6 ms·

George Eliot's reflections on AGI from 1879

145 points by benbreen 2y ago

pama 2y ago
With the explosion of LLMs we are close to the final thoughts in her chapter: “this planet may be filled with beings who will be blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without sensitive impulse.”
- XorNot 2y ago
  The thing which has become very weird for me is watching Star Trek holodeck episodes in the age of LLMs. When I was in high school we considered this absurd writing - obviously they must be sentient...now LLMs have happened and it feels obvious that the opposite can be true. Same story with Star Wars and droids: C3PO wasn't sentient, just a protocol model loaded into a droid frame in the wrong environment, it's attempts to constantly being the conversation back to politeness being a simplistically coded filter layer.
  - optimalsolver 2y ago
    Another thing Trek (and other SF) didn't predict was that AI would speak with Bay Area vocal fry. Someone should re-dub the Enterprise computer's lines with it.
    - yapyap 2y ago
      I think that’s just the AI you’re using..
  - captainclam 2y ago
    Haha, I've had the same thoughts, that of course computers/AI/droids of that conversational capacity were conscious. You'd be a brute not to think that! And all of a sudden, LLMs absolutely have the command of natural language that once seemed such an obvious indicator of sentience, and now I find myself one of those bigots who don't believe in robot rights! I'm being silly, but I do think there are implications here with respect to the future debate on AI sentience. I guess I once thought there would be this threshold where the reality of an AI's inner experience became blatantly obvious, but I see now that this is going to be a profoundly thorny problem. Who knows, maybe in several decades we'll have a consciousness-o-meter that demonstrates that LLMs have had some degree of awareness all along.
    - kenjackson 2y ago
      What seems far more likely, the way the world is going, is that we’ll use the consciousness-o-meter to determine some groups of humans are less conscious than others.
    - ANewFormation 2y ago
      The fundamental problem is that we keep setting 'reasonable' benchmarks, implicitly because we want to make them seem reachable, but then when we inevitably do we find it feels we [of course] haven't achieved what we really wanted to in the first place. True artificial intelligence would have the ability to meaningfully and significantly improve itself, recursively - a characteristic of even the most primitive life on Earth. And the implications of a computing system capable of such simply can't be overstated. With access to essentially all contemporary knowledge, flawless recall, and stupidly ridiculous amounts of energy to power itself (relative to e.g. a brain), it would create an explosion of knowledge in every single domain imaginable, and many we can't even yet fathom. And it would be doing this at an accelerating pace owing to self improvement. Basically the very nature of existence and knowledge would change. Sentience or not would be irrelevant as we simply tried (and inevitably failed, miserably) to catch up. But this is a bit further out of reach than 'can vaguely pass for a human in a casual non-adversarial q&a style chat.' --- This was one of the rather many areas where Star Trek failed to really consider the implications of its concepts, probably because it would simply break the world building. The Borg, for instance, would be defacto Gods in no time, even without assimilation.
      - readyplayernull 2y ago
        > meaningfully and significantly improve itself Exactly, mechanically by tools, environmentally by science, metaphysically by philosophy. An AI can only become an I by crossing a singularity of knowledge.
      - captainclam 2y ago
        > This was one of the rather many areas where Star Trek failed to really consider the implications of its concepts, probably because it would simply break the world building. This is true of pretty much all scifi! It's funny seeing super-futuristic depictions of star-fighter pilots and combatants with firearms and its just...so crushingly evident that humans will not have supremacy in these arenas very shortly. Frank Herbert must have anticipated this complication and side-stepped the whole issue by preemptively canonizing the Butlerian Jihad.
  - jameshart 2y ago
    Threepio reads so much like an LLM, the writing turns out to have been skockingly prescient. At the time of Phantom Menace, the whole story of him being assembled by some slave kid on a backwater planet in the outer rim seemed preposterous - why would a slave kid into pod racing make a pompous ass of a protocol droid? Well, he just installed a standard easily pirated LLM into the droid he made. And the fact that these LLMs are used as 'protocol droids' to communicate with lower-level devices - 'the binary language of moisture vaporators' etc. - matches up with the pattern of LLMs as tools for generating scripts in Python. Terrible though the last sequel is, they even managed to include jailbreaking Threepio to get him to access part of his training data that had been censored out.
- nthingtohide 2y ago
  Philosophers have coined the term P-zombies. LLMs can be considered as P-zombies if they do not possess consciousness. Functionally equivalent but no soul. Substance Dualism was used by philosophers to deny animals consciousness.
  - farts_mckensy 2y ago
    Non materialist bullshit.
  - kbelder 2y ago
    >Functionally equivalent but no soul. I think it's an incoherent concept. If the 'soul' is anything, there is some difference in the brain that would allow it. You can't have two people with identical brains and claim that one has a soul, unless you believe in magic.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      Is there a non-magical description of a soul? I thought it was an essentially magical concept. I’m not sure that makes it incoherent.
    - bobxmax 2y ago
      It's been interesting seeing those with an entirely materialist understanding of the universe try to grapple with and deal with consciousness as LLMs have emerged. To maintain that belief you have to either believe there is a physical source of consciousness, or that consciousness doesn't exist, neither of which most people can accept, yet LLMs are forcing people to confront.
      - thfuran 2y ago
        You think most people can't accept that consciousness is a phenomenon with basis solely in physical reality?
        Isamu 2y ago
- superkuh 2y ago
  Basically the plot of Peter Watts' "Blindsight" (post-2000) scifi book series.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
antonkar 2y ago
Before creating “eGod”, it’s safer to first create “eHeaven”. I propose building direct-democratic multiversal static place intelligence (you can google it): the static place AI, the place of eventual all-knowing, where we are the only agents that will eventually become all-powerful. We start with making a digital copy of Earth and some ideally wireless brain-computer-interfaces, everyone who wants can buy a special armchair for their living room and go to the simulated planet with the whole experience the same as on our planet, but when a bus hits you there, you just open your eyes. So it gives you immortality from injuries. And of course there will be may other worlds with different freedoms, like flying or doing magic or instant teleportation in public places…
- fishtacos 2y ago
  Sort of related, but in the two or three times I've lucid dreamt, one of them was flying and having relatively functional control of my direction. Not sure how/why my brain rendered this sensation having never experienced it in real life, but it felt strange and novel and not easy to direct. It was akin to a sensation of VR games where my mind seems to interpolate real-life expectations with visual input, but not quite. Not quite "brain-computer-interfaces", but perhaps a glimpse with current tech.
  - antonkar 2y ago
    Yes, that's great, I jumped over building in my dreams a few times and it was me controlling it, I think it'll resemble some future "multiversal UI" a bit. Did it look anything like long-exposure photos? https://wesely.org/2019/flughafen-tempelhof-berlin-1-7-2008-1-7-2009-2/ https://wesely.org/2019/flughafen-tempelhof-berlin-1-7-2008-... There are more good photos like this in the end of this article: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LaruPAWaZk9KpC25A/rational-utopia-and-multiversal-ai-alignment-steerable-asi#Final_Thoughts https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LaruPAWaZk9KpC25A/rational-u...
sho_hn 2y ago
This was a joy to read.
cess11 2y ago
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10762/pg10762-images.html https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10762/pg10762-images.ht... It comes across as satire to me, which I did not expect after reading TFA. From the classical references littered throughout the portions I've skimmed, it seems like a learned person is joking about contemporary men that aren't as well educated and unaware of it. Quite reminiscent of some of the stuff Kierkegaard wrote.
- joshmarlow 2y ago
  Interesting - I wonder if the author was gesturing at Erewhon which was published a few years earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    For those considering them, Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited (wherein we discover just how much in the way of, ahem, relations a book of the period can pack "between the lines") are available in a single widely available and cheap (used) little Modern Library hardback, and are a pretty fun read for the genre (nothing like Utopia—I read a lot of things most folks would consider boring, and that one taxed even my patience).
- stevenwoo 2y ago
  I recently reread Middlemarch, and this time I had finally read most of the literature and had wikipedia on hand to learn about the historical events that are referenced in it, the breadth and depth of her erudition is impressive, as is her portrayal of human nature (complicated and believable communicated across the divide of culture and time), which is the main thing I took from my first reading.
joshmarlow 2y ago
Fascinating read! > Theophrastus closes by asking whether human consciousness is a ‘stumbling’ on the way to ‘unconscious perfection’. This reminds me of a line from the scifi novel Echopraxia where one of the characters explains that as AIs become more intelligent, they 'wake up' and become conscious like humans. But then as they continue to grow, they eventually go back to sleep - and those are the machines to be afraid of. '
- fishtacos 2y ago
  I'm not well-versed enough on sci-fi to be able to connect more dots than this, but I am assuming these are common tropes. The Mass Effect series describes the Reapers as (copied from masseffect.fandom.com - I <3 this game's lore): "The Reapers are a highly-advanced machine race of synthetic-organic starships. The Reapers reside in dark space: the vast, mostly starless space between galaxies. They hibernate there, dormant for fifty thousand years at a time, before returning to the galaxy...the Reapers spare little concern for whatever labels other races choose to call them, and merely claim that they have neither beginning nor end." The other pop-sci-fi analogue I can think of is The Borg.
  - le-mark 2y ago
    Fred Saberhagen Beserkers are the first instance of this concept I’m familiar with (1963) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(novel_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(novel_series)
- goatlover 2y ago
  In the 3001 novel, the last of the 2001 series by Clarke, the Dave simulation explains that while the monolith can simulate conscious beings, it is itself not conscious. This is similar to The Expanse novels, where it's explained that that the protomolecule technology was limited to not being conscious on purpose by it's creators, and yet could still somehow simulate conscious beings it wanted to use as tools.
gwern 2y ago
> Not many people have Eliot down as an influential player in the history of AI — and they would be right. Her contribution has been for most part overlooked, even as folks begin to unpick the role of fiction shaping the trajectory of the AI industry. It's because it reads mostly as a retread of the far-better known Samuel Butler pieces like _Erewhon_ years before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines was 1863), and which Eliot likely read given her lifestyle & how closely she echoes him. Surprising to see no mention of Butler at all in OP, given what critical context it is - she was not writing in a vacuum. Some earlier discussion: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/goANJNFBZrgE9PFNk/shadows-of-the-coming-race-1879 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/goANJNFBZrgE9PFNk/shadows-of...
- setgree 2y ago
  I learned about Butler and his letter from George Dyson's book, "Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence" -- it's a very entertaining account. Butler was quite a character. (If I recall correctly I learned about Dyson's book from a postscript to Neal Stephenson's "Quicksilver.")
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  It does seem a bit suspicious given the context, as if the author intentionally omitted the background.
  - hiatus 2y ago
    "Good artists copy, great artists steal." -- hiatus
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      How does this relate to the presence or absence of ulterior motives…?
twic 2y ago
I wonder if the title "The Shadows of the Coming Race" alludes to "Vril: The Power of the Coming Race", published eight years before, if that phrase was already in circulation. Google ngrams first sees it in 1868.
- anon84873628 2y ago
  Sure seems likely! Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article for Vril: >When H. G. Wells' novella The Time Machine was published in 1895, The Guardian wrote in its review: "The influence of the author of The Coming Race is still powerful, and no year passes without the appearance of stories which describe the manners and customs of peoples in imaginary worlds, sometimes in the stars above, sometimes in the heart of unknown continents in Australia or at the Pole, and sometimes below the waters under the earth. The latest effort in this class of fiction is The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells." So the phrase "the Coming Race" must have been well established in literary circles, and probably used as a shorthand for what today we might call non-humans or post-humans.
timewizard 2y ago
> any physical or cognitive task there aren’t exactly many roles that a human being can play that are additive to the economy. What a terribly small imagination this presents. There is life outside of your cubicle. There always was. > Each time a person engages in work that could be done more efficiently by a machine, the employing party—be that company, government or charity—will have to bear the opportunity cost of using AI. Your LLMs run on GPUs and have no physical component. Those physical components aren't free, require maintenance, and break at inconvenient times. This is not a zero sum future or one that doesn't require intelligent economic planning. > It’s like when a toddler ‘helps’ you wash the dishes. It's cute you presume your "AGI" is going to /want/ to do anything for you. In particular, mundane chores, like washing your dishes, or that you as an individual would be able to afford it. Anyways, it's an interesting past time around here, rather than admit the gulf between the current technologies and what AGI is imagined to be, we just troll through the past looking for anyone who even remotely made a "thinking machine" part of a fictional story. Well, one part she got right, the machine presents itself as something of a useless chat bot.
unwise-exe 2y ago
If you want to know what life is like when society is run by beings smarter than you, ask someone who flunked out of high school. If you want to know what life is like when society is run by alien intelligences, ask someone who lives under an economy dominated by megacorps.
katzenversteher 2y ago
Damn, it's pretty early while I'm reading this and in my tired state, not noticing the year in the title, I somehow expected an article about Sierra adventure game internals... A bit disappointed but still a good read on a completely different topic :)
superkuh 2y ago
Another early book on the implications of AI is Samuel Butler's "Erewhon" (1872) satire which describes a society in which a complex machine uprising occurred and thereafter all complex mechanical/computational devices were banned in their society. This idea is later referenced in the well known 20th century "Dune" books as "The Butlerian Jihad".

145 points by benbreen 2y ago

pama 2y ago

With the explosion of LLMs we are close to the final thoughts in her chapter: “this planet may be filled with beings who will be blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without sensitive impulse.”

XorNot 2y ago
The thing which has become very weird for me is watching Star Trek holodeck episodes in the age of LLMs. When I was in high school we considered this absurd writing - obviously they must be sentient...now LLMs have happened and it feels obvious that the opposite can be true. Same story with Star Wars and droids: C3PO wasn't sentient, just a protocol model loaded into a droid frame in the wrong environment, it's attempts to constantly being the conversation back to politeness being a simplistically coded filter layer.
- optimalsolver 2y ago
  Another thing Trek (and other SF) didn't predict was that AI would speak with Bay Area vocal fry. Someone should re-dub the Enterprise computer's lines with it.
  - yapyap 2y ago
    I think that’s just the AI you’re using..
- captainclam 2y ago
  Haha, I've had the same thoughts, that of course computers/AI/droids of that conversational capacity were conscious. You'd be a brute not to think that! And all of a sudden, LLMs absolutely have the command of natural language that once seemed such an obvious indicator of sentience, and now I find myself one of those bigots who don't believe in robot rights! I'm being silly, but I do think there are implications here with respect to the future debate on AI sentience. I guess I once thought there would be this threshold where the reality of an AI's inner experience became blatantly obvious, but I see now that this is going to be a profoundly thorny problem. Who knows, maybe in several decades we'll have a consciousness-o-meter that demonstrates that LLMs have had some degree of awareness all along.
  - kenjackson 2y ago
    What seems far more likely, the way the world is going, is that we’ll use the consciousness-o-meter to determine some groups of humans are less conscious than others.
  - ANewFormation 2y ago
    The fundamental problem is that we keep setting 'reasonable' benchmarks, implicitly because we want to make them seem reachable, but then when we inevitably do we find it feels we [of course] haven't achieved what we really wanted to in the first place. True artificial intelligence would have the ability to meaningfully and significantly improve itself, recursively - a characteristic of even the most primitive life on Earth. And the implications of a computing system capable of such simply can't be overstated. With access to essentially all contemporary knowledge, flawless recall, and stupidly ridiculous amounts of energy to power itself (relative to e.g. a brain), it would create an explosion of knowledge in every single domain imaginable, and many we can't even yet fathom. And it would be doing this at an accelerating pace owing to self improvement. Basically the very nature of existence and knowledge would change. Sentience or not would be irrelevant as we simply tried (and inevitably failed, miserably) to catch up. But this is a bit further out of reach than 'can vaguely pass for a human in a casual non-adversarial q&a style chat.' --- This was one of the rather many areas where Star Trek failed to really consider the implications of its concepts, probably because it would simply break the world building. The Borg, for instance, would be defacto Gods in no time, even without assimilation.
    - readyplayernull 2y ago
      > meaningfully and significantly improve itself Exactly, mechanically by tools, environmentally by science, metaphysically by philosophy. An AI can only become an I by crossing a singularity of knowledge.
    - captainclam 2y ago
      > This was one of the rather many areas where Star Trek failed to really consider the implications of its concepts, probably because it would simply break the world building. This is true of pretty much all scifi! It's funny seeing super-futuristic depictions of star-fighter pilots and combatants with firearms and its just...so crushingly evident that humans will not have supremacy in these arenas very shortly. Frank Herbert must have anticipated this complication and side-stepped the whole issue by preemptively canonizing the Butlerian Jihad.
- jameshart 2y ago
  Threepio reads so much like an LLM, the writing turns out to have been skockingly prescient. At the time of Phantom Menace, the whole story of him being assembled by some slave kid on a backwater planet in the outer rim seemed preposterous - why would a slave kid into pod racing make a pompous ass of a protocol droid? Well, he just installed a standard easily pirated LLM into the droid he made. And the fact that these LLMs are used as 'protocol droids' to communicate with lower-level devices - 'the binary language of moisture vaporators' etc. - matches up with the pattern of LLMs as tools for generating scripts in Python. Terrible though the last sequel is, they even managed to include jailbreaking Threepio to get him to access part of his training data that had been censored out.
nthingtohide 2y ago
Philosophers have coined the term P-zombies. LLMs can be considered as P-zombies if they do not possess consciousness. Functionally equivalent but no soul. Substance Dualism was used by philosophers to deny animals consciousness.
- farts_mckensy 2y ago
  Non materialist bullshit.
- kbelder 2y ago
  >Functionally equivalent but no soul. I think it's an incoherent concept. If the 'soul' is anything, there is some difference in the brain that would allow it. You can't have two people with identical brains and claim that one has a soul, unless you believe in magic.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Is there a non-magical description of a soul? I thought it was an essentially magical concept. I’m not sure that makes it incoherent.
  - bobxmax 2y ago
    It's been interesting seeing those with an entirely materialist understanding of the universe try to grapple with and deal with consciousness as LLMs have emerged. To maintain that belief you have to either believe there is a physical source of consciousness, or that consciousness doesn't exist, neither of which most people can accept, yet LLMs are forcing people to confront.
    - thfuran 2y ago
      You think most people can't accept that consciousness is a phenomenon with basis solely in physical reality?
      - Isamu 2y ago
superkuh 2y ago
Basically the plot of Peter Watts' "Blindsight" (post-2000) scifi book series.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

antonkar 2y ago

Before creating “eGod”, it’s safer to first create “eHeaven”. I propose building direct-democratic multiversal static place intelligence (you can google it): the static place AI, the place of eventual all-knowing, where we are the only agents that will eventually become all-powerful. We start with making a digital copy of Earth and some ideally wireless brain-computer-interfaces, everyone who wants can buy a special armchair for their living room and go to the simulated planet with the whole experience the same as on our planet, but when a bus hits you there, you just open your eyes. So it gives you immortality from injuries. And of course there will be may other worlds with different freedoms, like flying or doing magic or instant teleportation in public places…

fishtacos 2y ago
Sort of related, but in the two or three times I've lucid dreamt, one of them was flying and having relatively functional control of my direction. Not sure how/why my brain rendered this sensation having never experienced it in real life, but it felt strange and novel and not easy to direct. It was akin to a sensation of VR games where my mind seems to interpolate real-life expectations with visual input, but not quite. Not quite "brain-computer-interfaces", but perhaps a glimpse with current tech.
- antonkar 2y ago
  Yes, that's great, I jumped over building in my dreams a few times and it was me controlling it, I think it'll resemble some future "multiversal UI" a bit. Did it look anything like long-exposure photos? https://wesely.org/2019/flughafen-tempelhof-berlin-1-7-2008-1-7-2009-2/ https://wesely.org/2019/flughafen-tempelhof-berlin-1-7-2008-... There are more good photos like this in the end of this article: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LaruPAWaZk9KpC25A/rational-utopia-and-multiversal-ai-alignment-steerable-asi#Final_Thoughts https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LaruPAWaZk9KpC25A/rational-u...

sho_hn 2y ago

This was a joy to read.

cess11 2y ago

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10762/pg10762-images.html https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10762/pg10762-images.ht... It comes across as satire to me, which I did not expect after reading TFA. From the classical references littered throughout the portions I've skimmed, it seems like a learned person is joking about contemporary men that aren't as well educated and unaware of it. Quite reminiscent of some of the stuff Kierkegaard wrote.

joshmarlow 2y ago
Interesting - I wonder if the author was gesturing at Erewhon which was published a few years earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  For those considering them, Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited (wherein we discover just how much in the way of, ahem, relations a book of the period can pack "between the lines") are available in a single widely available and cheap (used) little Modern Library hardback, and are a pretty fun read for the genre (nothing like Utopia—I read a lot of things most folks would consider boring, and that one taxed even my patience).
stevenwoo 2y ago
I recently reread Middlemarch, and this time I had finally read most of the literature and had wikipedia on hand to learn about the historical events that are referenced in it, the breadth and depth of her erudition is impressive, as is her portrayal of human nature (complicated and believable communicated across the divide of culture and time), which is the main thing I took from my first reading.

joshmarlow 2y ago

Fascinating read! > Theophrastus closes by asking whether human consciousness is a ‘stumbling’ on the way to ‘unconscious perfection’. This reminds me of a line from the scifi novel Echopraxia where one of the characters explains that as AIs become more intelligent, they 'wake up' and become conscious like humans. But then as they continue to grow, they eventually go back to sleep - and those are the machines to be afraid of. '

fishtacos 2y ago
I'm not well-versed enough on sci-fi to be able to connect more dots than this, but I am assuming these are common tropes. The Mass Effect series describes the Reapers as (copied from masseffect.fandom.com - I <3 this game's lore): "The Reapers are a highly-advanced machine race of synthetic-organic starships. The Reapers reside in dark space: the vast, mostly starless space between galaxies. They hibernate there, dormant for fifty thousand years at a time, before returning to the galaxy...the Reapers spare little concern for whatever labels other races choose to call them, and merely claim that they have neither beginning nor end." The other pop-sci-fi analogue I can think of is The Borg.
- le-mark 2y ago
  Fred Saberhagen Beserkers are the first instance of this concept I’m familiar with (1963) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(novel_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(novel_series)
goatlover 2y ago
In the 3001 novel, the last of the 2001 series by Clarke, the Dave simulation explains that while the monolith can simulate conscious beings, it is itself not conscious. This is similar to The Expanse novels, where it's explained that that the protomolecule technology was limited to not being conscious on purpose by it's creators, and yet could still somehow simulate conscious beings it wanted to use as tools.

gwern 2y ago

> Not many people have Eliot down as an influential player in the history of AI — and they would be right. Her contribution has been for most part overlooked, even as folks begin to unpick the role of fiction shaping the trajectory of the AI industry. It's because it reads mostly as a retread of the far-better known Samuel Butler pieces like _Erewhon_ years before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines was 1863), and which Eliot likely read given her lifestyle & how closely she echoes him. Surprising to see no mention of Butler at all in OP, given what critical context it is - she was not writing in a vacuum. Some earlier discussion: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/goANJNFBZrgE9PFNk/shadows-of-the-coming-race-1879 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/goANJNFBZrgE9PFNk/shadows-of...

setgree 2y ago
I learned about Butler and his letter from George Dyson's book, "Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence" -- it's a very entertaining account. Butler was quite a character. (If I recall correctly I learned about Dyson's book from a postscript to Neal Stephenson's "Quicksilver.")
MichaelZuo 2y ago
It does seem a bit suspicious given the context, as if the author intentionally omitted the background.
- hiatus 2y ago
  "Good artists copy, great artists steal." -- hiatus
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    How does this relate to the presence or absence of ulterior motives…?

twic 2y ago

I wonder if the title "The Shadows of the Coming Race" alludes to "Vril: The Power of the Coming Race", published eight years before, if that phrase was already in circulation. Google ngrams first sees it in 1868.

anon84873628 2y ago
Sure seems likely! Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article for Vril: >When H. G. Wells' novella The Time Machine was published in 1895, The Guardian wrote in its review: "The influence of the author of The Coming Race is still powerful, and no year passes without the appearance of stories which describe the manners and customs of peoples in imaginary worlds, sometimes in the stars above, sometimes in the heart of unknown continents in Australia or at the Pole, and sometimes below the waters under the earth. The latest effort in this class of fiction is The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells." So the phrase "the Coming Race" must have been well established in literary circles, and probably used as a shorthand for what today we might call non-humans or post-humans.

timewizard 2y ago

> any physical or cognitive task there aren’t exactly many roles that a human being can play that are additive to the economy. What a terribly small imagination this presents. There is life outside of your cubicle. There always was. > Each time a person engages in work that could be done more efficiently by a machine, the employing party—be that company, government or charity—will have to bear the opportunity cost of using AI. Your LLMs run on GPUs and have no physical component. Those physical components aren't free, require maintenance, and break at inconvenient times. This is not a zero sum future or one that doesn't require intelligent economic planning. > It’s like when a toddler ‘helps’ you wash the dishes. It's cute you presume your "AGI" is going to /want/ to do anything for you. In particular, mundane chores, like washing your dishes, or that you as an individual would be able to afford it. Anyways, it's an interesting past time around here, rather than admit the gulf between the current technologies and what AGI is imagined to be, we just troll through the past looking for anyone who even remotely made a "thinking machine" part of a fictional story. Well, one part she got right, the machine presents itself as something of a useless chat bot.

unwise-exe 2y ago

If you want to know what life is like when society is run by beings smarter than you, ask someone who flunked out of high school. If you want to know what life is like when society is run by alien intelligences, ask someone who lives under an economy dominated by megacorps.

katzenversteher 2y ago

Damn, it's pretty early while I'm reading this and in my tired state, not noticing the year in the title, I somehow expected an article about Sierra adventure game internals... A bit disappointed but still a good read on a completely different topic :)

superkuh 2y ago

Another early book on the implications of AI is Samuel Butler's "Erewhon" (1872) satire which describes a society in which a complex machine uprising occurred and thereafter all complex mechanical/computational devices were banned in their society. This idea is later referenced in the well known 20th century "Dune" books as "The Butlerian Jihad".