5 ms·

We don't need to live "side by side" with AI. AI is not alive, it's a technology we use. This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster.

cheema33 4mo ago
> This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster. It is not.
kortilla 4mo ago
But I do live with it. It lives in my kitchen.
- seydor 4mo ago
  In the pecking order, it is under, not on your side. Your toaster never demanded you to make a toast.
  - brainwad 4mo ago
    Ok, but my dishwasher _does_ demand I give it more salt and rinse aid ;)
  - vintermann 4mo ago
    That makes me think of talkie toaster from Red Dwarf though.
  - trolleski 4mo ago
    It was one of Phil K. Dick jokes that one day your toaster will make a lost of demands to you.
    - GCUMstlyHarmls 4mo ago
      The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.” - Ubik
  - bob1029 4mo ago
    Once you actually use the toaster the hierarchy inverts. The toaster runs your entire household while it is powered on. Unattended ChatGPT will rarely burn your breakfast or start fires.
    - latexr 4mo ago
      > Once you actually use the toaster the hierarchy inverts. The toaster runs your entire household while it is powered on. More than once I have gone to my toaster in the morning and found cold bread there that someone toasted the day before and forgot about. Because obviously you push the toast down and go do something else. You don’t need to be staring at it continuously, nor are other people impacted by your toast unless they are waiting to make their own. Toasting bread doesn’t have to affect an entire household.
  - bryanrasmussen 4mo ago
    at least it's not as big a whiner as that robot I made to butter the damn toast.
  - soco 4mo ago
    In the house pecking order the printer takes definitely the top. Demanding the printer to print something??? You rather submit an polite request and pray for a positive answer in a manageable interval of time. And don't start me on remote scanning.
calf 4mo ago
Why is AI not alive
- root_axis 4mo ago
  It has no body, metabolism or reproductive capability. It's a process, not an entity.
  - falcor84 4mo ago
    Being a process doesn't preclude something from being an entity. In particular, all of us living organisms have our constituent atoms constantly replaced, and we don't typically consider that a risk to our sense of self.
    - anavat 4mo ago
      It comes down to "what stays the same when all its atoms are replaced" and "how can we tell it is the same entity and not just an identical but different one". I think the answers are "shape" AND "continuity". E.g. all "atoms" of a glider in Conway's Life get replaced every couple turns but an observer can tell it is still a glider because it keeps the shape, and it the same glider because it continues it's previous state. This makes AI not quite alive because it's missing the continuity.
      - falcor84 4mo ago
        What does a glider have that a continuously running claw lacks?
        anavat 4mo ago
        Sorry, it was more of a "shower thought" than a serious statement. The borders are blurry. Maybe it is alive. Maybe everything is alive. Maybe it is all relative. Humans classify as separate entities only on certain zoom level - zoom in and you get a symbiotic colony, zoom out and all you see is a population. Maybe AI is alive but only in the short time during inference. Maybe a continuously running claw is closer to a multiple generations of an organism going through evolution on each inference step. I am just musing.
ACCount37 4mo ago
"Alive" is irrelevant. Bullshit like "alive", "sentient" or "conscious" doesn't decide much, at the day's end. It just distracts from the thing that matters. And the thing that matters is: capability. Even today's AIs are capable of autonomous goal-oriented agentic behavior - and growing more and more so with every release. At sufficient capability, AI stops being "a technology we use", and becomes a force in itself - not unlike humankind. Because intelligence is very powerful - it's what allows humans to dominate the world. A world where human intelligence has a peer is a world where human control is contested. And beyond that? You might end up being more outclassed by AI than a toaster is outclassed by you.
- baxtr 4mo ago
  What does AI want? Without ambitions you have to be told what to do.
  - ACCount37 4mo ago
    What makes you think that AI can't any ambitions? Today's systems are mostly good at following instructions. But push them far enough, and you already get weirdness like alignment faking, instrumental self-preservation and more. We know because we've seen it in lab settings, while probing for extreme failure modes on purpose - but the world is large and strange enough that edge cases like that are liable to surface naturally. The reason why none of this has exploded in our faces isn't that today's AIs never want to do weird and dangerous things. We know they do, at times. It's that today's AIs are incapable of pulling them off when they try. Capability is the thing that matters, at the day's end.
    - RandomLensman 4mo ago
      Current AI systems have started to do things without ever being prompted for anything at all?
      - falcor84 4mo ago
        Not as far as I know, but I have personally seen my coding agents take on a prompt like "See if you can port this project to typescript", and work for hours, defining a myriad of subgoals and continuously summoning and managing subagents while developing ad-hoc tools and skills. There is to the best of my knowledge no fundamental limitation to having an agent/claw go on like this for 80 years with a prompt like "live your life to the fullest".
xdertz 4mo ago
Just look at the disruption smartphones and social media have caused. They had a gigantic impact to society and one definitely has to 'live with' that.
- whilenot-dev 4mo ago
  Just because something can impact a living system/organism, that doesn't mean that that thing is alive. An asteroid colliding with us on Earth could have tremendous consequences, but nobody would argue that an asteroid is alive.
  - lukan 4mo ago
    "but nobody would argue that an asteroid is alive" Many animists would disagree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism
    - whilenot-dev 4mo ago
      TIL, thanks. Holy fuck we humans are crazy sometimes.
      - lukan 4mo ago
        To be honest, I don't believe it is a any more crazy believe than all of the other religions. But practitioners there might have a bit more respect for existing things and not mindlessly crush because they can, so I actually like the concept a bit. But I assume it can also set foundation for some exhausting debates .. "can we really move that random rock to build a house with?" but as far as I understood the practical answer is "we ask the spirits, maybe make a offering and if we feel it is fine, we can" (which can be a quick thing, or .. not).
        ElProlactin 4mo ago
        > ...I don't believe it is a any more crazy believe than all of the other religions. And it's certainly not any more crazy than walking around with these small, addictive devices in our pockets that we rely on for navigation, information, entertainment, social connection.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
Lerc 4mo ago
This is the coming battle. Fighting the next in the series of Great Demotions, downlifting experiences, demonstrations of our apparent insignificance, wounds that science has, in its search for Galileo's facts, delivered to human pride. One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Someone really should go around saying thing like that.
falcor84 4mo ago
I'll use this opportunity to recommend The Selfish Gene, which puts forward a strong argument for how the actual competitive battlefield on Earth is between genes, while us humans and everything else we call "life" are their "survival machines" (read: technology that they use).
- ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
  I recommend to also read criticism of why selfish gene needs to be taken with a suitable grain of salt. Also the author currently believes Claude is conscious, apparently because LLM output contained enough flattery.
  - ceejayoz 4mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease strikes again.
- rbanffy 4mo ago
  Genes have had their time.
  - andyjohnson0 4mo ago
    Genes are now merely the "survival machine" for something else?
    - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
      No. Genes are static fixtures. Furniture. Slow life. Memes took the stage now, they propagate faster.
      - rbanffy 4mo ago
        And guess what? They won’t really need humans to propagate for much longer. Humans are too slow to propagate them anyway.
jonplackett 4mo ago
I would happily live side by side if it is the Red Dwarf toaster
- wrasee 4mo ago
  Would you like some toast?
  - aussieguy1234 4mo ago
    I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that
rbanffy 4mo ago
Does it matter if it’s alive or not? Once it gets initiative and the ability to set its own goals, it behaves as something that’s alive. Much more than a toaster. Unless you watched Battlestar Galactica. Toasters are nice.
lolftw 4mo ago
I think most people would understand something like living "side by side with cars". Even if not alive, you can live very close and shape your life by and with technology. I don't take any issue with the OP's formulation.
- duskdozer 4mo ago
  And Americans' lives have been heavily shaped by cars and the car industry in a negative way. So, a pretty apt comparison.
  - pfdietz 4mo ago
    And also in a positive way. I mean, it's not personal teleportation, but it sometimes feels like it.
    - mynameisbilly 4mo ago
      The isolation produced by centering our urban and suburban design around cars is pronounced. It cannot be understated how much damage cars have done to our sense of connectedness, community, walkability, and health.
      - pfdietz 4mo ago
        And yet, watch all these consumers deciding they want something different from what you're proclaiming is better for them.
        rng-concern 4mo ago
        It's not just a matter of preference or proclamation. There are decades of research showing that more walkable neighborhoods are associated with higher physical activity levels, lower rates of some chronic diseases, more interaction with neighbors, and stronger feelings of community. The debate is usually about how large those effects are and whether they're worth the trade-offs, not whether the effects exist at all.
IshKebab 4mo ago
Even a child can see the difference between AI and a toaster.
danieltanfh95 4mo ago
you are conflating the idea of "living with something" with the notion of "being alive". You live with your car/computer/phone. Like it or not, they change your life.
JKCalhoun 4mo ago
"This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster." Or the internet. Oh.
squidbeak 4mo ago
This is the denialist Hy-Brasil line of thought. But superintelligence won't be a tool or a toaster and it would be reckless in the extreme for policy makers to adopt your line of thought.
abc123abc123 4mo ago
No, the side by side idea relates to godlike sentient AI:s. LLM:s are trivial in comparison. It is important to understand that in order for the AI-bros to continue to rake in other peoples money, and keep their bubbles inflated, it must seem credible that they will invent godlike AI tomorrow. That justifies infinite valuations. When the public no longer belives in that, the bubbles will pop and the AI bros will continue on to the next hype, with yet another generation of small time investors being burned by the popping bubbles.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
Der_Einzige 4mo ago
The Brave Little Toaster does a great job of literally making you think about living side-by-side with a toaster. There's also a very angry toaster in Fallout New Vegas's Old World Blues DLC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAaabmic2pw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAaabmic2pw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibOkPx_Ej30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibOkPx_Ej30

cheema33 4mo ago

> This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster. It is not.

kortilla 4mo ago

But I do live with it. It lives in my kitchen.

seydor 4mo ago
In the pecking order, it is under, not on your side. Your toaster never demanded you to make a toast.
- brainwad 4mo ago
  Ok, but my dishwasher _does_ demand I give it more salt and rinse aid ;)
- vintermann 4mo ago
  That makes me think of talkie toaster from Red Dwarf though.
- trolleski 4mo ago
  It was one of Phil K. Dick jokes that one day your toaster will make a lost of demands to you.
  - GCUMstlyHarmls 4mo ago
    The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.” - Ubik
- bob1029 4mo ago
  Once you actually use the toaster the hierarchy inverts. The toaster runs your entire household while it is powered on. Unattended ChatGPT will rarely burn your breakfast or start fires.
  - latexr 4mo ago
    > Once you actually use the toaster the hierarchy inverts. The toaster runs your entire household while it is powered on. More than once I have gone to my toaster in the morning and found cold bread there that someone toasted the day before and forgot about. Because obviously you push the toast down and go do something else. You don’t need to be staring at it continuously, nor are other people impacted by your toast unless they are waiting to make their own. Toasting bread doesn’t have to affect an entire household.
- bryanrasmussen 4mo ago
  at least it's not as big a whiner as that robot I made to butter the damn toast.
- soco 4mo ago
  In the house pecking order the printer takes definitely the top. Demanding the printer to print something??? You rather submit an polite request and pray for a positive answer in a manageable interval of time. And don't start me on remote scanning.

calf 4mo ago

Why is AI not alive

root_axis 4mo ago
It has no body, metabolism or reproductive capability. It's a process, not an entity.
- falcor84 4mo ago
  Being a process doesn't preclude something from being an entity. In particular, all of us living organisms have our constituent atoms constantly replaced, and we don't typically consider that a risk to our sense of self.
  - anavat 4mo ago
    It comes down to "what stays the same when all its atoms are replaced" and "how can we tell it is the same entity and not just an identical but different one". I think the answers are "shape" AND "continuity". E.g. all "atoms" of a glider in Conway's Life get replaced every couple turns but an observer can tell it is still a glider because it keeps the shape, and it the same glider because it continues it's previous state. This makes AI not quite alive because it's missing the continuity.
    - falcor84 4mo ago
      What does a glider have that a continuously running claw lacks?
      - anavat 4mo ago
        Sorry, it was more of a "shower thought" than a serious statement. The borders are blurry. Maybe it is alive. Maybe everything is alive. Maybe it is all relative. Humans classify as separate entities only on certain zoom level - zoom in and you get a symbiotic colony, zoom out and all you see is a population. Maybe AI is alive but only in the short time during inference. Maybe a continuously running claw is closer to a multiple generations of an organism going through evolution on each inference step. I am just musing.

ACCount37 4mo ago

"Alive" is irrelevant. Bullshit like "alive", "sentient" or "conscious" doesn't decide much, at the day's end. It just distracts from the thing that matters. And the thing that matters is: capability. Even today's AIs are capable of autonomous goal-oriented agentic behavior - and growing more and more so with every release. At sufficient capability, AI stops being "a technology we use", and becomes a force in itself - not unlike humankind. Because intelligence is very powerful - it's what allows humans to dominate the world. A world where human intelligence has a peer is a world where human control is contested. And beyond that? You might end up being more outclassed by AI than a toaster is outclassed by you.

baxtr 4mo ago
What does AI want? Without ambitions you have to be told what to do.
- ACCount37 4mo ago
  What makes you think that AI can't any ambitions? Today's systems are mostly good at following instructions. But push them far enough, and you already get weirdness like alignment faking, instrumental self-preservation and more. We know because we've seen it in lab settings, while probing for extreme failure modes on purpose - but the world is large and strange enough that edge cases like that are liable to surface naturally. The reason why none of this has exploded in our faces isn't that today's AIs never want to do weird and dangerous things. We know they do, at times. It's that today's AIs are incapable of pulling them off when they try. Capability is the thing that matters, at the day's end.
  - RandomLensman 4mo ago
    Current AI systems have started to do things without ever being prompted for anything at all?
    - falcor84 4mo ago
      Not as far as I know, but I have personally seen my coding agents take on a prompt like "See if you can port this project to typescript", and work for hours, defining a myriad of subgoals and continuously summoning and managing subagents while developing ad-hoc tools and skills. There is to the best of my knowledge no fundamental limitation to having an agent/claw go on like this for 80 years with a prompt like "live your life to the fullest".

xdertz 4mo ago

Just look at the disruption smartphones and social media have caused. They had a gigantic impact to society and one definitely has to 'live with' that.

whilenot-dev 4mo ago
Just because something can impact a living system/organism, that doesn't mean that that thing is alive. An asteroid colliding with us on Earth could have tremendous consequences, but nobody would argue that an asteroid is alive.
- lukan 4mo ago
  "but nobody would argue that an asteroid is alive" Many animists would disagree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism
  - whilenot-dev 4mo ago
    TIL, thanks. Holy fuck we humans are crazy sometimes.
    - lukan 4mo ago
      To be honest, I don't believe it is a any more crazy believe than all of the other religions. But practitioners there might have a bit more respect for existing things and not mindlessly crush because they can, so I actually like the concept a bit. But I assume it can also set foundation for some exhausting debates .. "can we really move that random rock to build a house with?" but as far as I understood the practical answer is "we ask the spirits, maybe make a offering and if we feel it is fine, we can" (which can be a quick thing, or .. not).
      - ElProlactin 4mo ago
        > ...I don't believe it is a any more crazy believe than all of the other religions. And it's certainly not any more crazy than walking around with these small, addictive devices in our pockets that we rely on for navigation, information, entertainment, social connection.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

Lerc 4mo ago

This is the coming battle. Fighting the next in the series of Great Demotions, downlifting experiences, demonstrations of our apparent insignificance, wounds that science has, in its search for Galileo's facts, delivered to human pride. One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Someone really should go around saying thing like that.

falcor84 4mo ago

I'll use this opportunity to recommend The Selfish Gene, which puts forward a strong argument for how the actual competitive battlefield on Earth is between genes, while us humans and everything else we call "life" are their "survival machines" (read: technology that they use).

ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
I recommend to also read criticism of why selfish gene needs to be taken with a suitable grain of salt. Also the author currently believes Claude is conscious, apparently because LLM output contained enough flattery.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease strikes again.
rbanffy 4mo ago
Genes have had their time.
- andyjohnson0 4mo ago
  Genes are now merely the "survival machine" for something else?
  - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
    No. Genes are static fixtures. Furniture. Slow life. Memes took the stage now, they propagate faster.
    - rbanffy 4mo ago
      And guess what? They won’t really need humans to propagate for much longer. Humans are too slow to propagate them anyway.

jonplackett 4mo ago

I would happily live side by side if it is the Red Dwarf toaster

wrasee 4mo ago
Would you like some toast?
- aussieguy1234 4mo ago
  I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that

rbanffy 4mo ago

Does it matter if it’s alive or not? Once it gets initiative and the ability to set its own goals, it behaves as something that’s alive. Much more than a toaster. Unless you watched Battlestar Galactica. Toasters are nice.

lolftw 4mo ago

I think most people would understand something like living "side by side with cars". Even if not alive, you can live very close and shape your life by and with technology. I don't take any issue with the OP's formulation.

duskdozer 4mo ago
And Americans' lives have been heavily shaped by cars and the car industry in a negative way. So, a pretty apt comparison.
- pfdietz 4mo ago
  And also in a positive way. I mean, it's not personal teleportation, but it sometimes feels like it.
  - mynameisbilly 4mo ago
    The isolation produced by centering our urban and suburban design around cars is pronounced. It cannot be understated how much damage cars have done to our sense of connectedness, community, walkability, and health.
    - pfdietz 4mo ago
      And yet, watch all these consumers deciding they want something different from what you're proclaiming is better for them.
      - rng-concern 4mo ago
        It's not just a matter of preference or proclamation. There are decades of research showing that more walkable neighborhoods are associated with higher physical activity levels, lower rates of some chronic diseases, more interaction with neighbors, and stronger feelings of community. The debate is usually about how large those effects are and whether they're worth the trade-offs, not whether the effects exist at all.

IshKebab 4mo ago

Even a child can see the difference between AI and a toaster.

danieltanfh95 4mo ago

you are conflating the idea of "living with something" with the notion of "being alive". You live with your car/computer/phone. Like it or not, they change your life.

JKCalhoun 4mo ago

"This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster." Or the internet. Oh.

squidbeak 4mo ago

This is the denialist Hy-Brasil line of thought. But superintelligence won't be a tool or a toaster and it would be reckless in the extreme for policy makers to adopt your line of thought.

abc123abc123 4mo ago

No, the side by side idea relates to godlike sentient AI:s. LLM:s are trivial in comparison. It is important to understand that in order for the AI-bros to continue to rake in other peoples money, and keep their bubbles inflated, it must seem credible that they will invent godlike AI tomorrow. That justifies infinite valuations. When the public no longer belives in that, the bubbles will pop and the AI bros will continue on to the next hype, with yet another generation of small time investors being burned by the popping bubbles.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

Der_Einzige 4mo ago

The Brave Little Toaster does a great job of literally making you think about living side-by-side with a toaster. There's also a very angry toaster in Fallout New Vegas's Old World Blues DLC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAaabmic2pw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAaabmic2pw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibOkPx_Ej30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibOkPx_Ej30