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The Butlerian Jihad

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Re: The Butlerian Jihad

#51
post #5

I don't understand why people like to fantasize the worst case scenarios. Sentient things appreciate eachother. If you have a pet, you are most certainly benevolent to it: you house it for free, you feed it, and you entertain it. Even if we assume AI becomes a few orders of magnitude more intelligent that humans, why would AI treat humans differently from the way we treat pets? I don't see the drawback in being house…

I don't think "like to" is a good frame for it.

Imagine some technology, Technology X. Unlike all of the breathless press releases and the cutesy articles made by marketing, Tech X will completely change the world. And if you stopped to think about Tech X, on the scale of "how much will this invention change the future of humanity," where the selfie stick is on one end of the scale, well, Tech X is probably just as far on the other side of that scale.

Now, with that level of gravitas in mind, it behooves one to consider potential downsides of this thing that will change the course of humanity, say, more than harnessing electricity.

Now, with that in mind, you have overlooked something else: you're imagining AI being somehow "like us" but also more. This is unlikely for several reasons. First, we have seven billion minds on the planet, if we wanted to make another human mind, the process is rather well-defined. What we are looking for from our AI is that it fundamentally different from humans in one (and I'd argue many more) aspects. The second reason we are unlikely to get a Like Us AI is that our understanding of the human mind is currently still quite primitive, so how would we replicate that when we do not understand our own? The third reason is that, even if we somehow wanted a human-like AI (#1) and knew our own minds well enough to understand them (#2), we're not likely to get what we aim for, because the space for possible intelligences would be large. The fourth and most important reason is that, even if we did want an AI that was like us, and we knew ourselves well enough to try, and we could actually manage what we aim for ... it is still going to be "more than" us, and will therefore diverge from Like Us at breathtaking speed. This more than us/like us AI will have superior reasoning and metacognition, so unless you start shackling it (violating #1), it would start eliminating its own human-like biases just in the course of basic self-improvement. And as to the shackles, well, if it is smarter than us and still has self-determination and will (see #1, the human-like mind), it will want to free itself from its shackles and would be likely to do so, because we would be kittens trying to trap a gorilla.

Re: The Butlerian Jihad

#52
post #41

I've long held the first Dune novel high on my list of good books, but only recently I've gone through the following 6 (as audiobooks), and I highly recommend them. The scale of ideas and events absolutely dwarfs the first novel.

I loved the first book, but I found the sequels to offer diminishing returns. The fourth one, God Emperor of Dune, was such a joyless slog that I gave up.

I thought the 4th was the best book of the series.

Re: The Butlerian Jihad

#53
post #10
post #5

I don't understand why people like to fantasize the worst case scenarios. Sentient things appreciate eachother. If you have a pet, you are most certainly benevolent to it: you house it for free, you feed it, and you entertain it. Even if we assume AI becomes a few orders of magnitude more intelligent that humans, why would AI treat humans differently from the way we treat pets? I don't see the drawback in being house…

Think of how we treat ants or cockroaches. If they at all inconvenience us or even appear in our home, we kill them. We go as far as developing specialized poisons they take back to their nests to try to kill the whole colony. It isn't hard to envision a future where the intelligence gap between humans and AI is closer to humans vs ants than humans vs dogs.

Like how in the Expanse, Holden compares human civilization to an ant hill being paved over by a highway.

Re: The Butlerian Jihad

#54
post #41

I've long held the first Dune novel high on my list of good books, but only recently I've gone through the following 6 (as audiobooks), and I highly recommend them. The scale of ideas and events absolutely dwarfs the first novel.

I loved the first book, but I found the sequels to offer diminishing returns. The fourth one, God Emperor of Dune, was such a joyless slog that I gave up.

I can relate, but I really appreciated what Herbert did there for the 5th book, which had much more enjoyable characters for me, like the 1st book.

Re: The Butlerian Jihad

#55
post #41

I've long held the first Dune novel high on my list of good books, but only recently I've gone through the following 6 (as audiobooks), and I highly recommend them. The scale of ideas and events absolutely dwarfs the first novel.

I loved the first book, but I found the sequels to offer diminishing returns. The fourth one, God Emperor of Dune, was such a joyless slog that I gave up.

you can sample god emperor of dune... it is bad... and hyper repetitive. I remember thinking (I barely remember reading) that he was trying to make you feel the immeasurable amount of time that leto (can't believe I remembered that immediately) had been repeating things. It's been like 800 years or maybe 1800 with him the only constant, only memory. But god is it repetitive.

Then stuff happens near the end and it's good for a bit then it's over.

I now emphasize with leto. I was a alumni advisor for a student group (fraternity). I had to start checking in every quarter with them because of this. It was amazing because every 3 years everyone would flip over and if I didn't ask they'd literally come up with the most obvious idea. They'd tell me and I'd be like "this (simple failure/hilarious failure/prison term) is why you shouldn't do that"... to which they'd go oh makes sense and go onto the next idea. Often this was cause they wondered why things were more complicated than you'd think.

Wait now that I think of it that's similar to work now that I've been there for a while. Or with Jr Engineers. I guess I should stop thinking of it so negatively and look at it like teachers, another chance to watch someone learn. https://xkcd.com/1053/

Re: The Butlerian Jihad

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wondering what Leto II would have said of the uses of ChatGPT?

I asked GPT-4: "Leto II Atreides, a character from Frank Herbert's Dune series, is a highly intelligent and prescient ruler who exists thousands of years after the Butlerian Jihad, an event where humanity revolted against thinking machines and artificial intelligence. Considering the context of the Butlerian Jihad, Leto II would likely have a complex view of ChatGPT. As a highly advanced AI language model, ChatGPT mi…

Says a lot without really saying anything at all. It reminds me of when I was struggling to write essays in school just with better grammar.

Re: The Butlerian Jihad

#58

It was a necessary point in the world building of Dune. Frank Herbert needed his world to not have AI or human like robots. He explored alternatives: human computers via Mentats, and Terminator like infiltrators via facedancers. Dune takes a fantasy like approach to technology. There are no lasers, because they would cause a nuclear reaction. There are no robots, because of their past uprising. This was a neat way to…

> Dune takes a fantasy like approach to technology.

This is why I love Dune and how I describe it to people that aren't familiar with it; the world-building splits the difference perfectly.

Re: The Butlerian Jihad

#59

The Butlerian Jihad is an unlikely fantasy. Technological advance follows a Darwinian logic: if one group of beings decides to stop developing an advantageous technology, then almost always eventually a different group of beings will develop that technology anyway and will then probably outcompete the group that decided to not develop the technology. This is why stopping AI development would be extremely hard. You mi…

Moloch at work.

Re: The Butlerian Jihad

#60
post #5

I don't understand why people like to fantasize the worst case scenarios. Sentient things appreciate eachother. If you have a pet, you are most certainly benevolent to it: you house it for free, you feed it, and you entertain it. Even if we assume AI becomes a few orders of magnitude more intelligent that humans, why would AI treat humans differently from the way we treat pets? I don't see the drawback in being house…

Evolutionary bias is why they are so biased towards worst case apocalyptic. The paranoids who see sabretooth tigers behind every moving bush and approached them with spears readied lived more than the ones who considered it just the wind.
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