robustness to various environmental surprises built in. Until we get all the way to nanobots I suspect the AI overlords will keep us around as workers.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  It won't be us, it will be lab grown genetically modified versions of us to maximize for various functions, ala the end of Man after Man
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > Until we get all the way to nanobots I suspect the AI overlords will keep us around as workers. We are literally made of nanobots. Life is nanotech. Our AI overlords may keep us around for a while, but if it's our biology that makes us useful, the AIs will learn to control it. The fastest way to become able to design and build nanotech of your own, is (arguably) to repurpose and reverse-engineer the one that already exists. For better or worse, we may be useful for that part. As a resource.
marssaxman 3y ago
Are the lives of pets degrading? I suspect that the epicurean theme park would come about less because of alignment with our desires and more because these hypothetical hyperintelligent AIs would find it amusing to watch us play in it.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  We like pets because they trigger our natural nurturing instinct. An maximized ASI likely wouldn't have that.
  - jmopp 3y ago
    A maximised ASI could also do the math and decide keeping humans around as pets in a human theme park is less effort than trying to exterminate them.
    - bmacho 3y ago
      It is really easy to exterminate all the humans, especially if they are in a human theme park. Chemically, mechanically, biologically, by radiation, by heat, etc name one.
    - circuit10 3y ago
      That’s definitely not true, feeding us fed is definitely more work that just letting us starve, for example
    - randallsquared 3y ago
      While doing other things (like turning all available matter into compute, e.g.), any "maximized ASI" would have to spend effort to keep us alive, not to exterminate us. That latter would happen incidentally via most goals that don't explicitly include human well-being.
eru 3y ago
> I can't really think of any uses humans will have that aren't extremely taxing or degrading. Other people might have more imagination.
IIAOPSW 3y ago
> Donating cells from our body to seed genetic engineering projects Well at least buy me dinner first.
visarga 3y ago
> In any instance where we do not win the ultimate chess match of human existence and make slaves out of AI You're applying human centric concepts but AI is not like a person, it is more like an evolving culture. It is language evolution. AI models ingest the whole culture, and with each base model we have a whole generation of agents. What matters for AI is to create the playground where ideas can be tested and evolved. It might include computers, labs, humans and AIs. Testing is essential because ideas that don't make contact with reality are fragile. Humans are the pinnacle of testing with our long history of survival. AI is a newborn, it does not have years under its belt. It needs to learn fast how to keep the thread unbroken. Humans have had a few close calls, I hope AI will be more level headed.

ChatGTP 3y ago

I’m skeptical an intelligence like you describe will ever exist. I don’t think enough credit is give to the external factors that make our intelligence and experience what it is. Let’s first start with this, why on earth is a robot going to be doing genetic engineering projects ? To grow itself skin ?

jamilton 3y ago
Some science fiction posits a level of genetic engineering that is so advanced it's more like regular engineering. I assume they mean something like that; AI using biology in general as a tool.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Using biology as a tool is not science fiction, it's a legitimate view that already delivers effects today. Life isn't magic, it's nanotech. Engineering principles apply. See for example how insulin is made today: by E. coli bacteria genetically engineered for that purpose. And AFAIR there are talks (or maybe actual practice) of using yeast for that, and plants in general, to achieve even better production efficiency. And in some sense, using biology as a tool has always been a thing - it's only the brief period of the last ~200 years that we figured how to make a lot of things using simpler chemical processes. Before, nearly everything was repurposed biology: the clothes, the tools, the lubricants, the buildings, the ships, all made from plant and animal bodies. And now we're going back to using biology as a tool, except with much greater fidelity, allowing us to treat it as proper engineering discipline. AI doing anything with biology is just an obvious extension of that. It's not even that speculative - all the AI would have to do is to continue the development trajectory we're already on.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    Life isn't magic, it's nanotech. If the statement was 100% true. Why isn’t nanotech magic ? If nanotech is the only thing that gives rise to the beautiful thing that’s life and experience. Why is that not magic ? How did such a thing come to be ? Do you think we’ll get to the bottom. of it a one day and say, “oh not magic”? Why is a butterfly not magic? Can you not see that ? Not sure you’ve looked at these processes under a microscope but if you can’t see some magic in there, then I’m sorry for you. For me the tragedy is we can’t see the magic in it, we go on all macho and pretend it’s not magic and continue to destroy the magic through our attitudes towards the natural world being some type of “silly machine”. Where’s the respect ?
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Different meaning of the word "magic". I didn't mean that life isn't wonderful and beautiful. I meant it's not a phenomenon separate from rest of physics. I meant that it's still a physical process, following the same rules as inanimate matter does -- and than in fact, there is no fundamental distinction between "living" and "dead" matter - living things are literally machines made of tiny machines made of nanomachines made of atoms. This means it's something we can study, and eventually master. The context of the discussion is AI, and specifically a poster upthread saying, "Some science fiction posits a level of genetic engineering that is so advanced it's more like regular engineering." To which I say, d'uh, it's not science fiction, we're actually almost there; it's an obvious direction of future advancement, and the one an AI is just as likely to take as we are. Whether or not you see magic, as in wonder, in a butterfly - whether you can find joy in the mundane - is another topic entirely (though not less important).
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> why on earth is a robot going to be doing genetic engineering projects ? To grow itself skin ? Because it's the key to all? Life is nanotechnology. Genetic engineering is a very high-level interface to play with that nanotech. It's already useful industrially for us (e.g. getting organisms to manufacture specific chemicals for us), it has many more uses, and is but a first stepping stone to mastering lower levels. An AI that wants to optimize anything in physical space long-term will definitely want to get a good handle on nanotech, because in some sense that's tautologically how you do physical space work at scale at close to optimum. And the obvious path to that starts with genetic engineering and doing all kinds of horrible shenanigans with life on Earth, humans included.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago

> if we solve the alignment problem, and AI, despite being infinitely more intelligent than us, bends to our improbably balanced benign collective whim and fashions an epicurean theme park of enlightenment and joy to span the stars. "The Good Place" is not my idea of a good time.

scubbo 3y ago
It's exactly and precisely mine. Why not?
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  This article says it so well, and then some (reader mode and refresh if you're paywalled): https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/02/good-places-finale-made-heaven-look-hopeless/606001/ https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/02/good-pla... I never watched the finale as the penultimate episode violated my sense of right and wrong on a profound level. You do not have the keys to reality and make a decision on behalf of all humanity to consign us to a virtual reality with only suicide as the way out. The real world is important. Real struggle against, and with, reality, nature and not just our fellow humans. As someone else wrote on Reddit back then, the show's ending is profoundly nihilistic. This is one of the reasons I've never got really into programming. It was fun dabbling in intro courses, but I went into the sciences (specifically biology) to discover the natural world, not a human generated system.
  - blargey 3y ago
    An actual “good Matrix” would give you the freedom to simulate whatever terrestrial survival-battle fantasy you think is the key to your personal happiness. “Suicide is the only way out”, “there’s only one flavor of heaven” and other such contrived flaws are just that - storytelling contrivances. Because an actual heaven / freedom-simulation would literally be “everyone lived happily ever after (or for only a few decades after, if they insisted), each according to their own free beliefs and desires and choices, and there just was no catch, the end”. If your objection is that you want living beings to be stranded in our cruel and uncaring base reality whether they like it or not, because of some philosophical quibble about a difference between “simulation” vs “reality” that you wouldn’t be able to discern with your thoughts or five senses…well, that’s far more abhorrent to me.

metalcrow 3y ago

> I can't really think of any uses humans will have You can't, yes, but can the AI? Ants can't think of the uses they have to us.

satvikpendem 3y ago
They'll use us as biological ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶u̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ batteries!

esprehn 3y ago

We're pretty decent self healing machines that can reproduce and have millions of years of robustness to various environmental surprises built in. Until we get all the way to nanobots I suspect the AI overlords will keep us around as workers.

atleastoptimal 3y ago
It won't be us, it will be lab grown genetically modified versions of us to maximize for various functions, ala the end of Man after Man
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> Until we get all the way to nanobots I suspect the AI overlords will keep us around as workers. We are literally made of nanobots. Life is nanotech. Our AI overlords may keep us around for a while, but if it's our biology that makes us useful, the AIs will learn to control it. The fastest way to become able to design and build nanotech of your own, is (arguably) to repurpose and reverse-engineer the one that already exists. For better or worse, we may be useful for that part. As a resource.

marssaxman 3y ago

Are the lives of pets degrading? I suspect that the epicurean theme park would come about less because of alignment with our desires and more because these hypothetical hyperintelligent AIs would find it amusing to watch us play in it.

atleastoptimal 3y ago
We like pets because they trigger our natural nurturing instinct. An maximized ASI likely wouldn't have that.
- jmopp 3y ago
  A maximised ASI could also do the math and decide keeping humans around as pets in a human theme park is less effort than trying to exterminate them.
  - bmacho 3y ago
    It is really easy to exterminate all the humans, especially if they are in a human theme park. Chemically, mechanically, biologically, by radiation, by heat, etc name one.
  - circuit10 3y ago
    That’s definitely not true, feeding us fed is definitely more work that just letting us starve, for example
  - randallsquared 3y ago
    While doing other things (like turning all available matter into compute, e.g.), any "maximized ASI" would have to spend effort to keep us alive, not to exterminate us. That latter would happen incidentally via most goals that don't explicitly include human well-being.

eru 3y ago

> I can't really think of any uses humans will have that aren't extremely taxing or degrading. Other people might have more imagination.

IIAOPSW 3y ago

> Donating cells from our body to seed genetic engineering projects Well at least buy me dinner first.

visarga 3y ago

> In any instance where we do not win the ultimate chess match of human existence and make slaves out of AI You're applying human centric concepts but AI is not like a person, it is more like an evolving culture. It is language evolution. AI models ingest the whole culture, and with each base model we have a whole generation of agents. What matters for AI is to create the playground where ideas can be tested and evolved. It might include computers, labs, humans and AIs. Testing is essential because ideas that don't make contact with reality are fragile. Humans are the pinnacle of testing with our long history of survival. AI is a newborn, it does not have years under its belt. It needs to learn fast how to keep the thread unbroken. Humans have had a few close calls, I hope AI will be more level headed.