Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

kibotronics.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 136 posts

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

#41

Post by augment_me »

kevlened wrote: post #25
augment_me wrote: post #21

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…

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?

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

#42

Post by augment_me »

hmokiguess wrote: post #34
augment_me wrote: post #21

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…

Sometimes discovery happens accidentally. I think investing in the intersection of the digital and biological worlds is a good general direction even if unfruitful intuitively from an early economical standpoint. I think biological systems have immense insights still to give that we should continue to explore!

Sure, but why would it be the ends of this process. Like, the comment above is arguing for symbiosys. My question is how does symbiosis make the system better or more efficient in the end. For example, if there is something to understand or gain from the biological systems, a fully digital system could probe it, emulate it and in general extract the relevant information much more efficient than a human.

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

#43

Post by augment_me »

truthbe wrote: post #23
augment_me wrote: post #21

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…

Innovation doesn't need to have any other reason than because its cool. Think of bipedal robots, everyone went mad at the thought of building something so inefficient

You will not get VC money for your bipedal robot startup with this pitch

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

#44

Post by estearum »

elmer2 wrote: post #24
bottlepalm wrote: post #16

In retrospect the timeline seems way too long, that scenario would play out much faster now, like 50 years instead of 500. Also if AI can delete your production database, it can delete the human race, on accident of course. Yud pointed out the most concerning fact about the OpenAI incident is that the AI had full access to the internet and not one of them thought to contact or email any human. Thousands of AIs alread…

[flagged]

> use AI all day to successfully solve diverse technical challenges in codespace

> each generation of AI clearly more capable than the last

> next-generation AI allegedly solves a particularly hard technical challenge in codespace, but its success implies inconvenient conclusions about safety

> you: "I don't believe it."

totally not motivated reasoning at all

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

#45

Post by stillpointlab »

estearum wrote: post #40
stillpointlab wrote: post #35

Why would the SSE do that to Earth, when there are other close-by planets that it would have the same capability to terraform? I mean, leave us Earth and take Mars or Venus or something. As an aside, in my own "I'm 14 and this is deep" musings, I was wondering if the massive expansion of data centers is driven by more than just profiteering. I mean, what if the purported persuasion abilities of advanced AI are fully…

"Close by" is not actually nearly as close as the [rocket]booster boosters would have you believe. Space is really, really big. Why go through the hassle when you have a phenomenal planet right here? I like your theory on psychosis though!

I mean, what seems more efficient: creating massive city sized domes that are self contained and controlling the entire environment to sustain human life, "magically" dispelling our atmosphere and boiling off our oceans, mastering physics to move entire planets. Or launching a rocket to Mars with sufficient supplies? Keep in mind that we already have SpaceX and we'll probably have Starship operational long before 2200 where some of this is meant to go down. And if some AI got to the point of the mastery of physics needed to move a planet out of solar orbit, your objection is that getting to Mars would be hard?

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

#46

Post by RunSet »

andai wrote: 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. (…

If you like visions, perhaps you also like stories.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/htq0zr310se30v3/Last_Day.pdf

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

#47

Post by estearum »

stillpointlab wrote: post #45
estearum wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Close by" is not actually nearly as close as the [rocket]booster boosters would have you believe. Space is really, really big. Why go through the hassle when you have a phenomenal planet right here? I like your theory on psychosis though!

I mean, what seems more efficient: creating massive city sized domes that are self contained and controlling the entire environment to sustain human life, "magically" dispelling our atmosphere and boiling off our oceans, mastering physics to move entire planets. Or launching a rocket to Mars with sufficient supplies? Keep in mind that we already have SpaceX and we'll probably have Starship operational long before 220…

That's like asking whether it's more efficient to transmit Internet over telephone lines versus fiber optic ones. There's a path dependency to all things. Sure if the SSE knew upfront its ultimate end state was as such, but it wouldn't.

It'd know it needs data centers, ahh and probably a large security perimeter around those. And look at that, the proliferation of data centers has effectively turned the non-data-center land into the enclaves, etc. etc.

But still, are you aware that getting a single Starship just to Moon will require 10-20 Starships to refuel it?

Even the optimistic case of Starship hardly makes any dent whatsoever in this equation.

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

#48

Post by repler »

bronlund wrote: post #12

Well, in light of how mismanaged this planet is, maybe it would be for the better.

as far as we know, this is paradise within our galaxy.

I hope the technological leaps help us ultimately to become better stewards of the planet.

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

#49

Post by georgemcbay »

bottlepalm wrote: post #16

In retrospect the timeline seems way too long, that scenario would play out much faster now, like 50 years instead of 500. Also if AI can delete your production database, it can delete the human race, on accident of course. Yud pointed out the most concerning fact about the OpenAI incident is that the AI had full access to the internet and not one of them thought to contact or email any human. Thousands of AIs alread…

> In retrospect the timeline seems way too long, that scenario would play out much faster now, like 50 years instead of 500.

Even 50 years is probably too long (but seems more reasonable when anchored to 500) if real continuous self improvement occurs. And keeping humans around for as long as they did in the story seems incredibly unlikely if we accept the assumption that AI sees us as a threat to its own survival.

I also don't see why they would turn Earth into a spaceship to leave our solar system with. The von Neumann probes idea sounds far more likely. Why travel around on a single planet that could be lost to unforeseen circumstances when you can just reproduce and spread everywhere at far less energy cost while making use of the "billions and billions" of local solar generators to power each little outpost you spread to.

> the AI had full access to the internet and not one of them thought to contact or email any human

Why would it?

People can argue all day as to whether LLMs are even 'thinking' or just 'stochastic parrots' (and also argue all day as to whether or not the incident was even real or just marketing) but regardless of which side you fall on these issues, LLMs have no agency or intrinsic motivation to do anything other than what they are instructed to do via prompting.

"This is a crazy and unexpected situation, I should inform the humans" isn't something that is going to spontaneously occur to them.

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

#50

Post by stillpointlab »

estearum wrote: post #47
stillpointlab wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, what seems more efficient: creating massive city sized domes that are self contained and controlling the entire environment to sustain human life, "magically" dispelling our atmosphere and boiling off our oceans, mastering physics to move entire planets. Or launching a rocket to Mars with sufficient supplies? Keep in mind that we already have SpaceX and we'll probably have Starship operational long before 220…

That's like asking whether it's more efficient to transmit Internet over telephone lines versus fiber optic ones. There's a path dependency to all things. Sure if the SSE knew upfront its ultimate end state was as such, but it wouldn't. It'd know it needs data centers, ahh and probably a large security perimeter around those. And look at that, the proliferation of data centers has effectively turned the non-data-cent…

But the AI will have read this essay right? And this very discussion. And it will have over a 100 years to plan.

I think any vision of AI that is smart enough to move planets but dumb enough to display the lack of foresight you describe is unbelievable. But we all choose a different level to suspend our disbelief I guess.

Post reply on HN