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No higher power ever wrote anything though. That's all human writing, human promises, human propaganda.
I'm genuinely curious how you explain your own unconsciousness which comes out all the time when speaking or writing.
I'm going to use this time to drop the Marshall Brain work that had the biggest impact on me, and is some of the most prescient speculative fiction I've read. Manna: Two Views of Humanity’s Future He contracts two societies. One is a dystopia where AI very, very similar to today's ML models is integrated into society as a replacement for the middle class, removing social mobility as well as acting as a panopticon low…
Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existin…
The dystopian part was only enabled (within the story) by the fact that humans were utterly unnecessary to the rich.
None had any jobs, because the AI could do all for less… so why would the oligarchs waste money employing human wage slaves when the machines would always be cheaper than slaves?
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The only clear distinction between the utopia and the dystopia is on wealth distribution. All the rest of it is a narrative about consequences. Anyway, the AI there isn't like our LLMs either. It's an AGI capable of long term societal prediction.
> The only clear distinction between the utopia and the dystopia is on wealth distribution. A utopia where everyone is starving vs a dystopia where some people are fabulously wealthy but almost everyone has basic healthcare and education and opportunity to succeed? Inequality isn't anywhere near as important as the baseline of what most people have available to them.
Within the story, the dystopia crams the masses into cheap housing, they have no jobs nor possibility of jobs, no freedom even to leave as they are apprehended by robots if they try; and the utopia has no need for jobs, but gives out UBI credits to be spent on whatever you want the machines to make for you, and lets you live out a fantasy life.
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> And each of those questions comes from a highly confused state about what religion is, about what prayer is, about what God is. No need for goalpost moving. The holy book claims that God answers prayers. This is, in fact, a lie. Some people aren't yet fully convinced of this, and reading the website helps them along. (see uncle comments)
The steel-man position here — and I say this as one who does not believe in any of the many variations/presentations of the Christian god — is that "answer" does not imply "does what you ask". What does indicate that the claim "God answers prayers" is false, is the near total lack of personal responses to those praying*, not even so much as "your prayer is important to us, you are number 184,693,224 in the queue" tha…
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I'm genuinely curious how you explain your own unconsciousness which comes out all the time when speaking or writing.
Are you conflating "unconsciousness" with "higher power" here?
So it could be that a "prophetic dream" you experienced one night is truly a sign from a higher power. Or it could be garbled nonsense from electrochemical reactions. You are not allowed to know. If you received authoritative evidence one way, you'd have to verify that the evidence stems from reality, and from there it's a recursive loop.
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Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existin…
I'm going to disagree here, slightly. If anything I think Manna is something closer to AGI; and its capabilities certainly imply that it's Turing Complete. Which means the owners will constantly be playing whack-a-mole with edge cases and emergent properties that they couldn't anticipate from a prior fix. This is what would destabilize the dystopia; though that doesn't imply more freedom. It could just mean replacing…
So yes, the fictional AI in that story would, in reality, have all kinds of edge cases and emergent properties.
But Vertebrane would also have to be Turing complete, just to be able to function.
* I jest, but not by much
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Which utopia? I saw two dystopias. One the likely future of western society, another being one where your very thoughts are programmed
Do you think that this is not already the case? If not, what was the point of 15+ years of government education?
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I'm genuinely curious how you explain your own unconsciousness which comes out all the time when speaking or writing.
What's to explain? The brain is a complex structure that does weird stuff. Consciousness is simply an emergent property of that complexity.
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Are you conflating "unconsciousness" with "higher power" here?
If we want the highest level of rigor, claims such as "the unconscious is/isn't influenced by a higher power" aren't falsifiable. Anything that you aren't aware of can't be explained by you. Others can examine your mental state, but your perception of others is itself a part of your mental state. It's solipsism, in a sense. By definition, a higher power that transcends our ability to comprehend can't be verified or d…
Münchhausen trilemma makes it impossible to argue that point either way.
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Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existin…
> In fact I would love to read a sequel where the dystopia wins and AI-empowered oligarchs and human wage slaves create generation ships to nearby stars and eventually setup fast food restaurants in every corner of the galaxy. The dystopian part was only enabled (within the story) by the fact that humans were utterly unnecessary to the rich. None had any jobs, because the AI could do all for less… so why would the ol…
The workers supply not only the drama of suffering but also a (meagre, absurd) customer base for the fast food restaurants themselves.
Last but not least, given the long distances involved in interstellar travel, an oligarch must delegate their authority, either to a machine, a human, or a combination, and that is an opportunity for some drama as experience and vision inevitably diverge. This would be true even if, for example, the delegate is a perfect clone of the oligarch. It would be within these cracks and crevices hope could form, only to be crushed, in artistic, brutal fashion.