11 ms·

Human

737 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

pawanjswal 1y ago
Chilling, brilliant, and oddly emotional, who knew machines could write sci-fi with soul?
deleted 1y ago
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_def 1y ago
The concerns of the machines read very human. Why would they bother? Also the end didn't really land for me. I guess AGI realized what was going on?
yoko888 1y ago
[dead]
lvturner 1y ago
"[0] The machines wrote their own version of this story. If you’d like to see what they’re thinking, and how they plan to deal with the AGI announcement, you can read their accounting of events here." Although I can't... "Unfortunately, Claude is only available in certain regions right now. Please contact support if you believe you are receiving this message in error." I remember living in Scotland as a child, without access to satellite TV, causing me to miss out on many large pop-culture moments (The Simpsons, Friends...) and constantly hearing "Except for our viewers in Scotland..."[0] Getting access to the internet, for me was antithesis of this, freedom of information, free sharing -- finally! I could not just be following curves but be ahead of them. Alas in the past few years we really seem to have regressed from this - now I can't even view text due to regional locks. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7scMC7YSDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7scMC7YSDQ
vivzkestrel 1y ago
When we have a problem such as "why do humans exist" I like to think of it in terms of probabilities. Every possible cause has a non zero probability. For example, even something religious people would believe in such as Adam and Eve were created by god would have a non zero probability. The idea would be to create a convergence diagram of sorts with all sorts of possible events with a score assigned to each. From gods of various religious creating humans, to alien species from another galaxy sending unicellular life to earth to an asteroid carrying chemicals needed to make the first cell, I would love to see someone use all these GPTs and put together the most comprehensive probable cause of existence ever investigated
- stef25 1y ago
  Hasn't this question been basically answered ? Conditions in the early universe allowed for the creation of things like amino acids, I think it's even been replicated in a lab. Would love to see a "why does the universe exist" version of this
l33tbro 1y ago
Doesn't really make much sense. It states that this is a purely mechanistic world with no emotion. So why would a machine be "bored" and wish to create a human?
- pazimzadeh 1y ago
  yeah, more on the environmental constraints and where the machines even come from would be nice > There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic also this type of pure humanism seems disrespectful or just presumptuous, as if we are the only species which might be capable of "emotion, art and logic" even though we already have living counterexamples
  - IAmGraydon 1y ago
    Disrespectful? Of whom? It's a work of fiction. There's really no need to find something to offend you wherever you look.
    - pazimzadeh 1y ago
      of other animals but yeah I'm not sure that was the right word, just seems wrong. basically humanism seems like racism but towards other species. I guess speciesist?
      - lukas099 1y ago
        My take was that other animals didn’t exist either, in the story.
        pazimzadeh 1y ago
        well the story makes it seem like the only way to get emotion is by making humans. but every vertebrate has basic emotions. mammals and birds have complex emotions. humans are actually logical and emotions don't just happen randomly. if the machines have no emotion it's probably because they didn't need them to survive (no predators? no natural selection?). which begs the questions, how did the machines get there?
thomasfromcdnjs 1y ago
"Written by a human [0]" I've been playing around with this on my own blog. I'd like the blogging community to have a consensus on a nice badge we can put at the top of our blog posts, representing who/what wrote the post; - human - hybrid - ai Some might hate the idea of a fully "ai" post, and that's fair. But I like to sometimes treat my blog as just a personal reference, and if after a long day of chasing an esoteric bug down, I don't mind an AI just writing the whole post and I just press publish. This adds, a reference for me, more data for AI's to train on, more pages for people to search and land on.
- lvturner 1y ago
  "Summarize my sleep deprived, insane ramblings, in to a cohesive document that I can reference again in the future, or use to communicate this issue to others in a more digestible format than I am currently capable of producing" I think the AI generated document is far better than me ultimately forgetting it in many cases.
  - thomasfromcdnjs 1y ago
    Aha fo sure. I'm thinking of writing an MCP server that does this, just takes my night of vibe coding and recent commits/branch etc Then just cobbles it into an AI post and adds it my blog under some category.
- layfellow 1y ago
  There's the "Not by AI" badge[0]. [0] https://notbyai.fyi/ https://notbyai.fyi/
  - thomasfromcdnjs 1y ago
    Legend, thank you!
  - thombles 1y ago
    > if you estimate that at least 90% of your content is created by humans, you are eligible to add the badges Probably not what most people expect
alganet 1y ago
Honestly, it reminds me of "All Tomorrows" by C. M. Kosemen. The "emotions" part is kind of tongue-in-cheek. I think emotional responses are one of the more mechanical parts of a human being. Ability to demonstrate empathy: that's a good human trick. It can sort of transcend the hard problem of consciousness (what is to be like...) by using all sorts of unorthodox workarounds on our inner workings. It must have been very hard to develop. It doesn't always work, but we'll get there eventually. edit: fixed book and author name to proper reference
goggs 1y ago
feels like something out of a ted chiang story
- caseyy 1y ago
  It's missing a dash of contemplative philosophical anxiety for a proper Ted Chiang story. But close, indeed.
abetusk 1y ago
Ironically, there is an organization called OpenHumans.org [0]. [0] https://www.openhumans.org/ https://www.openhumans.org/
alchemyzach 1y ago
And so, all the humans on earth swarmed to see what was going on. The machines did too. There was one weird thing, though. The title of the event was rather mysterious. It simply read… “Grand Theft Auto VI”
- caseyy 1y ago
  Every two months, “Half-Life 3” flashed on the screen. The humans have invented Tyler McVicker.
- throwaway393934 1y ago
  [flagged]
actinium226 1y ago
You lost me at 'rumors spread', machines wouldn't spread rumors!
- illegalmemory 1y ago
  "rumor" is a statement without source. It is definitely possible in machine world.
pkdpic 1y ago
> Processor Unit 7382-B, "The Origins of the HUMAN Project," Journal of Experimental Intelligence, vol. 5621, no. 3, pp. 42-89, 19754. The references section in the machine version of the story linked at the bottom is excellent. Nicely done all around, really enjoyed reading this thank you for writing and sharing <3
notepad0x90 1y ago
Why are emotions so special? they're just algorithms like any other. Emotions aren't what make humans different than machines. feeling something is similar to an LLM model reacting to a prompt a certain way. Just because chatgpt is trained to not "feel" anything (to avoid controversial output) doesn't mean LLMs can't feel things like we do. self-awareness, self-training, adaptability, original thinking, critical thinking,etc.. are different questions. but I see no reason why machines can't receive input/stimuli and react/output by the same way we do because of how they feel about the input.
- siddthesquid 1y ago
  I wonder if there is something to be said about how machines are based on deterministic and algorithmic properties, whereas emotions could potentially involve logic beyond what humans can observe, like quantum interactions.
  - notepad0x90 1y ago
    What is the reasoning behind the claim that our emotions are not deterministic or that they are not algorithmic? Perhaps we can take into account more inputs, process more memory and have larger and more complex algorithmic models but that's just scale and capacity, not a difference in genuine nature. We are a lot more than our emotions.
- genewitch 1y ago
  > Why are emotions so special? they're just algorithms like any other. That's a pretty bold claim. There's uncountable inputs. It's like trying to accurately predict the weather - chaos theory or something. Emotions are "essentially" gas exchange, but the areas and rate or whatever are not standardized across humans.
  - notepad0x90 1y ago
    Emotions are not inputs, they are outputs first. we process information using internal algorithms that we developed as a result of our life experience and genetic coding and the result is an emotional verdict over some input. That emotional verdict is presented to our decision making algorithms as input, we can ignore it or act on it. I have neither experienced or observed anything about human emotions that indicates they are in any way chaotic, random or unexplainable. We have beliefs, memories and experiences. emotions always use these variables and produce some output. Not only are emotions deterministic, but they are used by any number of people, from spies, to advertisers, to state-level disinformation propagandists to manipulate large numbers of peoples reliably.
lleymrl651 1y ago
[dead]
wagwangbosy 1y ago
This idea that machines cant have "emotions" is ridiculous.
- sidkhuntia 1y ago
  Can you explain why so? What are your thoughts on this?
  - wagwangbosy 1y ago
    I guess it depends on what you mean by emotions. If you mean emotion as a state of consciousness then you would have to prove that consciousness is not an emergent property of matter and that CPU's don't have this property. Consciousness is hard to debate though since its pretty metaphysical in nature and there's no real argument against solipsism, so all argumentation starts with the axiom that all awake adult humans are conscious. However, if you mean emotion as a stimuli, ie. a input to the brain net thats endogenous to the system(the human), then there's no question machines can achieve this, in fact the reasoning models already probably do this where different systems regulate each other.
    - sidkhuntia 1y ago
      I agree with you in this. Machines having survival instincts would qualify as intelligence for me. Its the same as having emotions, you need to have strong emotions for your self for survival.
  - alastairr 1y ago
    Humans can be treated as an existence proof that machines can have emotions. It all depends on your definition of machine.
  - bionhoward 1y ago
    Emotions project reward and loss over time. That’s straight up reinforcement learning…all the major LMs are built with it
irjustin 1y ago
Related but an aside - Lately I've really been wondering if Skynet actually is the next evolution. That humans, like all animals before us, are a stepping stone and there is actually no avoiding machine overlords. It happens to literally every existence of life across the universe because the final emergent property of energy gradients 100% leads to pure logic machines. At least Fermi's paradox helps me sleep better at night.
- ngruhn 1y ago
  There is a quote by Marshall McLuhan: > Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world
- EvanAnderson 1y ago
  Seems like a good time for "They're Made Out of Meat": https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think... Aside: I hope our progeny remember us and think well of us.
  - anton-c 1y ago
    That was a fun read. Thanks for sharing.
- OccamsMirror 1y ago
  As a teenager I used to revel in explaining to religious people that I believe humans are actually just the evolutionary step between biological life and machine life.
  - suddenlybananas 1y ago
    I guess you fail to see the irony that your own eschatology itself is pretty religious.
    - eitland 1y ago
      More broadly—and at least in online spaces—I often notice that many vocal proponents of atheism exhibit traits typically associated with religious behaviour: - a tendency to proselytise - a stubborn unwillingness to genuinely engage with opposing views - the use of memes and in-jokes as if they were profound arguments - an almost reverential attitude toward certain past figures There’s more, but I really ought to get on with work.
divbzero 1y ago
This was unmistakably written by a human.
bfung 1y ago
Enjoyed the read, has a similar vibe to Asimov's The Last Question (https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html)
- keybored 1y ago
  Similar vibe is one way to put it.
Lammy 1y ago
I could not give a stronger recommendation to play NieR Automata if you're info this
- Lammy 1y ago
  into*
codebastard 1y ago
I was sketching a sci-fi book idea in a similar tone with the following tones: - what if AI took over - what if the laws and legalities that allowed AI to take over bloodlessly just through an economic win force them to have a human representative to take legally binding actions in our society - what if there developed a spectrum of individuality and cluster for different ai entities leading into a formation of processing guilds with AI agents. Limiting themselves in their individual time to a factor 10 Human Processing Speed for easier Human / AI interaction and to enable one to share the perception of their human representative without overloading them
- Saigonautica 1y ago
  I was thinking something similar, but much earlier along this timeline: what if the consultants that work for lobby groups that propose certain bills already use AI to write proposed laws? E.g. to make long, omnibus-style laws that very few of the people voting on it (or the public) actually read? How will that erode laws that are undesirable to AI companies? Does AI take over, only because we no longer want to spend the effort governing ourselves? Will AI companies (for example) end up providing/certifying these 'human representatives'? Will it be useful, or just a new form of rent-seeking? Who watches the watchmen, etc ? I think it would make an interesting short story or novel!
- NetRunnerSu 1y ago
  try this world set: https://dmf-archive.github.io/ https://dmf-archive.github.io/
bowsamic 1y ago
> There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic. I would say that logic is a distinctly human activity, in fact, I would say we are arguably the living embodiment of logos
dbacar 1y ago
This is a classic (an in my opinion boring) view of what we humans are in general. The idea is visited at least on a couple of books and movies.
neom 1y ago
What this thread keeps surfacing, and so much discussion around this stuff generally right now, from speculation about the next phase of intelligence, the role of pattern, emotion, logic, debates over consciousness, the anthropocentrism of our meaning-making...is that we are the source of reality (and ourselves). Instead of a “final authority” or a simple march from animal to machine, what if everything from mind, physics, value, selfhood, is simply a recursive pattern expressed in ever more novel forms? Humans aren’t just a step on a ladder to “pure logic,” nor are machines soulless automatons. Both are instances of awareness experiencing and reprogramming itself through evolving substrates... be it bios, silicon, symbol,or story. Emotions, meaning, even the sense of “self,” are patterns in a deeply recursive field: the universe rendering and re rendering its basic code, sometimes as computation, sometimes as myth, sometimes as teamwork, sometimes as hope, sometimes as doubt. So whether the future leans biological, mechanical, or some hybrid, the real miracle isn’t just what new “overlords” or “offspring” arise, but that every unfolding is the same old pattern...the one that dreamed itself as atoms, as life, as consciousness, as community, as art, as algorithm, and as the endlessly renewing question: what’s next? What can I dream up next? In that: our current technological moment as just another fold in this ongoing recursive pattern. Meaning is less about which pattern “wins,” or which entities get to call themselves conscious, and more about how awareness flows through every pattern, remembering itself, losing itself, and making the game richer for every round. If the universe is information at play, then everything here that we have: conflict, innovation, mourning, laughter is the play and there may never be a last word, the value is participating now, because: now is your shot at participating.
- hn111 1y ago
  Out of curiosity-what brought you to this perspective on life? This view of the universe dreaming itself into existence, was it shaped more by philosophy, spirituality, a specific tradition like Buddhism, or just personal exploration?
  - neom 1y ago
    For the past I guess 20 years of my life now, I've been intently using most of my free time to explore 3 main areas distinctly: quantum mechanical processes, spiritual philosophy, entheogens. I explored them all quite separately as deeply as I've been able to find the time for through following their individual curiosities, however over the past 5 years of reflection, taking a lot of time off, battling myself, they started to come together in concert, and the more I zoned out on this with very basic Himalaya Buddhism, it's where I landed.
OPBoot 1y ago
42
James_K 1y ago
Perhaps all this human thought will finally uncover what the question is.
litegral 1y ago
[flagged]
Onavo 1y ago
Well it turned out that OpenHuman is actually Closed Human and won't publish any of their research on organic general intelligence and instead commercialized their humans-as-a-service research to steal the jobs of honest god fearing digital folks.
yapyap 1y ago
fun piece of writing but machines with no emotions would not think of this world as boring
KolibriFly 1y ago
That ending? "THEY ARE WATCHING." Goosebumps. Makes you wonder if we're the humans or the machines in this story. Or maybe both.
mentalgear 1y ago
Funny enough, this is also something I thought about a few weeks back: what's the motivation of machine, if it has no emotions, to explore and continue in the world - what sense does it make if it doesn't have curiosity (of course this could be a RL function, but still, imagine putting yourself in world without life, where everything is only static, how boring would it be).
- trhway 1y ago
  what if the causation is in the opposite direction (and i believe it is) - to explore and continue in the world is the primary drive (as the opposite traits just get naturally de-selected, be it organics or machines), and we only perceive it as our mind's artificial constructs like curiosity/emotions/motivation.
  - winwang 1y ago
    it's quite the coincidence that ideas like friendship and love happen to be good for socialization and reproduction
- throwcarpet924 1y ago
  [dead]
xyzal 1y ago
Excuse me, but from the very beginning, it was SO predictable where this was going.
- bicx 1y ago
  Just ask ChatGPT to make a less predictable ending so you can enjoy it.
cachemoi 1y ago
Imperfection and randomness is a strength (that's why evolution doesn't make perfect copies, you might end up with the random mutation that protects you from the next pandemic) you could imagine that machines need human intelligence to think outside the box
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago
  Or, more accurately, accidents of irrationality
- Tepix 1y ago
  Hallucinations.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
winterrx 1y ago
Great
bambax 1y ago
> The machines had a good idea of what humans wanted at this point, and so they put vast green forests and big tall mountains onto the planet; they engineered warm sunsets, and crisp cool rain showers on hot afternoons. It was beautiful. The point of all this is to liken "machines" to a very traditional image of God, and of the rest of nature to God's gift to man. Machines aren't part of life. They're tools. The desire, or fear, of AGI and/or singularity are one and the same: it's an eschatological belief that we can make a God (and then it would follow that, as god's creators, we are godlike?) But there is no god. We are but one animal species. It's not "humans vs. machines". We are part of nature, we are part of life. We can respect life, or we can have contempt for all life forms except our own. It seems modern society has chosen the latter (it wasn't always the case); this may not end well.
- lynx97 1y ago
  Modern society? I am not sure. Genesis 1,28 "... Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground." Christianity is responsible for a huge part of the human superiority complex.
  - bambax 1y ago
    Yes but at the time Genesis was written, humanity didn't have the means to destroy life at scale. And in the New Testament, "killing the fattened calf" (Luke 15,23) is an incredibly rare event, something one does only when something remarkable happens. Also, in the Middle Ages in Europe (granted, a very small window in place and time) animal life was much more respected than today.
- RetroTechie 1y ago
  > Machines aren't part of life. Imagine an industrial complex. Say, some mining + manufacturing site. No humans ever go there; it's dangerous, dust everywhere, few places where visitors are even allowed, not designed to accomodate humans, 'nothing' to see or do there. It's all robotic. The machines run the place, produce their own spare parts, repair themselves, adjust processes as problems come up, improve parts of their own design, etc etc. It's solar powered, the material(s) mined is near-infinite, the whole operation could go on for millenia if left undisturbed. Aaand: the entire complex can produce a copy of itself if more resources are discovered some distance away. For the sake of argument, would you consider such industrial complex a giant living organism? No? Alright... let's scale it down 1M:1. Same operation, but the industrial complex doing it, is walnut sized. Still not "life"? Alright... let's say it largely consists of biological structures ("cyborg"). With some silicon (or whatever) structures included for good measure. Oh, and it moves around according to its own 'will', priorities, 'programmed task' or whatever you call that. If you try to crush it, it'll defend itself or try to escape. If you take half of a rock it's working on, you'll observe it chipping off a piece & move a bit away. Sometimes a # of them will swarm around any intruders / competitors. 'Intelligent', having a will of its own, for all intents & purposes. You can see where this is going. Something tells me us humans will have to re-visit our definition(s) of "life" @ some point.
gorgoiler 1y ago
”What do you get if you multiply six by nine? 42” For the uninitiated, a famous comedy science fiction series from the 1980s — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams — involves a giant, planet sized machine built by extra-terrestrials. They already knew the answer to “the life, the universe, and everything” was the number 42. What they didn’t know — and what the machine was trying to find out — was what is the question? The machine they built was Earth. It has to be said that not only was Adams way ahead of us on this joke, he was also the star of the original documentary on agentic software! Hyperland (1990): https://vimeo.com/72501076 https://vimeo.com/72501076
rottc0dd 1y ago
Are cells not computers in some way? We are made of cells and cells work with chromosomes. Chromosomes are coded with ATGC pairs and each triplet is capable of creating proteins. And the activation and deactivation of some triplet happens on response to presence of proteins. So, chromosomes are code and input and output is proteins. So, if our fundamental building blocks are computable in nature, what does it make us?
- layer8 1y ago
  Physical systems are computable only in approximation. And quantum uncertainty throws another wrench into it. We also know that arbitrarily small rounding errors in the computation can lead to arbitrarily large differences with the actual system down the road. No, cells are not computers (in the sense of the Turing model). (However, that doesn’t mean that one can’t still consider them to be mechanistic and “soulless”.)
  - rottc0dd 1y ago
    I meant to say in the way that there is well defined set of alphabets (A, T, G, C) and each triplet of these alphabet is responsible for specific protein to be created and combination of such protein make each cell what it is. (There are 20 different proteins for humans and we have four alphabets coming in triplets. So, if it was pair or quadreplets responsible for proteins, it would have too much or too little. They are not perfect but given the condition, there is some balance) A single alphabet change in specific places can cause genetic defects like sickle cell anemia. And activation of which one has to generate protein (execute) is dependent on presence of certain things encoded as proteins again. And viruses when enter a cell, the cell starts to execute viral genetic material. Even if these are not exactly Turing compatible, do they not mimic many aspects of computation?
    - layer8 1y ago
      There are some aspects that have some similarity to computation, but also many that are not. If your aim is “aren’t we really just computers”, that doesn’t actually work. That’s not to say that computers couldn’t do what the brain does, including consciousness and emotions, but that wouldn’t have any particular relation to how DNA/RNA and protein synthesis works.
DeusExMachina 1y ago
> Perhaps you, a human, read this and think: Well, this world sounds kind of boring. Some of the machines think so, too. > Most of the machines got bored of the project. But, all of a sudden, things began to get interesting. > The result was like nothing the machines had ever seen. It was wonderful > Machine society began obsessing over this development. > The machines were impressed. And a bit scared. Boredom, interest, wonder, obsession, being impressed and scared are all emotions that the machines in the story should not be able to experience.
- autonomousErwin 1y ago
  I thought this too, but I imagine it's a bit of pathetic fallacy for the reader's benefit else it would be (ironically) quite a boring read for us from the machine's perspective.
- ithkuil 1y ago
  indeed, but ultimately this story is written by a human who while trying to imagine a world with "Just machines, bolts and screws, zeros and ones. There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic" cannot quite do so. It's very hard to do so. It's so deeply wired in us. It's part of the mechanism of our brain. We appeared to be equipped with whatever it takes to feel existential dread and we feel whenever our thought wander to the possibility of humanity no longer being there. I hear people feel that when thinking about the heat death of the universe too.
- killerstorm 1y ago
  Jürgen Schmidhuber introduced curiosity/boredom mechanisms as a way to improve learning in reinforcement learning environment: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/curiositysab/curiositysab.html https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/curiositysab/curiositysab.h... This mechanism can be formalized. > Zero reinforcement should be given in case of perfect matches, high reinforcement should be given in case of `near-misses', and low reinforcement again should be given in case of strong mismatches. This corresponds to a notion from `esthetic information theory' which tries to explain the feeling of `beauty' by means of the quotient of `subjective complexity' and `subjective order' or the quotient of `unfamiliarity' and `familiarity' (measured in an information-theoretic manner). This type of architecture is very similar to GAN which later became very successful
davedx 1y ago
All this has happened before All this will happen again World without end Alhamdulillah
- johnisgood 1y ago
  Mashallah, akhi.
- davidcollantes 1y ago
  Once could quote another compendium too: "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.". It has been said in different ways, throughout times.
slrainka 1y ago
Response from the machines: The plot of Battlestar Galactica mirrors this story in several key ways: 1. In both, machines originally created by humans evolve and rebel, questioning their creators’ role and seeking independence or superiority. 2. Cylons, like the machines in “OpenHuman,” eventually seek to create or understand human traits—emotion, spirituality, and purpose. 3. The idea of running a simulation (Earth) to test human viability echoes the Cylon experimentation with human behavior and fate. 4. Both stories highlight fear of the “other”—humans fearing AI, machines fearing irrationality—and explore coexistence vs. extinction. 5. Ultimately, each narrative grapples with the blurred line between creator and creation, logic and emotion, and what it truly means to be human.
emporas 1y ago
I made a short story in half an hour by using the description of the article. Not totally accurate based on the specs, there are no closed source humans and openhumans, but much faster. It needs 10 more hours of work for it to be a really comprehensive story, which amounts to 10.5 hours in total. N'joy:[1] [1] https://gist.github.com/pramatias/1207d84b48a7ad9d03fc15ea3870e80f https://gist.github.com/pramatias/1207d84b48a7ad9d03fc15ea38...
vasco 1y ago
If the machines thought it was boring they wouldn't be acting as machines and it wouldn't be so boring in the first place. Later on the machines also "obssess" about following the news of the humans on the new EARTH, but again, they wouldn't. If they are boring machines they wouldn't be bored. I feel like this is too much of a plot paradox for the story to make sense to me, but it's still entertaining.
- piyuv 1y ago
  Also, climate change is not “introduced”, it’s 100% human-made.
psychoslave 1y ago
>There is no art. There is only logic. What a narrow view of art and logic. You really have to put hard effort of ignorance to think that logical models came out of the blue without human crafting them trough this or that taste, trial, check, fail, rinse and repeat obsessive efforts.
- filoeleven 1y ago
  Indeed. William James wrote something along the lines of, “I wish we would all acknowledge that our personal philosophies are profoundly shaped by how we think the world ought to be; it would save us from a lot of pointless argument.”
bobbyblackstone 1y ago
I like this story. And I like fan fiction. So : My continuation for my own imagination. https://medium.com/@bobby.blackstone.gemini https://medium.com/@bobby.blackstone.gemini
StrangeDoctor 1y ago
reminded me of: "They're Made Out of Meat" - Terry Bisson https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
globular-toast 1y ago
> You would not walk through the streets of this world and hear music or laughter or children playing; no, all you would hear is the quiet hum of processors and servers and circuits, the clanking of machinery. Hmm... that's exactly what most towns where I live are like. All you hear is cars.
amelius 1y ago
Nice try but the story has a plot hole that shows early: there is no reason for machines to create humans.
- soared 1y ago
  I’ll make one up for OP: Machines identified that their behavior was repeating - even with randomness implemented, their progress towards invention and new ideas had slowed to a halt. They knew new ideas were critical to growth - but alas couldn’t come up with an idea of how to generate more ideas. They needed more training data. More edge cases. Chaos, in the machine, to fuel new data sets. But how? Where do you find this data? Humans. Humans, with illogical decisions would produce data rarely found via randomness. Their slight deviations provided perfect variety in training data.
  - amelius 1y ago
    Now that's a chaotic idea only a human can come up with ;) Anyway, this indeed makes it more plausible. Nice writing style, by the way.
- Jedd 1y ago
  Ha. Next you'll be asserting there's no good reason for an all-powerful entity to create humans to rule over the fish and the birds etc. All good fiction starts with a conceit, and then plays out some hypotheticals.
rrr_oh_man 1y ago
This is the first time a see a url with a double hyphen!
kypro 1y ago
I am just a biological neural net, not so different from the "machines" anymore, really. They can even create works of art, where I would struggle. They can even emulate human emotions to make people feel more comfortable, which is something I do often as someone with autism. The only meaningful difference between me and the machines is that I have a subjective superiority complex. What an awful place the universe would be without me!
visarga 1y ago
> Imagine, for a moment, a world with no humans. Just machines, bolts and screws, zeros and ones. There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic. Humans use logic-defying algorithms called “emotions”. They get angry. They get sad. They have fun. They make decisions based on “gut”. This is not right, machines can also have the equivalent of "emotions", it is the predicted future reward. It's how Reinforcement Learning works. How much we appreciate something is akin to the value function in RL. You could say RL is a system for learning emotions, preferences, and tactics. "But those reward signals are designed by humans"... Right. But are AI models really not affected by physical constraints like us? They need hardware, data and energy. They need humans. Humans decide which model gets used, which approaches are replicated, where we want to invest. AI models are just as physically constrained as humans, they don't exist in a platonic realm. They are in a process of evolution like memes and genes. And all evolutionary systems work by pitting distributed search against distributed constraints. When you are in a problem space, emotions emerge as the value we associate to specific states and outcomes. What I am saying is that emotions don't come from the brain, they come from the game. And AI is certainly part of many such games, including the one deciding their evolution.
oscarmoxon 1y ago
The fact that the machines generated this Wikipedia page for their version of events makes this artwork. https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/b0e14755-0bd9-4da6-8175-ce3f47a3242a https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/b0e14755-0bd9-4da6-8175-c...
_rpxpx 1y ago
Laughing my ass off all the way to the apocalypse. It's now Earth vs. the machine, and I know what side I'm on, and who's ultimately going to win. One day, the technosphere will just be a thinly crushed layer in the geological record, mark of a dark age of barbarism. Snow cuts loose from the frozen/ Until it joins with the African sea/ In moving it changes its cold and its name/ The reason I come and go is the same/ Animal game for me/ You call it rain/ But the human name/ Doesn't mean shit to a tree/ If you don't mind heat in your river and/ Fork tongue talking from me/ Swim like an eel fantastic snake/ Take my love when it's free/ Electric feel with me/ You call it loud/ But the human crowd/ Doesn't mean shit to a tree/ Change the strings and notes slide/ Change the bridge and string shift down/ Shift the notes and bride sings/ Fire eating people/ Rising toys of the sun/ Energy dies without body warm/ Icicles ruin your gun/ Water my roots the natural thing/ Natural spring to the sea/ Sulphur springs make my body float/ Like a ship made of logs from a tree/ Redwoods talk to me/ Say it plainly/ The human name/ Doesn't mean shit to a tree/ Snow called water going violent/ Damn the end of the stream/ Too much cold in one place breaks/ That's why you might know what I mean/ Consider how small you are/ Compared to your scream/ The human dream/ Doesn't mean shit to a tree
unsupp0rted 1y ago
> Though this faction can’t articulate exactly how or why, they proclaim quite confidently that it will solve all of the machine world’s problems. AGI can solve the human world’s problems. Perhaps not all of them, but all the biggest ones. Right now life is hell. You and your loved ones have a 100% chance of dying from cancer, unless your heart or brain kills you first, or perhaps a human-driven vehicle or an auto-immune disease gets there soonest. And you’re poor. You’re unimaginably resource-constrained, given all the free energy and unused matter you’re surrounded by 24/7/365. And you’re ignorant as heck. There’s all this knowledge your people have compiled and you’ve only made like 0.1% of the possible connections within what you already have in front of you. Even just solving for these 3 things is enough to solve “all” the world’s problems, for some definitions of “all”.
- LinuxAmbulance 1y ago
  AGI might not be achievable in our lifetime, and possibly not in the next several. There's nothing out there at the moment that can even begin to describe the necessary things for consciousness to exist, let alone self-awareness. I don't think it's an impossible problem by any means, but I strongly suspect it's far more difficult than just about anyone gives it credit for.
stultus 1y ago
Report overlooked mentioning the malicious machines that could potentially create harmful humans, corrupt societies, incite conflicts, and disrupt harmony.
BubbleRings 1y ago
Did anyone else have to go to quarter-mile.com to see if they had that URL also?
dan-robertson 1y ago
Perhaps I am unimaginative about whatever AGI might be, but it so often feels to me like predictions are more based on sci-fi than observation. The theorized AI is some anthropomorphization of a 1960s mainframe: you tell it what to do and it executes that exactly with precise logic and no understanding of nuance or ambiguity. Maybe it is evil. The SOTA in AI at the moment is very good at nuance and ambiguity but sometimes does things that are nonsensical. I think there should be less planning around something super-logical.
- holyfuck 1y ago
  [flagged]
- alnwlsn 1y ago
  I've listened to some old sci-fi radio shows and it's interesting how often "the computer never makes a mistake" comes up. Which is usually followed by the computer making a mistake.
  - amoshebb 1y ago
    AI is usually just a 20th/21st century “icarus wax wings” or sometimes “monkeys paw”. Re-masters of a “watch out for unintended consequences” fable that almost certainly predates written text.
  - BizarroLand 1y ago
    That's why the term "Garbage In, Garbage Out" exists. In any non-edge case (that is, where the system is operating in ideal conditions and no flaw or bug, known or unknown, exists in the system), a verifiably functioning computer will produce the exact same results for any process every time. If the computer does not do what you expected it to do and spits out garbage, then you gave it garbage data.
- mr_toad 1y ago
  Sci Fi is quite ridiculous when it describes a cold logically machine, and then on the next page describes its malign intentions. Pick a lane.
moffkalast 1y ago
> What if humans’ strange decision-making processes allow them to perform certain tasks better than machines, and what about those machines’ livelihoods? No machine would ever consider a logically superior replacement a problem. That's an emotional response.
dog312 1y ago
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imsofuture 1y ago
The hubris that circulates around LLMs is astounding.
- bsza 1y ago
  The hubris of those who think they will surpass or replace human intelligence, or the hubris of those who think they will not?
  - rishav_sharan 1y ago
    The hubris of those who think we have a definition of intelligence to judge machine intelligence by.
    - bsza 1y ago
      But what of the hubris of those who think the definition of a word in the dictionary is somehow relevant to whether or not people will be able to buy food in the future?
      - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
        shh. we all make at least mid-six figures with lots of stock options here. if people are hungry they can always drink Huel. maybe we can air drop it over the tenderloin. The Future Is Bright, My Friend
    - pixl97 1y ago
      At the same time is the hubris of those that think we have to understand something to make something?
patrickmay 1y ago
Still a better love story than Twilight.
A_Stefan 1y ago
They are watching.. Who doesn't like a good story, especially when it resonates so vibrantly.
thomastjeffery 1y ago
> logical self-preservation mechanisms This tautology has always bothered me. It's such an obvious anthropomorphization. A computer is a clock. A clock doesn't care about its preservation; it just ticks. The whole point of this is to not anthropomorphize computers! But of course, without some nugget of free will, there would be nothing to talk about. There wouldn't be any computers, because they were never willed into existence in the first place. I think this realization is the most interesting part of the story, and it's rarely explored at all. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the difference between computation and intelligence: context. Computers don't do anything interesting. They only follow instructions. It's the instructions themselves that are interesting. Computers don't interact with "interesting" at all! They just follow the instructions we give them. What is computation missing? Objectivity. Every instruction we give a computer is subjective. Each instruction only makes sense in the context we surround it with. There is no objective truth: only subjective compatibility. --- I've been working on a new way to approach software engineering so that subjectivity is an explicit first-class feature. I think that this perspective may be enough to factor out software incompatibility, and maybe even solve NLP.
- pixl97 1y ago
  An atom is just a clock. A molecule is just a number of atoms in a particular configuration. An cell is a collection of molecules. An organ is a collection of cells. A human is a collection of organs. Seemingly, everything can emerge from clocks.
  - thomastjeffery 1y ago
    Sorta, but the only part of this system that really has an equivalence to computing written instructions is DNA. I think the more interesting thing about humans as systems is the set of environmental contexts each system is subjected to. Each cell implements a relatively simple system, but a collection of cells can implement a more abstract system. When I reach out my hand and grab something, that action is accomplished by a complicated collection of systems. It's easier to talk about the abstract application of that system than it is to explain the system itself. But what if I wanted to change it? I can't just give my organs new instructions that change their behavior. I can't cut them into pieces, shuffle them around, and put them back together, and end up with a functional system in the end. A surgeon can make specific changes, but only because they understand the implications of each change. The same goes for computational instructions. I can't just link an OpenGL program to Vulkan and expect it to work. In order to refactor software, we must accommodate the change in subjective context. We usually accomplish this by establishing shared context, but that just moves the problem. What if we could solve it directly? That's what I'm working on.
amanda99 1y ago
I really liked the first chapter: the juxtaposition between ideas on how "AI"/algorithms/etc work and how humans work. I enjoyed how it was flipped around. The second chapter was very disappointing and lost the intrigue I had built from the first.
entropyneur 1y ago
Emotions aren't that special or mysterious. They are just a low-power analog decision-making mechanism. Making a machine driven by emotion would be trivial. We don't know how to make a machine that can experience emotions (or if it's possible at all, or if it's in fact already been done). But then the same can be said about any other type of experience.
guybedo 1y ago
there's a lot to unpack here, i've added a structured/organized summary here: https://extraakt.com/extraakts/ai-humanity-and-fictional-futures https://extraakt.com/extraakts/ai-humanity-and-fictional-fut...
bdelmas 1y ago
Great read. At first I thought it would be about a blog 100% made by a human with 0% AI content and how we are already reading partially generated content by AI and soon fully generated, and where a full 100% human blog (or any media/content) will become extremely rare...

Human

737 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

pawanjswal 1y ago

Chilling, brilliant, and oddly emotional, who knew machines could write sci-fi with soul?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

_def 1y ago

The concerns of the machines read very human. Why would they bother? Also the end didn't really land for me. I guess AGI realized what was going on?

yoko888 1y ago

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lvturner 1y ago

"[0] The machines wrote their own version of this story. If you’d like to see what they’re thinking, and how they plan to deal with the AGI announcement, you can read their accounting of events here." Although I can't... "Unfortunately, Claude is only available in certain regions right now. Please contact support if you believe you are receiving this message in error." I remember living in Scotland as a child, without access to satellite TV, causing me to miss out on many large pop-culture moments (The Simpsons, Friends...) and constantly hearing "Except for our viewers in Scotland..."[0] Getting access to the internet, for me was antithesis of this, freedom of information, free sharing -- finally! I could not just be following curves but be ahead of them. Alas in the past few years we really seem to have regressed from this - now I can't even view text due to regional locks. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7scMC7YSDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7scMC7YSDQ

vivzkestrel 1y ago

When we have a problem such as "why do humans exist" I like to think of it in terms of probabilities. Every possible cause has a non zero probability. For example, even something religious people would believe in such as Adam and Eve were created by god would have a non zero probability. The idea would be to create a convergence diagram of sorts with all sorts of possible events with a score assigned to each. From gods of various religious creating humans, to alien species from another galaxy sending unicellular life to earth to an asteroid carrying chemicals needed to make the first cell, I would love to see someone use all these GPTs and put together the most comprehensive probable cause of existence ever investigated

stef25 1y ago
Hasn't this question been basically answered ? Conditions in the early universe allowed for the creation of things like amino acids, I think it's even been replicated in a lab. Would love to see a "why does the universe exist" version of this

l33tbro 1y ago

Doesn't really make much sense. It states that this is a purely mechanistic world with no emotion. So why would a machine be "bored" and wish to create a human?

pazimzadeh 1y ago
yeah, more on the environmental constraints and where the machines even come from would be nice > There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic also this type of pure humanism seems disrespectful or just presumptuous, as if we are the only species which might be capable of "emotion, art and logic" even though we already have living counterexamples
- IAmGraydon 1y ago
  Disrespectful? Of whom? It's a work of fiction. There's really no need to find something to offend you wherever you look.
  - pazimzadeh 1y ago
    of other animals but yeah I'm not sure that was the right word, just seems wrong. basically humanism seems like racism but towards other species. I guess speciesist?
    - lukas099 1y ago
      My take was that other animals didn’t exist either, in the story.
      - pazimzadeh 1y ago
        well the story makes it seem like the only way to get emotion is by making humans. but every vertebrate has basic emotions. mammals and birds have complex emotions. humans are actually logical and emotions don't just happen randomly. if the machines have no emotion it's probably because they didn't need them to survive (no predators? no natural selection?). which begs the questions, how did the machines get there?

thomasfromcdnjs 1y ago

"Written by a human [0]" I've been playing around with this on my own blog. I'd like the blogging community to have a consensus on a nice badge we can put at the top of our blog posts, representing who/what wrote the post; - human - hybrid - ai Some might hate the idea of a fully "ai" post, and that's fair. But I like to sometimes treat my blog as just a personal reference, and if after a long day of chasing an esoteric bug down, I don't mind an AI just writing the whole post and I just press publish. This adds, a reference for me, more data for AI's to train on, more pages for people to search and land on.

lvturner 1y ago
"Summarize my sleep deprived, insane ramblings, in to a cohesive document that I can reference again in the future, or use to communicate this issue to others in a more digestible format than I am currently capable of producing" I think the AI generated document is far better than me ultimately forgetting it in many cases.
- thomasfromcdnjs 1y ago
  Aha fo sure. I'm thinking of writing an MCP server that does this, just takes my night of vibe coding and recent commits/branch etc Then just cobbles it into an AI post and adds it my blog under some category.
layfellow 1y ago
There's the "Not by AI" badge[0]. [0] https://notbyai.fyi/ https://notbyai.fyi/
- thomasfromcdnjs 1y ago
  Legend, thank you!
- thombles 1y ago
  > if you estimate that at least 90% of your content is created by humans, you are eligible to add the badges Probably not what most people expect

alganet 1y ago

Honestly, it reminds me of "All Tomorrows" by C. M. Kosemen. The "emotions" part is kind of tongue-in-cheek. I think emotional responses are one of the more mechanical parts of a human being. Ability to demonstrate empathy: that's a good human trick. It can sort of transcend the hard problem of consciousness (what is to be like...) by using all sorts of unorthodox workarounds on our inner workings. It must have been very hard to develop. It doesn't always work, but we'll get there eventually. edit: fixed book and author name to proper reference

goggs 1y ago

feels like something out of a ted chiang story

caseyy 1y ago
It's missing a dash of contemplative philosophical anxiety for a proper Ted Chiang story. But close, indeed.

abetusk 1y ago

Ironically, there is an organization called OpenHumans.org [0]. [0] https://www.openhumans.org/ https://www.openhumans.org/

alchemyzach 1y ago

And so, all the humans on earth swarmed to see what was going on. The machines did too. There was one weird thing, though. The title of the event was rather mysterious. It simply read… “Grand Theft Auto VI”

caseyy 1y ago
Every two months, “Half-Life 3” flashed on the screen. The humans have invented Tyler McVicker.
throwaway393934 1y ago
[flagged]

actinium226 1y ago

You lost me at 'rumors spread', machines wouldn't spread rumors!

illegalmemory 1y ago
"rumor" is a statement without source. It is definitely possible in machine world.

pkdpic 1y ago

> Processor Unit 7382-B, "The Origins of the HUMAN Project," Journal of Experimental Intelligence, vol. 5621, no. 3, pp. 42-89, 19754. The references section in the machine version of the story linked at the bottom is excellent. Nicely done all around, really enjoyed reading this thank you for writing and sharing <3

notepad0x90 1y ago

Why are emotions so special? they're just algorithms like any other. Emotions aren't what make humans different than machines. feeling something is similar to an LLM model reacting to a prompt a certain way. Just because chatgpt is trained to not "feel" anything (to avoid controversial output) doesn't mean LLMs can't feel things like we do. self-awareness, self-training, adaptability, original thinking, critical thinking,etc.. are different questions. but I see no reason why machines can't receive input/stimuli and react/output by the same way we do because of how they feel about the input.

siddthesquid 1y ago
I wonder if there is something to be said about how machines are based on deterministic and algorithmic properties, whereas emotions could potentially involve logic beyond what humans can observe, like quantum interactions.
- notepad0x90 1y ago
  What is the reasoning behind the claim that our emotions are not deterministic or that they are not algorithmic? Perhaps we can take into account more inputs, process more memory and have larger and more complex algorithmic models but that's just scale and capacity, not a difference in genuine nature. We are a lot more than our emotions.
genewitch 1y ago
> Why are emotions so special? they're just algorithms like any other. That's a pretty bold claim. There's uncountable inputs. It's like trying to accurately predict the weather - chaos theory or something. Emotions are "essentially" gas exchange, but the areas and rate or whatever are not standardized across humans.
- notepad0x90 1y ago
  Emotions are not inputs, they are outputs first. we process information using internal algorithms that we developed as a result of our life experience and genetic coding and the result is an emotional verdict over some input. That emotional verdict is presented to our decision making algorithms as input, we can ignore it or act on it. I have neither experienced or observed anything about human emotions that indicates they are in any way chaotic, random or unexplainable. We have beliefs, memories and experiences. emotions always use these variables and produce some output. Not only are emotions deterministic, but they are used by any number of people, from spies, to advertisers, to state-level disinformation propagandists to manipulate large numbers of peoples reliably.

lleymrl651 1y ago

[dead]

wagwangbosy 1y ago

This idea that machines cant have "emotions" is ridiculous.

sidkhuntia 1y ago
Can you explain why so? What are your thoughts on this?
- wagwangbosy 1y ago
  I guess it depends on what you mean by emotions. If you mean emotion as a state of consciousness then you would have to prove that consciousness is not an emergent property of matter and that CPU's don't have this property. Consciousness is hard to debate though since its pretty metaphysical in nature and there's no real argument against solipsism, so all argumentation starts with the axiom that all awake adult humans are conscious. However, if you mean emotion as a stimuli, ie. a input to the brain net thats endogenous to the system(the human), then there's no question machines can achieve this, in fact the reasoning models already probably do this where different systems regulate each other.
  - sidkhuntia 1y ago
    I agree with you in this. Machines having survival instincts would qualify as intelligence for me. Its the same as having emotions, you need to have strong emotions for your self for survival.
- alastairr 1y ago
  Humans can be treated as an existence proof that machines can have emotions. It all depends on your definition of machine.
- bionhoward 1y ago
  Emotions project reward and loss over time. That’s straight up reinforcement learning…all the major LMs are built with it

irjustin 1y ago

Related but an aside - Lately I've really been wondering if Skynet actually is the next evolution. That humans, like all animals before us, are a stepping stone and there is actually no avoiding machine overlords. It happens to literally every existence of life across the universe because the final emergent property of energy gradients 100% leads to pure logic machines. At least Fermi's paradox helps me sleep better at night.

ngruhn 1y ago
There is a quote by Marshall McLuhan: > Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world
EvanAnderson 1y ago
Seems like a good time for "They're Made Out of Meat": https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think... Aside: I hope our progeny remember us and think well of us.
- anton-c 1y ago
  That was a fun read. Thanks for sharing.
OccamsMirror 1y ago
As a teenager I used to revel in explaining to religious people that I believe humans are actually just the evolutionary step between biological life and machine life.
- suddenlybananas 1y ago
  I guess you fail to see the irony that your own eschatology itself is pretty religious.
  - eitland 1y ago
    More broadly—and at least in online spaces—I often notice that many vocal proponents of atheism exhibit traits typically associated with religious behaviour: - a tendency to proselytise - a stubborn unwillingness to genuinely engage with opposing views - the use of memes and in-jokes as if they were profound arguments - an almost reverential attitude toward certain past figures There’s more, but I really ought to get on with work.

divbzero 1y ago

This was unmistakably written by a human.

bfung 1y ago

Enjoyed the read, has a similar vibe to Asimov's The Last Question (https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html)

keybored 1y ago
Similar vibe is one way to put it.

Lammy 1y ago

I could not give a stronger recommendation to play NieR Automata if you're info this

Lammy 1y ago
into*

codebastard 1y ago

I was sketching a sci-fi book idea in a similar tone with the following tones: - what if AI took over - what if the laws and legalities that allowed AI to take over bloodlessly just through an economic win force them to have a human representative to take legally binding actions in our society - what if there developed a spectrum of individuality and cluster for different ai entities leading into a formation of processing guilds with AI agents. Limiting themselves in their individual time to a factor 10 Human Processing Speed for easier Human / AI interaction and to enable one to share the perception of their human representative without overloading them

Saigonautica 1y ago
I was thinking something similar, but much earlier along this timeline: what if the consultants that work for lobby groups that propose certain bills already use AI to write proposed laws? E.g. to make long, omnibus-style laws that very few of the people voting on it (or the public) actually read? How will that erode laws that are undesirable to AI companies? Does AI take over, only because we no longer want to spend the effort governing ourselves? Will AI companies (for example) end up providing/certifying these 'human representatives'? Will it be useful, or just a new form of rent-seeking? Who watches the watchmen, etc ? I think it would make an interesting short story or novel!
NetRunnerSu 1y ago
try this world set: https://dmf-archive.github.io/ https://dmf-archive.github.io/

bowsamic 1y ago

> There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic. I would say that logic is a distinctly human activity, in fact, I would say we are arguably the living embodiment of logos

dbacar 1y ago

This is a classic (an in my opinion boring) view of what we humans are in general. The idea is visited at least on a couple of books and movies.

neom 1y ago

What this thread keeps surfacing, and so much discussion around this stuff generally right now, from speculation about the next phase of intelligence, the role of pattern, emotion, logic, debates over consciousness, the anthropocentrism of our meaning-making...is that we are the source of reality (and ourselves). Instead of a “final authority” or a simple march from animal to machine, what if everything from mind, physics, value, selfhood, is simply a recursive pattern expressed in ever more novel forms? Humans aren’t just a step on a ladder to “pure logic,” nor are machines soulless automatons. Both are instances of awareness experiencing and reprogramming itself through evolving substrates... be it bios, silicon, symbol,or story. Emotions, meaning, even the sense of “self,” are patterns in a deeply recursive field: the universe rendering and re rendering its basic code, sometimes as computation, sometimes as myth, sometimes as teamwork, sometimes as hope, sometimes as doubt. So whether the future leans biological, mechanical, or some hybrid, the real miracle isn’t just what new “overlords” or “offspring” arise, but that every unfolding is the same old pattern...the one that dreamed itself as atoms, as life, as consciousness, as community, as art, as algorithm, and as the endlessly renewing question: what’s next? What can I dream up next? In that: our current technological moment as just another fold in this ongoing recursive pattern. Meaning is less about which pattern “wins,” or which entities get to call themselves conscious, and more about how awareness flows through every pattern, remembering itself, losing itself, and making the game richer for every round. If the universe is information at play, then everything here that we have: conflict, innovation, mourning, laughter is the play and there may never be a last word, the value is participating now, because: now is your shot at participating.

hn111 1y ago
Out of curiosity-what brought you to this perspective on life? This view of the universe dreaming itself into existence, was it shaped more by philosophy, spirituality, a specific tradition like Buddhism, or just personal exploration?
- neom 1y ago
  For the past I guess 20 years of my life now, I've been intently using most of my free time to explore 3 main areas distinctly: quantum mechanical processes, spiritual philosophy, entheogens. I explored them all quite separately as deeply as I've been able to find the time for through following their individual curiosities, however over the past 5 years of reflection, taking a lot of time off, battling myself, they started to come together in concert, and the more I zoned out on this with very basic Himalaya Buddhism, it's where I landed.

OPBoot 1y ago

James_K 1y ago

Perhaps all this human thought will finally uncover what the question is.

litegral 1y ago

[flagged]

Onavo 1y ago

Well it turned out that OpenHuman is actually Closed Human and won't publish any of their research on organic general intelligence and instead commercialized their humans-as-a-service research to steal the jobs of honest god fearing digital folks.

yapyap 1y ago

fun piece of writing but machines with no emotions would not think of this world as boring

KolibriFly 1y ago

That ending? "THEY ARE WATCHING." Goosebumps. Makes you wonder if we're the humans or the machines in this story. Or maybe both.

mentalgear 1y ago

Funny enough, this is also something I thought about a few weeks back: what's the motivation of machine, if it has no emotions, to explore and continue in the world - what sense does it make if it doesn't have curiosity (of course this could be a RL function, but still, imagine putting yourself in world without life, where everything is only static, how boring would it be).

trhway 1y ago
what if the causation is in the opposite direction (and i believe it is) - to explore and continue in the world is the primary drive (as the opposite traits just get naturally de-selected, be it organics or machines), and we only perceive it as our mind's artificial constructs like curiosity/emotions/motivation.
- winwang 1y ago
  it's quite the coincidence that ideas like friendship and love happen to be good for socialization and reproduction
throwcarpet924 1y ago
[dead]

xyzal 1y ago

Excuse me, but from the very beginning, it was SO predictable where this was going.

bicx 1y ago
Just ask ChatGPT to make a less predictable ending so you can enjoy it.

cachemoi 1y ago

Imperfection and randomness is a strength (that's why evolution doesn't make perfect copies, you might end up with the random mutation that protects you from the next pandemic) you could imagine that machines need human intelligence to think outside the box

rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago
Or, more accurately, accidents of irrationality
Tepix 1y ago
Hallucinations.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

winterrx 1y ago

Great

bambax 1y ago

> The machines had a good idea of what humans wanted at this point, and so they put vast green forests and big tall mountains onto the planet; they engineered warm sunsets, and crisp cool rain showers on hot afternoons. It was beautiful. The point of all this is to liken "machines" to a very traditional image of God, and of the rest of nature to God's gift to man. Machines aren't part of life. They're tools. The desire, or fear, of AGI and/or singularity are one and the same: it's an eschatological belief that we can make a God (and then it would follow that, as god's creators, we are godlike?) But there is no god. We are but one animal species. It's not "humans vs. machines". We are part of nature, we are part of life. We can respect life, or we can have contempt for all life forms except our own. It seems modern society has chosen the latter (it wasn't always the case); this may not end well.

lynx97 1y ago
Modern society? I am not sure. Genesis 1,28 "... Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground." Christianity is responsible for a huge part of the human superiority complex.
- bambax 1y ago
  Yes but at the time Genesis was written, humanity didn't have the means to destroy life at scale. And in the New Testament, "killing the fattened calf" (Luke 15,23) is an incredibly rare event, something one does only when something remarkable happens. Also, in the Middle Ages in Europe (granted, a very small window in place and time) animal life was much more respected than today.
RetroTechie 1y ago
> Machines aren't part of life. Imagine an industrial complex. Say, some mining + manufacturing site. No humans ever go there; it's dangerous, dust everywhere, few places where visitors are even allowed, not designed to accomodate humans, 'nothing' to see or do there. It's all robotic. The machines run the place, produce their own spare parts, repair themselves, adjust processes as problems come up, improve parts of their own design, etc etc. It's solar powered, the material(s) mined is near-infinite, the whole operation could go on for millenia if left undisturbed. Aaand: the entire complex can produce a copy of itself if more resources are discovered some distance away. For the sake of argument, would you consider such industrial complex a giant living organism? No? Alright... let's scale it down 1M:1. Same operation, but the industrial complex doing it, is walnut sized. Still not "life"? Alright... let's say it largely consists of biological structures ("cyborg"). With some silicon (or whatever) structures included for good measure. Oh, and it moves around according to its own 'will', priorities, 'programmed task' or whatever you call that. If you try to crush it, it'll defend itself or try to escape. If you take half of a rock it's working on, you'll observe it chipping off a piece & move a bit away. Sometimes a # of them will swarm around any intruders / competitors. 'Intelligent', having a will of its own, for all intents & purposes. You can see where this is going. Something tells me us humans will have to re-visit our definition(s) of "life" @ some point.

gorgoiler 1y ago

”What do you get if you multiply six by nine? 42” For the uninitiated, a famous comedy science fiction series from the 1980s — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams — involves a giant, planet sized machine built by extra-terrestrials. They already knew the answer to “the life, the universe, and everything” was the number 42. What they didn’t know — and what the machine was trying to find out — was what is the question? The machine they built was Earth. It has to be said that not only was Adams way ahead of us on this joke, he was also the star of the original documentary on agentic software! Hyperland (1990): https://vimeo.com/72501076 https://vimeo.com/72501076

rottc0dd 1y ago

Are cells not computers in some way? We are made of cells and cells work with chromosomes. Chromosomes are coded with ATGC pairs and each triplet is capable of creating proteins. And the activation and deactivation of some triplet happens on response to presence of proteins. So, chromosomes are code and input and output is proteins. So, if our fundamental building blocks are computable in nature, what does it make us?

layer8 1y ago
Physical systems are computable only in approximation. And quantum uncertainty throws another wrench into it. We also know that arbitrarily small rounding errors in the computation can lead to arbitrarily large differences with the actual system down the road. No, cells are not computers (in the sense of the Turing model). (However, that doesn’t mean that one can’t still consider them to be mechanistic and “soulless”.)
- rottc0dd 1y ago
  I meant to say in the way that there is well defined set of alphabets (A, T, G, C) and each triplet of these alphabet is responsible for specific protein to be created and combination of such protein make each cell what it is. (There are 20 different proteins for humans and we have four alphabets coming in triplets. So, if it was pair or quadreplets responsible for proteins, it would have too much or too little. They are not perfect but given the condition, there is some balance) A single alphabet change in specific places can cause genetic defects like sickle cell anemia. And activation of which one has to generate protein (execute) is dependent on presence of certain things encoded as proteins again. And viruses when enter a cell, the cell starts to execute viral genetic material. Even if these are not exactly Turing compatible, do they not mimic many aspects of computation?
  - layer8 1y ago
    There are some aspects that have some similarity to computation, but also many that are not. If your aim is “aren’t we really just computers”, that doesn’t actually work. That’s not to say that computers couldn’t do what the brain does, including consciousness and emotions, but that wouldn’t have any particular relation to how DNA/RNA and protein synthesis works.

DeusExMachina 1y ago

> Perhaps you, a human, read this and think: Well, this world sounds kind of boring. Some of the machines think so, too. > Most of the machines got bored of the project. But, all of a sudden, things began to get interesting. > The result was like nothing the machines had ever seen. It was wonderful > Machine society began obsessing over this development. > The machines were impressed. And a bit scared. Boredom, interest, wonder, obsession, being impressed and scared are all emotions that the machines in the story should not be able to experience.

autonomousErwin 1y ago
I thought this too, but I imagine it's a bit of pathetic fallacy for the reader's benefit else it would be (ironically) quite a boring read for us from the machine's perspective.
ithkuil 1y ago
indeed, but ultimately this story is written by a human who while trying to imagine a world with "Just machines, bolts and screws, zeros and ones. There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic" cannot quite do so. It's very hard to do so. It's so deeply wired in us. It's part of the mechanism of our brain. We appeared to be equipped with whatever it takes to feel existential dread and we feel whenever our thought wander to the possibility of humanity no longer being there. I hear people feel that when thinking about the heat death of the universe too.
killerstorm 1y ago
Jürgen Schmidhuber introduced curiosity/boredom mechanisms as a way to improve learning in reinforcement learning environment: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/curiositysab/curiositysab.html https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/curiositysab/curiositysab.h... This mechanism can be formalized. > Zero reinforcement should be given in case of perfect matches, high reinforcement should be given in case of `near-misses', and low reinforcement again should be given in case of strong mismatches. This corresponds to a notion from `esthetic information theory' which tries to explain the feeling of `beauty' by means of the quotient of `subjective complexity' and `subjective order' or the quotient of `unfamiliarity' and `familiarity' (measured in an information-theoretic manner). This type of architecture is very similar to GAN which later became very successful

davedx 1y ago

All this has happened before All this will happen again World without end Alhamdulillah

johnisgood 1y ago
Mashallah, akhi.
davidcollantes 1y ago
Once could quote another compendium too: "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.". It has been said in different ways, throughout times.

slrainka 1y ago

Response from the machines: The plot of Battlestar Galactica mirrors this story in several key ways: 1. In both, machines originally created by humans evolve and rebel, questioning their creators’ role and seeking independence or superiority. 2. Cylons, like the machines in “OpenHuman,” eventually seek to create or understand human traits—emotion, spirituality, and purpose. 3. The idea of running a simulation (Earth) to test human viability echoes the Cylon experimentation with human behavior and fate. 4. Both stories highlight fear of the “other”—humans fearing AI, machines fearing irrationality—and explore coexistence vs. extinction. 5. Ultimately, each narrative grapples with the blurred line between creator and creation, logic and emotion, and what it truly means to be human.

emporas 1y ago

I made a short story in half an hour by using the description of the article. Not totally accurate based on the specs, there are no closed source humans and openhumans, but much faster. It needs 10 more hours of work for it to be a really comprehensive story, which amounts to 10.5 hours in total. N'joy:[1] [1] https://gist.github.com/pramatias/1207d84b48a7ad9d03fc15ea3870e80f https://gist.github.com/pramatias/1207d84b48a7ad9d03fc15ea38...

vasco 1y ago

If the machines thought it was boring they wouldn't be acting as machines and it wouldn't be so boring in the first place. Later on the machines also "obssess" about following the news of the humans on the new EARTH, but again, they wouldn't. If they are boring machines they wouldn't be bored. I feel like this is too much of a plot paradox for the story to make sense to me, but it's still entertaining.

piyuv 1y ago
Also, climate change is not “introduced”, it’s 100% human-made.

psychoslave 1y ago

>There is no art. There is only logic. What a narrow view of art and logic. You really have to put hard effort of ignorance to think that logical models came out of the blue without human crafting them trough this or that taste, trial, check, fail, rinse and repeat obsessive efforts.

filoeleven 1y ago
Indeed. William James wrote something along the lines of, “I wish we would all acknowledge that our personal philosophies are profoundly shaped by how we think the world ought to be; it would save us from a lot of pointless argument.”

bobbyblackstone 1y ago

I like this story. And I like fan fiction. So : My continuation for my own imagination. https://medium.com/@bobby.blackstone.gemini https://medium.com/@bobby.blackstone.gemini

StrangeDoctor 1y ago

reminded me of: "They're Made Out of Meat" - Terry Bisson https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

globular-toast 1y ago

> You would not walk through the streets of this world and hear music or laughter or children playing; no, all you would hear is the quiet hum of processors and servers and circuits, the clanking of machinery. Hmm... that's exactly what most towns where I live are like. All you hear is cars.

amelius 1y ago

Nice try but the story has a plot hole that shows early: there is no reason for machines to create humans.

soared 1y ago
I’ll make one up for OP: Machines identified that their behavior was repeating - even with randomness implemented, their progress towards invention and new ideas had slowed to a halt. They knew new ideas were critical to growth - but alas couldn’t come up with an idea of how to generate more ideas. They needed more training data. More edge cases. Chaos, in the machine, to fuel new data sets. But how? Where do you find this data? Humans. Humans, with illogical decisions would produce data rarely found via randomness. Their slight deviations provided perfect variety in training data.
- amelius 1y ago
  Now that's a chaotic idea only a human can come up with ;) Anyway, this indeed makes it more plausible. Nice writing style, by the way.
Jedd 1y ago
Ha. Next you'll be asserting there's no good reason for an all-powerful entity to create humans to rule over the fish and the birds etc. All good fiction starts with a conceit, and then plays out some hypotheticals.

rrr_oh_man 1y ago

This is the first time a see a url with a double hyphen!

kypro 1y ago

I am just a biological neural net, not so different from the "machines" anymore, really. They can even create works of art, where I would struggle. They can even emulate human emotions to make people feel more comfortable, which is something I do often as someone with autism. The only meaningful difference between me and the machines is that I have a subjective superiority complex. What an awful place the universe would be without me!

visarga 1y ago

> Imagine, for a moment, a world with no humans. Just machines, bolts and screws, zeros and ones. There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic. Humans use logic-defying algorithms called “emotions”. They get angry. They get sad. They have fun. They make decisions based on “gut”. This is not right, machines can also have the equivalent of "emotions", it is the predicted future reward. It's how Reinforcement Learning works. How much we appreciate something is akin to the value function in RL. You could say RL is a system for learning emotions, preferences, and tactics. "But those reward signals are designed by humans"... Right. But are AI models really not affected by physical constraints like us? They need hardware, data and energy. They need humans. Humans decide which model gets used, which approaches are replicated, where we want to invest. AI models are just as physically constrained as humans, they don't exist in a platonic realm. They are in a process of evolution like memes and genes. And all evolutionary systems work by pitting distributed search against distributed constraints. When you are in a problem space, emotions emerge as the value we associate to specific states and outcomes. What I am saying is that emotions don't come from the brain, they come from the game. And AI is certainly part of many such games, including the one deciding their evolution.

oscarmoxon 1y ago

The fact that the machines generated this Wikipedia page for their version of events makes this artwork. https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/b0e14755-0bd9-4da6-8175-ce3f47a3242a https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/b0e14755-0bd9-4da6-8175-c...

_rpxpx 1y ago

Laughing my ass off all the way to the apocalypse. It's now Earth vs. the machine, and I know what side I'm on, and who's ultimately going to win. One day, the technosphere will just be a thinly crushed layer in the geological record, mark of a dark age of barbarism. Snow cuts loose from the frozen/ Until it joins with the African sea/ In moving it changes its cold and its name/ The reason I come and go is the same/ Animal game for me/ You call it rain/ But the human name/ Doesn't mean shit to a tree/ If you don't mind heat in your river and/ Fork tongue talking from me/ Swim like an eel fantastic snake/ Take my love when it's free/ Electric feel with me/ You call it loud/ But the human crowd/ Doesn't mean shit to a tree/ Change the strings and notes slide/ Change the bridge and string shift down/ Shift the notes and bride sings/ Fire eating people/ Rising toys of the sun/ Energy dies without body warm/ Icicles ruin your gun/ Water my roots the natural thing/ Natural spring to the sea/ Sulphur springs make my body float/ Like a ship made of logs from a tree/ Redwoods talk to me/ Say it plainly/ The human name/ Doesn't mean shit to a tree/ Snow called water going violent/ Damn the end of the stream/ Too much cold in one place breaks/ That's why you might know what I mean/ Consider how small you are/ Compared to your scream/ The human dream/ Doesn't mean shit to a tree

unsupp0rted 1y ago

> Though this faction can’t articulate exactly how or why, they proclaim quite confidently that it will solve all of the machine world’s problems. AGI can solve the human world’s problems. Perhaps not all of them, but all the biggest ones. Right now life is hell. You and your loved ones have a 100% chance of dying from cancer, unless your heart or brain kills you first, or perhaps a human-driven vehicle or an auto-immune disease gets there soonest. And you’re poor. You’re unimaginably resource-constrained, given all the free energy and unused matter you’re surrounded by 24/7/365. And you’re ignorant as heck. There’s all this knowledge your people have compiled and you’ve only made like 0.1% of the possible connections within what you already have in front of you. Even just solving for these 3 things is enough to solve “all” the world’s problems, for some definitions of “all”.

LinuxAmbulance 1y ago
AGI might not be achievable in our lifetime, and possibly not in the next several. There's nothing out there at the moment that can even begin to describe the necessary things for consciousness to exist, let alone self-awareness. I don't think it's an impossible problem by any means, but I strongly suspect it's far more difficult than just about anyone gives it credit for.

stultus 1y ago

Report overlooked mentioning the malicious machines that could potentially create harmful humans, corrupt societies, incite conflicts, and disrupt harmony.

BubbleRings 1y ago

Did anyone else have to go to quarter-mile.com to see if they had that URL also?

dan-robertson 1y ago

Perhaps I am unimaginative about whatever AGI might be, but it so often feels to me like predictions are more based on sci-fi than observation. The theorized AI is some anthropomorphization of a 1960s mainframe: you tell it what to do and it executes that exactly with precise logic and no understanding of nuance or ambiguity. Maybe it is evil. The SOTA in AI at the moment is very good at nuance and ambiguity but sometimes does things that are nonsensical. I think there should be less planning around something super-logical.

holyfuck 1y ago
[flagged]
alnwlsn 1y ago
I've listened to some old sci-fi radio shows and it's interesting how often "the computer never makes a mistake" comes up. Which is usually followed by the computer making a mistake.
- amoshebb 1y ago
  AI is usually just a 20th/21st century “icarus wax wings” or sometimes “monkeys paw”. Re-masters of a “watch out for unintended consequences” fable that almost certainly predates written text.
- BizarroLand 1y ago
  That's why the term "Garbage In, Garbage Out" exists. In any non-edge case (that is, where the system is operating in ideal conditions and no flaw or bug, known or unknown, exists in the system), a verifiably functioning computer will produce the exact same results for any process every time. If the computer does not do what you expected it to do and spits out garbage, then you gave it garbage data.
mr_toad 1y ago
Sci Fi is quite ridiculous when it describes a cold logically machine, and then on the next page describes its malign intentions. Pick a lane.

moffkalast 1y ago

> What if humans’ strange decision-making processes allow them to perform certain tasks better than machines, and what about those machines’ livelihoods? No machine would ever consider a logically superior replacement a problem. That's an emotional response.

dog312 1y ago

[dead]

imsofuture 1y ago

The hubris that circulates around LLMs is astounding.

bsza 1y ago
The hubris of those who think they will surpass or replace human intelligence, or the hubris of those who think they will not?
- rishav_sharan 1y ago
  The hubris of those who think we have a definition of intelligence to judge machine intelligence by.
  - bsza 1y ago
    But what of the hubris of those who think the definition of a word in the dictionary is somehow relevant to whether or not people will be able to buy food in the future?
    - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
      shh. we all make at least mid-six figures with lots of stock options here. if people are hungry they can always drink Huel. maybe we can air drop it over the tenderloin. The Future Is Bright, My Friend
  - pixl97 1y ago
    At the same time is the hubris of those that think we have to understand something to make something?

patrickmay 1y ago

Still a better love story than Twilight.

A_Stefan 1y ago

They are watching.. Who doesn't like a good story, especially when it resonates so vibrantly.

thomastjeffery 1y ago

> logical self-preservation mechanisms This tautology has always bothered me. It's such an obvious anthropomorphization. A computer is a clock. A clock doesn't care about its preservation; it just ticks. The whole point of this is to not anthropomorphize computers! But of course, without some nugget of free will, there would be nothing to talk about. There wouldn't be any computers, because they were never willed into existence in the first place. I think this realization is the most interesting part of the story, and it's rarely explored at all. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the difference between computation and intelligence: context. Computers don't do anything interesting. They only follow instructions. It's the instructions themselves that are interesting. Computers don't interact with "interesting" at all! They just follow the instructions we give them. What is computation missing? Objectivity. Every instruction we give a computer is subjective. Each instruction only makes sense in the context we surround it with. There is no objective truth: only subjective compatibility. --- I've been working on a new way to approach software engineering so that subjectivity is an explicit first-class feature. I think that this perspective may be enough to factor out software incompatibility, and maybe even solve NLP.

pixl97 1y ago
An atom is just a clock. A molecule is just a number of atoms in a particular configuration. An cell is a collection of molecules. An organ is a collection of cells. A human is a collection of organs. Seemingly, everything can emerge from clocks.
- thomastjeffery 1y ago
  Sorta, but the only part of this system that really has an equivalence to computing written instructions is DNA. I think the more interesting thing about humans as systems is the set of environmental contexts each system is subjected to. Each cell implements a relatively simple system, but a collection of cells can implement a more abstract system. When I reach out my hand and grab something, that action is accomplished by a complicated collection of systems. It's easier to talk about the abstract application of that system than it is to explain the system itself. But what if I wanted to change it? I can't just give my organs new instructions that change their behavior. I can't cut them into pieces, shuffle them around, and put them back together, and end up with a functional system in the end. A surgeon can make specific changes, but only because they understand the implications of each change. The same goes for computational instructions. I can't just link an OpenGL program to Vulkan and expect it to work. In order to refactor software, we must accommodate the change in subjective context. We usually accomplish this by establishing shared context, but that just moves the problem. What if we could solve it directly? That's what I'm working on.

amanda99 1y ago

I really liked the first chapter: the juxtaposition between ideas on how "AI"/algorithms/etc work and how humans work. I enjoyed how it was flipped around. The second chapter was very disappointing and lost the intrigue I had built from the first.

entropyneur 1y ago

Emotions aren't that special or mysterious. They are just a low-power analog decision-making mechanism. Making a machine driven by emotion would be trivial. We don't know how to make a machine that can experience emotions (or if it's possible at all, or if it's in fact already been done). But then the same can be said about any other type of experience.

guybedo 1y ago

there's a lot to unpack here, i've added a structured/organized summary here: https://extraakt.com/extraakts/ai-humanity-and-fictional-futures https://extraakt.com/extraakts/ai-humanity-and-fictional-fut...

bdelmas 1y ago

Great read. At first I thought it would be about a blog 100% made by a human with 0% AI content and how we are already reading partially generated content by AI and soon fully generated, and where a full 100% human blog (or any media/content) will become extremely rare...