3 ms·

We'll have to gradually get used to the notion that a person's voice, like so many other things we once thought of as intimately personal, is just a coordinate

We'll have to gradually get used to the notion that a person's voice, like so many other things we once thought of as intimately personal, is just a coordinate in a high-dimensional vector space.

mjburgess 2y ago
Those are not contradictions.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  But it is unintuitive to those of us who are from the past.
- trescenzi 2y ago
  One of the common bad takes is that since personal things can be distilled to “just math” they are no longer personal or valuable in the sort of way we value personal things. Increasing our understanding of how the world works shouldn’t devalue the world. To put it another way, people having souls is not the only reason to treat people like people. Or as Dr Seuss says: A person’s a person no matter how small.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    But I do think there are some psychological hurdles we’ll have to overcome, as it becomes possible to mechanically copy individual personal aspects. A person’s a person no matter how small, but we aren’t all used to thinking of ourselves as very small.
  - visarga 2y ago
    > they are no longer personal or valuable in the sort of way we value personal things There were people with your face or voice before, you just didn't care. AI continues a trend: the internet has always been post-scarcity, free copying and offering an amazing array of choices. We are acting as if it's a new thing, but it's been here for 25 years.
    - trescenzi 2y ago
      We shouldn't value people simply because they are scarce. People are valuable intrinsically. Identical Twins don’t have less value because there are two of them. A mother is not less sad when one of them dies as compared to a mother who doesn’t have twins. Trying to make such a comparison of value is gross. I do appreciate that not everyone agrees with that view, and that capitalism tries to value people at their output but intuitively plenty of people find that sort of thing wrong and ignoring that intuition is something I’d argue will not end well for us as a society.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
visarga 2y ago
> is just a coordinate in a high-dimensional vector space Everything is, including types of personality, physiognomy and demographics. Anything that can be related to anything else is embeddable.
- afarviral 2y ago
  Is this a well studied topic I can research or just a guess?
cscurmudgeon 2y ago
Even simpler, mathematically anything computable is a natural number. That doesn’t remove privacy and other rights. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering
seoulmetro 2y ago
It always has been. The same way passwords were never secure, we just found that they are too slow to bother uncovering. The same can be said for voices/AI. Except now it's not too slow to "crack an easy password" in the voices/AI world. The idea that everything is open, you just need the right tool, is scary to most.. but it's not once you realise how expensive the tools are.

We'll have to gradually get used to the notion that a person's voice, like so many other things we once thought of as intimately personal, is just a coordinate in a high-dimensional vector space.

mjburgess 2y ago

Those are not contradictions.

bee_rider 2y ago
But it is unintuitive to those of us who are from the past.
trescenzi 2y ago
One of the common bad takes is that since personal things can be distilled to “just math” they are no longer personal or valuable in the sort of way we value personal things. Increasing our understanding of how the world works shouldn’t devalue the world. To put it another way, people having souls is not the only reason to treat people like people. Or as Dr Seuss says: A person’s a person no matter how small.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  But I do think there are some psychological hurdles we’ll have to overcome, as it becomes possible to mechanically copy individual personal aspects. A person’s a person no matter how small, but we aren’t all used to thinking of ourselves as very small.
- visarga 2y ago
  > they are no longer personal or valuable in the sort of way we value personal things There were people with your face or voice before, you just didn't care. AI continues a trend: the internet has always been post-scarcity, free copying and offering an amazing array of choices. We are acting as if it's a new thing, but it's been here for 25 years.
  - trescenzi 2y ago
    We shouldn't value people simply because they are scarce. People are valuable intrinsically. Identical Twins don’t have less value because there are two of them. A mother is not less sad when one of them dies as compared to a mother who doesn’t have twins. Trying to make such a comparison of value is gross. I do appreciate that not everyone agrees with that view, and that capitalism tries to value people at their output but intuitively plenty of people find that sort of thing wrong and ignoring that intuition is something I’d argue will not end well for us as a society.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

visarga 2y ago

> is just a coordinate in a high-dimensional vector space Everything is, including types of personality, physiognomy and demographics. Anything that can be related to anything else is embeddable.

afarviral 2y ago
Is this a well studied topic I can research or just a guess?

cscurmudgeon 2y ago

Even simpler, mathematically anything computable is a natural number. That doesn’t remove privacy and other rights. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering

seoulmetro 2y ago

It always has been. The same way passwords were never secure, we just found that they are too slow to bother uncovering. The same can be said for voices/AI. Except now it's not too slow to "crack an easy password" in the voices/AI world. The idea that everything is open, you just need the right tool, is scary to most.. but it's not once you realise how expensive the tools are.