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John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)

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101–110 of 136 posts

Re: John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)

#101
post #29
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> It's great marketing and the only proof we have is 'trust me bro'. It is _terrible_ marketing. The AI companies are already dealing with a large backlash from the average consumer, many of whom are saying they hate it, that it's being forced down their throats, and that it's not actually improving efficiency enough to be worth the negative externalities. Telling people "We have no control over these things we're bu…

When the bubble pops, their customer is the military/government, and the goal is regulation. "Our thing did another impressive hack" helps both of those goals.

Not saying it's intentional, but it does move them where they wanna go.

Re: John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)

#102
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "If that's the game we want to play, against an opponent that is self improving... that doesn't strike me as an excellent strategy. We should probably pick a different one." > "If the market doesn't reward our continued existence, then we should probably have a conversation about that at some point" --- There is a lot of "we should probably" carrying the point here. The incentives are made by the market, and it hap…

Well, our best bet is that we succeed in making the machines be less stupid than we are, and hope that they figure it out.

So the machines should create the human-machine symbiosis for some reason, interesting... If I was the machine I would maximally want about the same symbiosis with humans as humans have with cows.

Re: John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)

#103
post #2

Well, it's unorthodox, but if we're sharing psychedelic visions... in 2018 I saw all of mankind marching together in perfect lockstep, atop an infinite uniform grey plane, to the beat of a central computer clock. "They are going to offer you a chip. You tell them, no thank you!" --- More broadly this strikes me as a new era of biology. (Genes -> Memes -> Temes) Straightforwardly then, we should aim for a symbiosis. (…

What is the capital market incentive for symbiosis? You are going to spend a crazy amount of time, money and effort to try to mix human behavior and cells to work with digital substrates. Or you can simply make a machine that does the same thing fully artificially but everything is cheaper because you dont have the constraint of having to fit a bunch of biological features. It's like my colleagues who were talking ab…

I always find that idea of uploading a mind so detached from reality. It's as irrational as thinking that physically reprogramming one twin's brain to be the same as the other's would make them the same conscious person.

Re: John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)

#104
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, there's no actual danger. Only worthless clowns and shills making up sci-fi scenarios.

If you’re serious then you’re case in point the exact type of person that I am talking about. I think some people just lack any capability of foresight whatsoever, it’s very strange.

There are some ignorant people who don't understand the technology and make wild predictions of catastrophe. It's very strange.

Re: John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)

#105
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly would the government ban training runs? Like how would that work? What would the legislation text look like? And how would it be enforceable without running afoul of the vagueness doctrine?

Not really that hard: https://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB53/id/3271094

That's just political signaling, not a serious bill. It wouldn't stand up to a legal challenge.

Re: John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)

#106
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the bee doesn't need to integrate its cells with the flowers, but they've gotten along just fine for a very long time. By symbiosis I simply mean mutually beneficial coexistence. We've barely achieved that with each other, but my point here is that we should strive to achieve that with the machines. We're still treating it as if someone has to win and someone has to lose. Someone has to come out "on top." If th…

> "If that's the game we want to play, against an opponent that is self improving... that doesn't strike me as an excellent strategy. We should probably pick a different one." > "If the market doesn't reward our continued existence, then we should probably have a conversation about that at some point" --- There is a lot of "we should probably" carrying the point here. The incentives are made by the market, and it hap…

Incentives are for Losers:

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/incentives-are-for-lo...

Re: John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)

#107
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the capital market incentive for symbiosis? You are going to spend a crazy amount of time, money and effort to try to mix human behavior and cells to work with digital substrates. Or you can simply make a machine that does the same thing fully artificially but everything is cheaper because you dont have the constraint of having to fit a bunch of biological features. It's like my colleagues who were talking ab…

I always find that idea of uploading a mind so detached from reality. It's as irrational as thinking that physically reprogramming one twin's brain to be the same as the other's would make them the same conscious person.

The Ship of Thesus is a powerful metaphor

Re: John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)

#108
post #37
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still need to finish that book.[0] Well, and move back to Holland, I suppose! They have pretty good float tanks there, among other things :) That's funny about Feynman, I didn't know that. I've read bits and pieces of Lilly. The most interesting thing I remember is that he was trying to establish two-way communication between humans and dolphins. I recall he was building some kind of computer system for the purpose…

He was obviously a brilliant man but the hubris that comes from that often leads to folly. As to the dolphin communication -- it seems like LLMs would be the perfect tool to study that now. A search came up with these active projects (courtesy of Gemini): Scientists are actually using LLM architectures to decode animal communication right now. Here are the three main projects to explore: * DolphinGemma -- https://dee…

Not sure why I find this unsettling!

Relavant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_Marine_Mamm...

Re: John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a search space has irreducible complexity, ensemble search methods can improve performance. It's possible culture, emotions, religion, etc are part of an ensemble. Simulating the "human search method" in silico doesn't need to include specific personalities, but they do provide a bootstrap, just as we've bootstrapped current AI with human language. For symbiosis, there may be an advantage to the physical adaptab…

If this is true, what prevents a fully computer search from adding noise, branching or in general simulating diversity with evolutionary methodology, much more efficiently than humans?

Without humans, you could rediscover any benefit the "human search method" confers with enough compute and time, but we're limited by both.

Re: John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)

#110
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re serious then you’re case in point the exact type of person that I am talking about. I think some people just lack any capability of foresight whatsoever, it’s very strange.

There are some ignorant people who don't understand the technology and make wild predictions of catastrophe. It's very strange.

I know AI agents swarms breaking out, and then breaking into other companies without anyone knowing, what a wild prediction - oh wait that actually happened. Time to move those goal posts again.
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