jansan
This somehow reminds me of the movie Pleasantville, where people live in a "perfect" world that is all black and white. Imperfection, love and a little weirdness slowly brings color and real life into the world.
cachemoi
Imperfection and randomness is a strength (that's why evolution doesn't make perfect copies, you might end up with the random mutation that protects you from the next pandemic) you could imagine that machines need human intelligence to think outside the box
neom
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, physics, value, selfhood, is simply a recursive pattern expressed in ever more novel forms? Humans aren’t just a step on a ladder to “pure logic,” nor are machines soulless automatons. Both are instances of awareness experiencing and reprogramming itself through evolving substrates... be it bios, silicon, symbol,or story. Emotions, meaning, even the sense of “self,” are patterns in a deeply recursive field: the universe rendering and re rendering its basic code, sometimes as computation, sometimes as myth, sometimes as teamwork, sometimes as hope, sometimes as doubt.
So whether the future leans biological, mechanical, or some hybrid, the real miracle isn’t just what new “overlords” or “offspring” arise, but that every unfolding is the same old pattern...the one that dreamed itself as atoms, as life, as consciousness, as community, as art, as algorithm, and as the endlessly renewing question: what’s next? What can I dream up next? In that: our current technological moment as just another fold in this ongoing recursive pattern.
Meaning is less about which pattern “wins,” or which entities get to call themselves conscious, and more about how awareness flows through every pattern, remembering itself, losing itself, and making the game richer for every round. If the universe is information at play, then everything here that we have: conflict, innovation, mourning, laughter is the play and there may never be a last word, the value is participating now, because: now is your shot at participating.
mentalgear
Funny enough, this is also something I thought about a few weeks back: what's the motivation of machine, if it has no emotions, to explore and continue in the world - what sense does it make if it doesn't have curiosity (of course this could be a RL function, but still, imagine putting yourself in world without life, where everything is only static, how boring would it be).
trhway
what if the causation is in the opposite direction (and i believe it is) - to explore and continue in the world is the primary drive (as the opposite traits just get naturally de-selected, be it organics or machines), and we only perceive it as our mind's artificial constructs like curiosity/emotions/motivation.
l33tbro
Doesn't really make much sense. It states that this is a purely mechanistic world with no emotion. So why would a machine be "bored" and wish to create a human?
Scarblac
I see it as an anthropomorphized word for the story. I imagine the machines run out of tasks with high or even low priority, but they still generate tasks at some epsilon priority that are close but not quite to random. That's a kind of boredom.
disambiguation
My headcanon is that "boredom" and "fear" are probabilities in a Markov chain - since it's implied the machine society is not all-knowing, they must reconcile uncertainty somehow.
pazimzadeh
yeah, more on the environmental constraints and where the machines even come from would be nice
> There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic
also this type of pure humanism seems disrespectful or just presumptuous, as if we are the only species which might be capable of "emotion, art and logic" even though we already have living counterexamples
IAmGraydon
Disrespectful? Of whom? It's a work of fiction. There's really no need to find something to offend you wherever you look.
pazimzadeh
of other animals
but yeah I'm not sure that was the right word, just seems wrong. basically humanism seems like racism but towards other species. I guess speciesist?
xyzal
Excuse me, but from the very beginning, it was SO predictable where this was going.
irjustin
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 at night.
NhanH
> 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.
This sentence has way too many assumptions doing the heavy lifting.
“Pure logic machines” is not a thing because literally, there are things that are uncomputable (both in the sense of Turing machine’s uncomputability, and in the sense that some functions are out of scope for a finite being to compute, think of Busy Beaver)
To put it the other way, your assumption is that machines (as we commonly uses the term, rather than scifi Terminator”) are more energy efficient than human in understanding the universe. We do not have any evidence nor priori for that assumption.
irjustin
... what was that about sleep?
EvanAnderson
Seems like a good time for "They're Made Out of Meat": https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
Aside: I hope our progeny remember us and think well of us.
ngruhn
There is a quote by Marshall McLuhan:
> Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world
tonyhart7
Terminator reminds the DOD that they would never make this
but what about China,Russia,Iran etc??? if integrating "Skynet" can improve their military capabilities then they would do it
KolibriFly
Like, "yeah we're doomed, but at least it's inevitable and universal."
jb1991
> 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.
Can you elaborate?
echelon
> Can you elaborate?
The universe tends to produce self-replicating intelligence. And that intelligence rids itself of chemical and biological limitations and weaknesses to become immortal and omnipotent.
If evolution can make it this far, it's only a few more "hard steps" to reach take off.
>> 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.
The spacefaring alien meme is just fantasy fiction. Aliens evolve to fit the nutrient and gas exchange profiles of their home worlds. They're overfit to the gravity well and likely die suboptimally, prematurely.
Any species reaching or exceeding our level of technological capability could design superior artificial systems. If those systems take off, those will become the dominant shape of intelligence on those worlds.
The future of intelligence in the universe is artificial. And that throws the Fermi Paradox for a loop in many ways:
- There's enough matter to compute within a single solar system. Why venture outside?
- The universe could already be computronium and we could be ants too dumb to notice.
- Maybe we're their ancestor simulation.
- Similar to the "fragile world hypothesis", maybe we live in a "fragile universe". Maybe the first species to get advanced physics and break the glass nucleates the vacuum collapse. And by that token, maybe we're the first species to get this far.
jb1991
> The universe tends to produce self-replicating intelligence.
Which intelligence are you referring to? Other lifeforms in the universe?
OccamsMirror
As a teenager I used to revel in explaining to religious people that I believe humans are actually just the evolutionary step between biological life and machine life.
suddenlybananas
I guess you fail to see the irony that your own eschatology itself is pretty religious.
lukas099
It’s a belief about a great future change, but there’s nothing supernatural or totally implausible about it. And it doesn’t sound like they were preaching it as the absolute truth, but were open that it was just their belief. Also, no social rites or rituals mean that despite them telling it to people who didn’t care to hear it, I am not convinced that their belief was very religious.
Also, “As a teenager” implies more self-awareness than you seem to give them credit for.
eitland
More broadly—and at least in online spaces—I often notice that many vocal proponents of atheism exhibit traits typically associated with religious behaviour:
- a tendency to proselytise
- a stubborn unwillingness to genuinely engage with opposing views
- the use of memes and in-jokes as if they were profound arguments
- an almost reverential attitude toward certain past figures
There’s more, but I really ought to get on with work.
akomtu
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 MWI, our world line may split into two: one will continue towards the machine world as if nothing happened, while the other world line will experience a slight change of physical laws that will make the machine world impossible. 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.
codebastard
I was sketching a sci-fi book idea in a similar tone with the following tones:
- what if AI took over
- what if the laws and legalities that allowed AI to take over bloodlessly just through an economic win force them to have a human representative to take legally binding actions in our society
- what if there developed a spectrum of individuality and cluster for different ai entities leading into a formation of processing guilds with AI agents. Limiting themselves in their individual time to a factor 10 Human Processing Speed for easier Human / AI interaction and to enable one to share the perception of their human representative without overloading them
Saigonautica
I was thinking something similar, but much earlier along this timeline: what if the consultants that work for lobby groups that propose certain bills already use AI to write proposed laws? E.g. to make long, omnibus-style laws that very few of the people voting on it (or the public) actually read?
How will that erode laws that are undesirable to AI companies? Does AI take over, only because we no longer want to spend the effort governing ourselves?
Will AI companies (for example) end up providing/certifying these 'human representatives'? Will it be useful, or just a new form of rent-seeking? Who watches the watchmen, etc ?
I think it would make an interesting short story or novel!
NetRunnerSu
try this world set: https://dmf-archive.github.io/
thomasfromcdnjs
"Written by a human [0]"
I've been playing around with this on my own blog.
I'd like the blogging community to have a consensus on a nice badge we can put at the top of our blog posts, representing who/what wrote the post;
- human
- hybrid
- ai
Some might hate the idea of a fully "ai" post, and that's fair. But I like to sometimes treat my blog as just a personal reference, and if after a long day of chasing an esoteric bug down, I don't mind an AI just writing the whole post and I just press publish.
This adds, a reference for me, more data for AI's to train on, more pages for people to search and land on.
layfellow
There's the "Not by AI" badge[0].
thombles
> if you estimate that at least 90% of your content is created by humans, you are eligible to add the badges
Probably not what most people expect
thomasfromcdnjs
Legend, thank you!
lvturner
"Summarize my sleep deprived, insane ramblings, in to a cohesive document that I can reference again in the future, or use to communicate this issue to others in a more digestible format than I am currently capable of producing"
I think the AI generated document is far better than me ultimately forgetting it in many cases.
thomasfromcdnjs
Aha fo sure.
I'm thinking of writing an MCP server that does this, just takes my night of vibe coding and recent commits/branch etc
Then just cobbles it into an AI post and adds it my blog under some category.
unangst
Easy disclaimers for human, AI or hybrid content: https://disclai.me/r (Oddly enough I built this AI citation tool with exactly those 3 categories a couple years back. Could use some tweaking of course, but I’m very open to suggestions.)
burkaman
I think I would still call that a hybrid post. Fully AI would be if you contribute nothing except the topic and tell the AI to research and write the whole thing.
pkdpic
> Processor Unit 7382-B, "The Origins of the HUMAN Project," Journal of Experimental Intelligence, vol. 5621, no. 3, pp. 42-89, 19754.
The references section in the machine version of the story linked at the bottom is excellent. Nicely done all around, really enjoyed reading this thank you for writing and sharing <3
vivzkestrel
When we have a problem such as "why do humans exist" I like to think of it in terms of probabilities. Every possible cause has a non zero probability. For example, even something religious people would believe in such as Adam and Eve were created by god would have a non zero probability. The idea would be to create a convergence diagram of sorts with all sorts of possible events with a score assigned to each. From gods of various religious creating humans, to alien species from another galaxy sending unicellular life to earth to an asteroid carrying chemicals needed to make the first cell, I would love to see someone use all these GPTs and put together the most comprehensive probable cause of existence ever investigated
And so, all the humans on earth swarmed to see what was going on.
The machines did too.
There was one weird thing, though.
The title of the event was rather mysterious.
It simply read…
“Grand Theft Auto VI”