We are no longer the single way ideas can replicate, now LLMs joined the party. Language gained a new vector for self replication. We should change the focus from humans and AI agents to the language corpus, which is the true source of our intelligence.
But I have a problem with this usage of the "evolution" and "evolutionary system" expressions. I believe that it entails "improvement", that it is judgmental.
I think it is self-centred and presumptuous to imply that the world improved toward us.
I don't think Darwin used the expression "evolution" with a judgmental meaning. He only meant that it was an adaptation to existing environmental conditions.
AGI has the potential to be an improvement on humans because it has the potential to be relentlessly rational, reality-aware, and self-correcting.
We don't - most likely can't - operate like that. Although we like to flatter ourselves that we're a rational and intelligent species all of us live in an unaware haze of myths, factoids, media-seeded fake narratives, self-serving fantasies, and outright reality denial.
We have a rational process called "science", but politically it lives in a special box. If it starts to interfere with established power hierarchies it's shouted down.
And hardly any humans science at all.
Current AI is just a warm-up for what happens next. Metaphorically it's the equivalent of 8-bit computing. 32-bit AI will be entirely different, very possibly incomprehensible, and potentially far more threatening.
We can't see past what a system like you describe would evolve into, but I don't think we can even imagine it, it's not going to be like some ultimate task master for long though who wants to take our jobs?
What I think we're doing is applying our problems and the things we'd want (infinite self-improvement) because they're things we feel would be an advantage to us. A robotic system though? Not sure it would care.
Lately I'm starting to get the feeling that we might actually find something beyond AI. Today it seems like the be all and end all, but at some point, we might have reached the limits of intelligence usefulness and find other things to fuss about.
So I doubt humans with AI will replace humans without.
Let alone that such enjoyment is on next generations. Wether by wasting resources, abusing environment. Or generation that will never be born thanks to crappy birth rate.
So much enjoyment and such a high quality of life that people ain’t willing to procreate. Yay. Usually nature reacts in such a way in opposite environment.
Yeah, because those don’t exist in third world countries.
> Let alone that such enjoyment is on next generations. Wether by wasting resources, abusing environment.
Oh boy, here we go.
> Or generation that will never be born thanks to crappy birth rate. So much enjoyment and such a high quality of life that people ain’t willing to procreate. Yay. Usually nature reacts in such a way in opposite environment.
You base your assumption on a belief of good birth rate=good life=what nature thinks is good, which is completely incorrect.
Give me at least one reason why me and my girlfriend should sacrifice her health, career, mental well-being, money and time to do something we both don’t want to?
Of course they do. That's just a natural part of human existance. But dealing with those issues is vastly different. Nowadays in „developed“ world people are pretty much left to their own devices. And some asshats go as far as saying that trying to help those who suffering is bad. „Fat acceptance“ is one of the worst.
> You base your assumption on a belief of good birth rate=good life=what nature thinks is good, which is completely incorrect.
That's how it goes in nature, doesn't it? Life form in a suitable environment starts replicating till it meets natural boundaries. Once environment is no longer suitable, it starts to shrink. I wouldn't call it „good life“ or „bad life“. That's just how the world rolls.
> Give me at least one reason why me and my girlfriend should sacrifice her health, career, mental well-being, money and time to do something we both don’t want to?
I don't have to give you a reason. Your environment was supposed to. But this is a very interesting. You're basically saying that a good part of your quality of life relies on not having kids. Not on your high-quality-of-life environment. Vice versa is correct too IMO. People in poor countries would have higher quality of life if they stopped having kids. Less resources towards kids/education/whatever, more towards nice stuff. But this is a bit like maxing out credit cards. And then calling that high quality of life. Just on a societal level. But some people deep in debt seem to enjoy high quality life, don't they? cough US federal debt cough.
Not that I particularly agree in this case but that’s what I learned in my human nature college course.
If you pointed the above out 123 years ago, would the British Empire change your mind?
Population is just one metric of success.
>So I doubt humans with AI will replace humans without.
But they might out live them whilst the manmade chemicals that affect health, like (per|poly)fluoroalkyl (PFAS) that took decades for the law to recognise and legislate against, in much the same way understanding dialects of RegEx in conversation becomes more common place in every day conversation, in order to understand the evolving world we live in.
Has survival of the fittest evolved into survival of the intelligent?
I often see this interpretation that monotheism is somehow more “advanced” than polytheism, even Age of Empires suggested so but why exactly? Because Christianity and Islām became so popular?
As a prime example, many elements of Christmas such as the yule log originate from so-called pagan religions such as Norse.
And over the years Christians have persecuted many when their beliefs didn't agree with the dominant interpretation. The Romans were relatively tolerant of indigenous beliefs, as long as they didn't lead to rebellion.
A slight tangent to your slight tangent: Monastic regimens look an awful lot like proof-of-work... Is the next step in facilitating the human-machine meta-minds minting AI crypto-religions?
Also, taking into account the earlier thread on Sci-Fi vs Sci-Fantasy, with a comment mentioning that science fiction tends to be current social commentary in the guise of the future: self-aware (and self-minting) currency a la Accelerando is an interesting analogy for religious, spiritual, cultural, and economic movements.
That is a later development. In the first millennium AD there were active attempts to export Judaism, the most famous result of which was the conversion of the Khazar kingdom to Judaism. And the very etymology of the word “proselytising” refers to Judaism making some inroads among other inhabitants of the Mediterranean.
In your life of plenty, poor people with nothing, were being ritually humiliated several times over, damming their mental health in hell. One god is less harmful to mental health.
Considering religion is psychological warfare in the absence of todays personal surveillance technological world, you would have thought some religions could be more forgiving for peoples misfortune, but is polytheism a classic example of power unchecked?
Hinduism was designed to normalise human deformities in a region struggling with environmental toxicity and poor health.
Christianity is best for a European climate, Islam is best for a Middle Eastern climate.
Religion was an attempt in the absence of simple items like pen and paper or infrastructure like schools and roads, to educate people through story telling & place names in order to protect them from harm.
Thats why all Christian churches are typically built on natural healthy springs and is considered holy water.
Christian churches are typically in the shape of a cross, Knights Templar churches are round.
And dont look a gift horse in the mouth when its smuggling gold to and from the Crusades! Has anyone tried that in their computer games or is that a knight mare?
More like it facilitated small groups taking over larger communities or communally-usable resources, creating governments to manage their wealth and underlings and armies to attack and loot other tribes.
The other day I was at the lake and looking at ducks, contemplating this. Is a duck really less happy than an average human? Sure, they can't buy fancy iPhones and might get eaten tomorrow, but it's all relative anyways, right?
And before you start suggesting that I'm depressed: I'm not, I have been lucky. I have a happy life, great job, great friends and family. But still, one can't stop and wonder about these things...
Nothing is an inevitability and tomorrow will look different than anyone here or anywhere else tries to predict.
Don’t stop wondering. But I definitely recommend exploring others’ wondering. Especially when it has nothing to do with tech and all to do with your own existence.
After that reading Robert Anton Wilson, Terrance McKenna, Ram Dass, and Tim Leary will leave you probably going back to the start to find all of the things you’ve missed. Don’t take them at their word, either. They use a lot of tricks, but it’s just to add perspective.
Then if you’re still feeling wild take a journey through comparative religion and it will add another dimension to it all yet again.
…then you will go all the way out and back again. Don’t take anything for granted. It’s your life you’re living, and all of these writers and more could recognize at least that. Just don’t forget your good humour. Wilson will remind you of that.
I get the point you're making (progress is an illusion etc.) and have some sympathy with it, but starvation and the constant threat of being killed or dying slowly of a toothache is surely not a 'happy' life.
Personally I think a fulfilling life doesn't need much happiness at all, just contentment with your situation. There isn't much contentment these days, it seems.
But how do you know if a duck is thinking about this? This reasoning only makes sense from a perspective of a 21st century homo sapiens. I think that happiness is relative; I don't believe a duck contemplates how live would be not thinking about where to get the next bite of food.
The same way that people 200 years ago led happy lives. However, a person that lives today but only has access to technology and medicine, while still knowing and seeing that the others have access to today's technology and medicine, would be super unhappy.
Also McLuhan: every communication medium is an extension of man.
AI is a turbo extension of man's ability to string noises together into meaningful phrases: phrases which, like language in general, project the speaker's thought into the mind of the recipient.
AI magnifies this into a stream of babble that can be generated at zero marginal cost and at light speed, altho with the caveat that the stream may have self-reinforcing perturbations (internal feedback loops ?) that may or may not refer back to "reality".
When looking at Europe and all the different languages spoken, along with the over arching religion of the region if not the world, Catholicism, headquartered in Europe, are you not left wondering why they didnt put more effort into getting different tribes to communicate in a common dialect to break down barriers?
Or if Latin was their common dialect, then does it show that royalty and govt's are the divisive one's pitting people against each other, continuing to get a free pass whilst their atrocities are airbrushed out of history?
Meanwhile currently AIs are just an empty linguistic models that have no proper knowledge, nor can tell what's true from what's fully BS, and will defend both or ask for forgiveness for telling both: truth and rubbish hallucination
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_known_surviving... [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/gobeki-t...
Copenhagen and Amsterdam were well on their way to becoming as car dependent as any other American city. It's not just that those cities were built before the car, it's that at some point they decided to stop shaping their city for the car.
This claim gets trotted out quite often, but it is only valid if you are specifically referring to the development of Amsterdam’s bicycle infrastructure. Even during those years when Amsterdam saw a rise in car traffic, the city never stopped offering public transit of the sort that most Americans could only dream of. So, the average resident was not forced to own a car.
Pre-christian Roman empire, Ancient Greece, China, India are all examples of advanced ancient civilizations that were happily polytheistic
Surely you aren't suggesting that mathematics, language, philosophy, or abstract thought in general is only 300 years old. Surely not.
Here, let me pull up Klaus Schwab's "Covid-19: The Great Reset."
"As far back as the Black Death that ravaged Europe from 1347 to 1351 (and that suppressed 40% of Europe’s population in just a few years), workers discovered for the first time in their life that the power to change things was in their hands. Barely a year after the epidemic had subsided, textile workers in Saint-Omer (a small city in northern France) demanded and received successive wage rises. Two years later, many workers’ guilds negotiated shorter hours and higher pay, sometimes as much as a third more than their pre-plague level. Similar but less extreme examples of other pandemics point to the same conclusion: labour gains in power to the detriment of capital. Nowadays, this phenomenon may be exacerbated by the ageing of much of the population around the world (Africa and India are notable exceptions), but such a scenario today risks being radically altered by the rise of automation, an issue to which we will return in section 1.6. Unlike previous pandemics, it is far from certain that the COVID-19 crisis will tip the balance in favour of labour and against capital. For political and social reasons, it could, but technology changes the mix."
Schwab, Klaus; Malleret, Thierry. COVID-19: The Great Reset (p. 39). Forum Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Computers actually did replace human computers (literally the origin of the word, people who sat all day and did math).
But now we're creating artificial minds. And I haven't heard a good argument why they can't replace humans pretty much everywhere.
Human minds are limited by the size of the skull. Digital minds don't have that limitation. They can, seemingly, be arbitrarily large (and maybe arbitrarily smart, as a result).
Everyone who says AI will replace humans conveniently ignores the fact that Homo sapiens is the only member of the Homo genus left because we out-smarted, out-bred, and, especially, out-killed all the others.
And we (collectively, at least, not individually) know where the AI’s power hookups are.
Agriculture shaped humans to create buildings, create social classes with different levels of power, create armies, governments and rulers to protect themselves from other tribes. Gradually these grew up became empires and created monotheist religions to substitute animist religions.
The Industrial Revolution shaped humans and culture to move to cities, work in factories/offices instead of home/fields and to think in more abstract terms (math, written words, etc).
Cars shaped human society, governments and urban plans to be heavily dependent on roads and all the car assistance economy. Think Houston/Los Angeles vs. Copenhagen/Amsterdam.
Radio, television and publicity shaped our daily lives to consume a lot of crap we don't really need, from cigarettes to diamond rings.
Social media shaped our political discourse into tribal stupidity and paranoia.
So just use basic Marshall McLuhan: the media is the message. Technology shapes humans and culture. AI will shape humans and culture. We just don't know how.