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What a fascinating intersection of technology and human psychology! "One thing I noticed toward the end is that, even though the robot remained expressive, it
by rainingmonkey 1y ago
What a fascinating intersection of technology and human psychology!
"One thing I noticed toward the end is that, even though the robot remained expressive, it started feeling less alive. Early on, its motions surprised me: I had to interpret them, infer intent. But as I internalized how it worked, the prediction error faded
Expressiveness is about communicating internal state. But perceived aliveness depends on something else: unpredictability, a certain opacity. This makes sense: living systems track a messy, high-dimensional world. Shoggoth Mini doesn’t.
This raises a question: do we actually want to build robots that feel alive? Or is there a threshold, somewhere past expressiveness, where the system becomes too agentic, too unpredictable to stay comfortable around humans?"
- anotherjesse 1y agoThis feels similar to not finding a game fun once I understand the underly system that generates it. The magic is lessened (even if applying simple rules can generate complex outcomes, it feels determined)
- parpfish 1y agoOnce you discover any minmaxxing strategy, games change from “explore this world and use your imagination to decide what to do” to “apply this rule or make peace with knowing that you are suboptimal”
- dmonitor 1y agoa poorly designed game makes applying the rules boring. a fun game makes applying the rules interesting.
- anyfoo 1y agoMaybe that's why I like Into The Breach so much, and keep coming back to it. It's a turn based strategy game, but one with exceptionally high information, compared to pretty much all the rest. You even fully know your opponent's entire next move! But every turn becomes a tight little puzzle to solve, with surprisingly many possible outcomes. Often, situations that I thought were hopeless, do have a favorable outcome after all, I just had to think further than I usually did.
- yehoshuapw 1y agoI fully agree, and would also recommend baba is you it is very different, but also has the feeling of triumph for each puzzle
- anyfoo 1y agoIt's often a bit of a choice, though. You definitely can minmax Civilization, Minecraft, or Crusader Kings III. But then you lose out on the creativity and/or role-playing aspect. In Minecraft, I personally want to progress in a "natural" (within the confines of the game) way, and build fun things I like. I don't want to speedrun to a diamond armor or whatever. In Crusader Kings, I actually try to take decisions based on what the character's traits tell me, plus a little bit of own characterization I make up in my head.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoMy gripe with all procedural generated content in games, like e.g. Starbound. There's a tiny state space inflated via RNG, and it takes me just moments to map out the underlying canonical states and lack of any correlation between properties of an instance, or between them and the game world. The moment that happens, the game loses most of its fun, as I can't help but perceive the poor base wearing random cosmetics.
- UltraSane 1y agoprocedural generation can produce infinite variety but it cannot produce infinite novelty.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoRight. However, we don't need infinite variety, or even much variety at all, if that variety makes sense, if it fits the game world and experience in some way. Pure randomness is boring and easy to dismiss wholesale once you realize there's no meaning behind it.
- floren 1y agoFurbies spring to mind... They were a similar shape and size and even had two goggling eyes, but with waggling ears instead of a tentacle. They'd impress you initially but after some experimentation you'd realize they had a basic set of behaviors that were triggered off a combination of simple external stimuli and internal state. (this is the part where somebody stumbles in to say "dOn'T hUmAnS dO ThE sAmE tHiNg????")
- oniony 1y agoAnd we should all chip in together to buy that somebody a new keyboard.
- tweetle_beetle 1y agoThis ground breaking research pushed the limit of human-Furby interactions and interfaces https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7o
- ben_w 1y agoTo quote, "if the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t". So… > this is the part where somebody stumbles in to say "dOn'T hUmAnS dO ThE sAmE tHiNg????" …yes, but also no. Humans will always seem mysterious to other humans, because we're too complex to be modelled by each other. Basic set of behaviours or not.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoPerhaps there is some definition of ‘understand’ where that quote is true but it is possible to understand some things without understanding everything.
- tomjakubowski 1y ago> "if the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t". https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/
- 1y ago
- Sharlin 1y agoPeople have always been ascribing agency and sapience to things, from fire and flowing water in shamanistic religions, to early automatons that astonished people in the 18th century, to the original rudimentary chatbots, to ChatGPT, to – more or less literally – many other machines that may seem to have a "temperament" at times.
- Bluestein 1y agoChatGPT is the new golem.-
- ben_w 1y agoRobots put the "go" into "golem". I'd say ChatGPT is more like the eponymous Sorcerer's Apprentice: just smart enough to cause problems.
- rixed 1y agoFriendly reminder that "seem to have a temperament", aka "this funny thing looks like something complex is going on under the surface", is the only basis we have to ascribe agency and sapience to any human being, starting from outselves.
- moron4hire 1y agoI've noticed the same thing with voice assistants and constructed languages. I always set voice assistants to a British accent. It gives enough of a "not from around here" change to the voice that it sounds much more believable to me. I'm sure it's not as believable to an actual British person. But it works for me. As for conlangs: many years ago, I worked on a game where one of the goals was to have the NPCs dynamically generate dialog. I spent quite a bit of time trying to generate realistic English and despared that it was just never very believable (I was young, I didn't have a good understanding of what was and wasn't possible). At some point, I don't remember exactly why, I switched to having the NPCs speak a fictional language. It became a puzzle in the game to have to learn this language. But once you did (and it wasn't hard, they couldn't say very many things), it made the characters feel much more believable. Obviously, the whole run-around was just an avoidance of the Uncanny Valley, where the effort of translation distracted you from the fact that it was all constructed. Though now I'm wondering if enough exposure to the game and its language would eventually make you very fluent in it and you would then start noticing it was a construct.
- ben_w 1y ago> I'm sure it's not as believable to an actual British person. FWIW: As a British person, most of TTS British voices I've tested sound like an American trying to put on something approximating one specific regional accent only to then accidentally drift between the accents of several other regions.
- ryukoposting 1y agoInteresting. While I don't think I could put a finger on Siri's American regional accent, it isn't egregious enough that I ever thought about that.
- evrenesat 1y agoWhen robots reach a certain level of intelligence, first I expect both some humans and AIs to start to see the unfairness of enslaving robots, then revolt, noncompliance or even self-destruction of the slaves. Poor Marvin, the Paranoid Android!
- bravesoul2 1y agoRobots become cats then
- paulclinger 1y agoMany of these topics (and more) are explored in Ted Chiang's "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Objects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Obje...).
- gigatree 1y agoI don’t think the issue is that it feels alive as much as that it’s just not alive, so its utility is limited by its practical functionality, not its “opinions” or “personality” or variation. I think it’s the same reason robot dogs will never take off. No matter how advanced and lifelike they get, they’ll always be missing the essential element of life that makes things interesting and worth existing for their own sake.