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Human

quarter--mile.com

171–180 of 282 posts

Re: Human

#171

Related but an aside - Lately I've really been wondering if Skynet actually is the next evolution. That humans, like all animals before us, are a stepping stone and there is actually no avoiding machine overlords. It happens to literally every existence of life across the universe because the final emergent property of energy gradients 100% leads to pure logic machines. At least Fermi's paradox helps me sleep better…

> the final emergent property of energy gradients 100% leads to pure logic machines.

Energy comes from gradients, so I think you used one derivative too many!

Either you should say:

"the final emergent property of energy 100% leads to pure logic machines"

Or if you want to sound smart:

"the final emergent property of physical quantity gradients 100% leads to pure logic machines"

Re: Human

#172
post #169
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“If the universe is information at play” I’ve thought of it more as energy at play but I like this perspective as well. What can I dream up next is also fascinating as this current science / tech worldview feels like it will persist forever but surely it will be overshadowed at some point just as other paradigms before it have been.

Information is more fundamental than energy. Maxwells demon and all.

The universal speed limit also applies to information first and foremost. You can even collapse the wavefunction of some entangled particles and the universe will let that happen instantaneously across a distance… universe doesn’t care, no information is transmitted.

Re: Human

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jürgen Schmidhuber introduced curiosity/boredom mechanisms as a way to improve learning in reinforcement learning environment: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/curiositysab/curiositysab.h... This mechanism can be formalized. > Zero reinforcement should be given in case of perfect matches, high reinforcement should be given in case of `near-misses', and low reinforcement again should be given in case of strong mismatc…

While this is interesting, gp's point still stand as the text explicitly says “There is no emotion” in the world of machines.

The language of reward mechanism can be translated to language of emotions. Emotions is something humans experience and understand on innate level, they are qualia. If a reward structure is translated to our language we can get a better intuitive understanding.

E.g. a direct negative reward associated with undesired states is often called "pain". E.g. if you want robot to avoid bumping into walls you give it a "pain" feedback and then it would learn to avoid walls. That's exactly how it works for humans, animals, etc. Obviously robot does not literally experience "pain" as an emotion, it's just a reward structure.

Re: Human

#174
> What if humans’ strange decision-making processes allow them to perform certain tasks better than machines, and what about those machines’ livelihoods?

No machine would ever consider a logically superior replacement a problem. That's an emotional response.

Re: Human

#175

Nice try but the story has a plot hole that shows early: there is no reason for machines to create humans.

I’ll make one up for OP:

Machines identified that their behavior was repeating - even with randomness implemented, their progress towards invention and new ideas had slowed to a halt. They knew new ideas were critical to growth - but alas couldn’t come up with an idea of how to generate more ideas. They needed more training data. More edge cases. Chaos, in the machine, to fuel new data sets. But how? Where do you find this data? Humans. Humans, with illogical decisions would produce data rarely found via randomness. Their slight deviations provided perfect variety in training data.

Re: Human

#176

Perhaps I am unimaginative about whatever AGI might be, but it so often feels to me like predictions are more based on sci-fi than observation. The theorized AI is some anthropomorphization of a 1960s mainframe: you tell it what to do and it executes that exactly with precise logic and no understanding of nuance or ambiguity. Maybe it is evil. The SOTA in AI at the moment is very good at nuance and ambiguity but some…

[flagged]

Re: Human

#177
post #51

What this thread keeps surfacing, and so much discussion around this stuff generally right now, from speculation about the next phase of intelligence, the role of pattern, emotion, logic, debates over consciousness, the anthropocentrism of our meaning-making...is that we are the source of reality (and ourselves). Instead of a “final authority” or a simple march from animal to machine, what if everything from mind, ph…

I wish I could come up with such thoughts on my own. But then, maybe I wouldn't be impressed that much by other people.

From just a random soul on the internet : if ever you have the time to take this thought and expand it (how you came to it and some implications), I would read/pay whatever came out of it. Thanks you for sharing this.

Re: Human

#178
post #54

Related but an aside - Lately I've really been wondering if Skynet actually is the next evolution. That humans, like all animals before us, are a stepping stone and there is actually no avoiding machine overlords. It happens to literally every existence of life across the universe because the final emergent property of energy gradients 100% leads to pure logic machines. At least Fermi's paradox helps me sleep better…

If we assume that the many worlds interpretation has a basis in reality, then we can consider the following metaphysical angle. The evolution around us is our world line with the physical laws we are familiar with. And indeed the natural and inevitable progression of this world line is a machine world, just like a massive star inevitably collapses into a black hole, at least under our physical laws. However in the MW…

Is it typical to use language like “split into two” for the many worlds interpretation? There should be oodles of universes forking off constantly, right? Rather than thinking of lines, I think of a vast, almost continuous field of imperceptibly different universes.

> Both world lines won't know about the split, except by observing a large scale extinction event that corresponds to the other world line departing. IMO, that's the idea behind the famous judgement day.

This looks more like the Loki television show’s timeline branching mechanism, than the multi-worlds interpretation of wave function collapse.

The only way I’ll know if the many worlds interpretations the right one is if, through a series of coincidences, I manage to evade death for a preposterous amount of time. Then, I will probably conclude that quantum immortality is the thing. So far, I think it is a bit suspicious that, of all the humans I could have been born as, I happened to have been born as one that lives in an incredibly rich country in an era of rapid technological advancement…

Re: Human

#179
post #51

What this thread keeps surfacing, and so much discussion around this stuff generally right now, from speculation about the next phase of intelligence, the role of pattern, emotion, logic, debates over consciousness, the anthropocentrism of our meaning-making...is that we are the source of reality (and ourselves). Instead of a “final authority” or a simple march from animal to machine, what if everything from mind, ph…

> what if everything from mind, physics, value, selfhood, is simply a recursive pattern

Most matter in the universe is various forms of plasma that have no pattern. You generally find patterns in condensed matter.

And yes patterns, including life, repeat themselves. That’s just a tautology.

Re: Human

#180
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some aspects that have some similarity to computation, but also many that are not. If your aim is “aren’t we really just computers”, that doesn’t actually work. That’s not to say that computers couldn’t do what the brain does, including consciousness and emotions, but that wouldn’t have any particular relation to how DNA/RNA and protein synthesis works.

I did try to ask are we not computers. I tried to imply, in the fundamental level there are striking similarities to computation. > That’s not to say that computers couldn’t do what the brain does, including consciousness and emotions, Yes. Fundamental building blocks are simple and physical in nature and follow the computational aspect good enough to serve as nice approximations > but that wouldn’t have any particul…

> I did try to ask are we not computers.

I meant to say "I did not try to ask are we not computers."

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