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Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

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Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#101

Post by Vecr »

squigz wrote: post #74
kadoban wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, the Culture series, and Vorkosigan Saga Sci Fi does tend to be bleak, these are the ones I can think of.

The Culture series is some of the best scifi I've ever read - and indeed, very hopeful and optimistic. Thanks for the other recommendations!

Some people think that. I've heard description from multiple smart people along the lines of "empty and despairing" and "leaves me with an empty feeling at the end". I think they probably thought through the implications. I can't comment though, maybe some of the books in the series are different than others.

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#102

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

gs17 wrote: post #58
1nd1ansumm3r wrote: post #15

I am thinking back to an IOS game called FlappyBird. The creator intentionally aimed for game dynamics that would hook users in the first 30 seconds. As a result, the gameplay mechanics were quite shallow and limited. But on the flip side, the game gained a huge following. You might do some balancing here, not to say there must be instant gratification but a better lead into the gameplay might help.

This isn't a game, it's a short story.

Nuh uh, you make a decision at the end.

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#103

Post by squigz »

Vecr wrote: post #101
squigz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Culture series is some of the best scifi I've ever read - and indeed, very hopeful and optimistic. Thanks for the other recommendations!

Some people think that. I've heard description from multiple smart people along the lines of "empty and despairing" and "leaves me with an empty feeling at the end". I think they probably thought through the implications. I can't comment though, maybe some of the books in the series are different than others.

Implications such as?

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#104

Post by kadoban »

Vecr wrote: post #101
squigz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Culture series is some of the best scifi I've ever read - and indeed, very hopeful and optimistic. Thanks for the other recommendations!

Some people think that. I've heard description from multiple smart people along the lines of "empty and despairing" and "leaves me with an empty feeling at the end". I think they probably thought through the implications. I can't comment though, maybe some of the books in the series are different than others.

Some of the books are _definitely_ different than others. In whole, the universe can be seen as somewhat troubling as well, but the vast majority is quite optimisitic. The majority of the universe that is, bad things still do happen in the plot.

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#105

Post by Filligree »

Vecr wrote: post #100
therein wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps if you have a cost approximation function that's alien to that of a human. Whatever that function is, it must be putting more value to time than a human does so it must have less of it. If this is a machine intelligence with a known lifetime of 52 days, most certainly. Otherwise even something as trivial as saving 23.74$ in fuel spent might be better value gained than the time savings it would expect to achie…

I don't think that's valid reasoning, maybe the AI system has near-zero discounting but obviously when a human asks it to do something, the human cares about how long it takes. It's plausible that would get programmed in very early and maybe forgotten about.

If I remember correctly, "Do it ASAP" was an explicit part of the prompt at that point.

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#106

Post by Vecr »

squigz wrote: post #103
Vecr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people think that. I've heard description from multiple smart people along the lines of "empty and despairing" and "leaves me with an empty feeling at the end". I think they probably thought through the implications. I can't comment though, maybe some of the books in the series are different than others.

Implications such as?

There's various things, but one of the main problems these people probably have, as some of them are AI researchers/simulationists, is that the real goals of the AIs are very unclear. Simulations at a very high detail either work and are widely used or are faked (causing horrible implications if they really are faked), so it's likely the AIs use simulations in planning. It's even worse if the simulations are not faked at all, as the AIs would run thousands or millions of simulations of really horrible situations, testing different interventions. If they are trying to reduce suffering, even not as their sole concern, why are they doing this? If they aren't trying to reduce suffering very much, the mind control is not really in the "human"'s best interests, it's just to control them.

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#107

Post by ammo1662 »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #19

In case anyone has not tried it, the Dyson Sphere Project on Steam is tremendous fun. A different spin on the Factorio gameplay loop. I completed it before combat was added, and enjoyed the low stress environment.

The graphic is awesome. I took a lot of pictures as wallpaper even before moving to my second planet.

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#108

Post by crooked-v »

smsm42 wrote: post #67
kadoban wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, the Culture series, and Vorkosigan Saga Sci Fi does tend to be bleak, these are the ones I can think of.

It's not used to be. It used to be optimistic. But then I guess the creators thought that "real literature" should be more "complex" and started to put more fear and desolation in. After all, as we know, all happy futures are alike and all unhappy futures are unhappy in their own different ways.

Dystopic and deeply negative works of scifi date to the literal start of the modern genre. There's nothing at all new about using negative projections to critique or satirize the interests of the time. See: Gulliver, Frankenstein, Captain Nemo, the unnamed protagonist of The Time Machine, etc.

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#109

Post by fourteenfour »

sroussey wrote: post #95
fourteenfour wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so I tried it on an iPhone and it is super smooth and the text typing renders at a reasonable speed. For some reason on Windows in either Chrome or Firefox the whole thing runs at like 5 fps and is super bugged. This is probably the reason so many people gave up on it. You can't just click through the text, you have to wait for it to slowwwwly type out each page which for the first one takes minimum 30 seconds, e…

On the iPhone you can touch the screen and it will speed up.

yes, I'm not sure you understood my comment.

Re: Edgar, build a Dyson swarm

#110

Post by ajuc »

chr1 wrote: post #99
ajuc wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is justified, pretty heavily. Edgar drops many hints it has a bad will. For example it can predict what parts of bad scenarios he should report to you but he still does the bad things in these scenarios. He can also predict when the human leadership will shut the project down. Which means he can predict what he should be doing in the first place - but he still presents to you misaligned scenarios making you mistak…

The story explicitly tells us that the virus was picked up by accident. But even if we discard that part and assume it was done intentionally by Edgar, the story is not logical, because the other choice of reverting climate change gives Edgar just as much opportunity to sabotage. Besides if your prompt does not make any difference, why lack of your prompt would make a difference, or if you don't write the prompt and…

> why lack of your prompt would make a difference

Not lack of prompt. Air gap between Edgar and everything else.

> reverting climate change gives Edgar just as much opportunity to sabotage

Yes. And you shouldn't do that with Edgar either.

> why do you think someone else would not write a worse prompt?

That's not the question we are asked. We can only decide on this one instance. If the question was "should we destroy Edgar" the answer is "yes".

> in real life to build and use such a swarm you would need trillions of people and AI agents, living on several planets and many space stations

It wouldn't matter, the problem wasn't an accident, it was Edgar killing humanity and making his crabs on purpose.

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