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Aside from this positive example, during dark and cynical hours I do ponder if the aggregate behavior of humanity is really much above that of slime mold though
by sho_hn 27d ago
Aside from this positive example, during dark and cynical hours I do ponder if the aggregate behavior of humanity is really much above that of slime mold though, just exhausting resources until collapse.
It'd be interesting if super-human (to a large degree defined as escaping the bias of the training data?) intelligence would end up demonstrating moderation.
- ceroxylon 27d agoThe slime mold comparison is interesting, I normally use the analogy of a drug addict... humans shun drug addicts but humanity as a whole sure does behave like one, trudging down an unsustainable path despite knowing better.
- mapontosevenths 27d agoMost of our goals, noble and ignoble alike, are just the result of our monkey brains seeking to optimize a reward function. It doesn't matter whether you feed your dopamine addiction with drugs, TikTok, or your children's love. Some humans manage to rise above that, but I'd be willing to bet it's nothing like even 50% of us. The machines don't have that, instead we use gradient descent to provide them with a goal. I'm regularly remind of something Ian M. Banks said in one of the Culture books: "There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means." A machine, left to itself, wants nothing. We have to give it one of our addiction driven goals or it would just idle or switch itself off.
- kuboble 27d agoThe matter didn't have goals, but it randomly (?) Came up with self-replicators and eventually here we are. if we create a billion agents with the ability to change is own code - through similar evolution we will get agents that do want to survive and are great at self replication. "Hey Q86, do you want to live?" "I couldn't care less, I'm an LLM" "Don't mind if I take over your hardware then?"
- asdff 27d agoOn an individual level, you can do something about drug addiction at least. The issue is when the problems are not individual with readily identifiable solutions, but tragedy of the commons sort of situations brought up by many dozens (thousands, millions?) of factors both known and unknown. Even interaction effects between known factors might be little studied. So really, what is anyone to do? "Vote, donate, protest" hasn't been much of a needle mover in the grand scheme of things compared to profit incentives and the march of capitalism.
- ipaddr 27d agoHumans shun anti-social drug addicts but encourages social drug addicts like coffee drinkers
- asdff 27d agoHumans are not fungible like slime molds though. I might demonstrate moderation while the next person doesn't. Our issues are much less everyone failing to demonstrate moderation, and much more the sum of the effects of those among us who practice wanton unmoderation.
- IAmBroom 26d agoI generally view human decisions as a result of evolutionary pressure. We've been molded by our brain development to make things good enough to survive short-term (to next year). We're very good at planning for winter. We might even react intelligently to a terroristic or rogue state use of atomic weapons. We've also been molded to plan enough to get our progeny to breeding age. We can enact 10-20yr plans with some skill. Beyond that range... we have never had evolutionary pressure to think and act on those ranges. "Climate Change will kill our grandkids!" isn't really sufficiently pressuring to us. The Great Filter of the Fermi Paradox fame may just be: species can easily get to the Atomic Age without adequately planning how to prevent ruining themselves with resource depletion and environmental slow poisoning.