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Accelerando (2005)

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Re: Accelerando (2005)

#121

Post by Ancapistani »

bombcar wrote: post #104
Ancapistani wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was turned on to this book by an HN commenter a few months ago. Since then, it’s become something between a goal and a fear that one day I’ll get to the point where I wonder how much of my consciousness is me versus how much has been pushed off to my agent. It’s already a lot closer than I expected to ever experience.

How much of our short and long term memory is already relegated to smart phones?

I never really fell into that, but obviously saw it around me. Phones are fine for content consumption, but not adequate for creation.

AI lets me spend a few seconds to get a thought out of my head, then I can come back to it later and not have to go down the rabbit hole investigating it.

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#122

Post by underlipton »

FL33TW00D wrote: post #14

Anyone have recommendations on books that can rival the first part of Accelerando in number of prescient ideas about how the near future, pre singularity might look? My own list is: Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon Counting Heads by David Marusek Nexus by Ramez Naam Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge But I'm always on the look out for more! The more predictive the better!

Not necessarily books, but:

Pantheon/the stories it's based on by Ken Liu (though I really do recommend the animated series).

Maybe more conventional/dated, but I always recommend it for "getting" the emotional, person-to-person side in a particular way that few others do: .hack//SIGN. None of the characters ever quite realize what's going on, but elements - especially the soundtrack - seem to understand that everyone is on the precipice of something irrevocable.

  Shine, bright morning light
  Now in the air the spring is coming
  Sweet blowing wind
  Singing down the hills and valleys

  Keep your eyes on me
  Now we're on the edge of hell
  Dear my love, sweet morning light
  Wait for me, you've gone much farther, too far...

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#124

Post by nozzlegear »

cwillu wrote: post #107
nozzlegear wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will be very hard (and only get harder) for humans to fight through the deluge of slop, especially if the slop is weaponized as a kind of DoS like in the book. I don't expect laws are strong enough to hold this back but I don't know any other tool in our collective toolboxes. We don't need to fret about finding a technical solution to slop in the real world. Courts have a mechanism to fight this kind of thing (o…

“Binding arbitration: The parties agree to surrender their rights to litigate under this provision.”

I'm not sure what you're quoting or how it's relevant to what I said. Could you explain?

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#125

Post by stephen_cagle »

SonnyTark wrote: post #19

Accelerando has prophecies that are coming true and it's scary. Spoiler warning in case you want to read it. The first part's main character basically has the future version of openclaw running in his glasses that let him dispatch agents to do any tasks/research he wants or to autonomously do things for him. -> we are already kinda here He's got such total dependency on his agents that when he loses his glasses he's…

I read this a while ago (https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2012-08-18-accelerando...) and I remember enjoying it a little less with every section. With that said:

This is a book of ideas!

Aside: That was my favorite section of the book as well. Just the notion that a person could have had so much of "themselves" embedded in their agents that when disconnected from them they are basically in shock.

I remember at the time I was noticing how all my friends were completely loosing the ability to use paper maps. And there was a big discussion among us about whether needing to physically rotate the map in order to make sense of it was an example of us loosing spatial reasoning. It reminded me of how little I understood the actual space (landmarks, distance, etc) from A to B until I started driving myself at 16. Previous to that, your parents drove you, and it just seem like two places were magically connected by a wormhole. Anyway, we thought it was interesting that we might be the last generation to have used actual written maps to navigate to places. We had learned to do so, but we would also loose the ability with time.

Sure enough, these days, I have a hard time imagining using a map compared to just having maps route the path on my phone. The skill has atrophied from disuse. I imagine this is what "loosing your agents" felt like to that character.

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#126

Post by CamperBob2 »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #102
mullingitover wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand by my prediction that when AI comes for the lawyers' jobs, that's when suddenly we'll have the Butlerian Jihad.

Not lawyers-- judges. Judges, in my experience, don't take kindly to anything or anyone infringing on their power. Edit: I've met a ton of attorneys who are bullish on LLMs preparing work for them (kinda like robo-paralegals, albeit ones apt to spout bullshit). Judges, being human (and lazy by dint of evolution), would probably lean on LLM-based analysis too. I cannot imagine they'd ever stand by and let decisions be…

That already happens, in the form of arbitration.

In fact, I'll bet someone makes a bundle selling AI arbitration services that do just that. Got a beef with BigCo? What could be more fair than letting HAL settle the matter?

If I had the sense God gave a gerbil, I'd already have Claude writing up a patent application on this. (Edit, too late: https://www.adr.org/ai-arbitrator/ )

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#127

Post by TacticalCoder »

SonnyTark wrote: post #19

Accelerando has prophecies that are coming true and it's scary. Spoiler warning in case you want to read it. The first part's main character basically has the future version of openclaw running in his glasses that let him dispatch agents to do any tasks/research he wants or to autonomously do things for him. -> we are already kinda here He's got such total dependency on his agents that when he loses his glasses he's…

The one thing that's often missing in fictions about the future is how half-arsed everything is. Seen how buggy, insecure and just plain wrong so many of the things we are using are, we kinda already live in a world where everything works but only half-works.

We're much close to a dystopian comedy like Brazil than we are to Black Mirror.

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#128

Post by andai »

SonnyTark wrote: post #19

Accelerando has prophecies that are coming true and it's scary. Spoiler warning in case you want to read it. The first part's main character basically has the future version of openclaw running in his glasses that let him dispatch agents to do any tasks/research he wants or to autonomously do things for him. -> we are already kinda here He's got such total dependency on his agents that when he loses his glasses he's…

Does the consumer need to be human? That seems to be the question which will determine the course of history.

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#129

Post by andai »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #29
SonnyTark wrote: post #19

Accelerando has prophecies that are coming true and it's scary. Spoiler warning in case you want to read it. The first part's main character basically has the future version of openclaw running in his glasses that let him dispatch agents to do any tasks/research he wants or to autonomously do things for him. -> we are already kinda here He's got such total dependency on his agents that when he loses his glasses he's…

https://ucp.dev/ looks an awful lot like the first step towards Economics 2.0

The egregore accelerates...

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#130

Post by zetalyrae »

I remember reading this as a teenager, and despite being already so steeped in transhumanist ideas that I should have found it very ordinary, I was so excited by it, having never read something like it before, I raved about it to my mother. "... and then they go to another star and find aliens but the aliens are not like us they're uploaded minds in Dyson spheres, which is like if you surround a star with solar collectors and..."
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