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Not obvious to me. I am generally a fan of Cyberspace manifesto and the free Internet, I think it's great people can reach outside their ingroup and talk to strangers and ostensible enemies.
But, that doesn't mean we should give up physical security, the guarantee that the connecting party comes from a certain physical location (state, company). I think allowing connections from anywhere by default is fundamentally flawed security architecture, for certain things.
But it's actually much weaker condition than it looks, because, for example, lot of representations of boolean circuits are equivalent up to linear transformations over Z_2^n.
Anyway, if they truly proven such a theorem you won't find "incompatible" representations of the same thing.
The argument "but Norway has oil" is so tiring. So what, US has a big tech with huge profits. Why can't you have a UBI from ads? Of course you can.
What's really amazing are the lengths by which people justify they cannot have a nice society. It's easy to see, mathematically, the willingness to share has no relation to absolute GDP or where it comes from.
I said it's plausible. Perhaps not for basic materials, but things like robot frames, higher tier research packs, modules, anything that has low component amount compared to time or amount required for crafting.
Even speedrunners do quite a bit of handfeed. And if AI/player cannot figure out the automation fast enough - the handfeed might easily come on top.
I have a similar problem on my GK2 vibegamed playthrough (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50302771), if I want computer to play similar to how a human would, I need to artificially close that loophole (for example, AI prefers to gather/eat low-tier food to cooking better).
But I am pointing it out, because lot of our ethics concerning humans (and animals) is based on irreproducibility. Things humans can build/reproduce we (at least ostensibly) value less.
Federation valued all life forms, while Terrans struggle to value even all other humans.
But there are interesting differences between Data and AI agents. Data was unique and irreproducible, but modern AI agents are easy to replicate. Data had continuous loop of operation as humans, which he controlled autonomously, for AI agents this is not as clear. Data was an independent being, but AI agent needs a human operated datacenter to survive.
The most interesting - Data knew everything about human culture but was lot more humble about it than AI agents. It wasn't built to answer every question posed to it.
Further estimation gave it's about like having another gaming PC, i.e. 100-300W when I am actually gaming.
I live quite low carbon intensity lifestyle, don't travel much, don't have a car or a family, so it's not really a big expense.
The same question can be asked about any modern game, which requires electricity and time to play. I don't have a better answer than that. And I think there are more wasteful activities that people do (like wars for example).
I would like to talk to it because then I could do other things with my hands while watching the agent playing.
- There is a mod (bot) in the game that handles the fast decisions on sub 1-second timescale; it is also hot-reloadable and gives informational overlay.
- There is a decision/policy server that makes macro decisions, such as what to build and what goals to pursue. It knows all the game rules and connects to the mod.
- Finally, AI agent (Claude) connects via MCP to the server. Through it, the micro and macro agents are developed. Both micro and macro policy agents can record what's happening, and the decisions, I usually only use AI to give policy feedback on what could be improved, and for writing the code.
Eventually, the plan is to make the goal planning macro server generic (I call it "game resource planning system", ERP for games) for many games (right now, my top list is Stardew Valley, Factorio and modded Minecraft), with rules (and agents mods/micro policy scripts) available as plugins.
I think it's a great setup because it saves lot of tokens spend on mundane things. (One thing that would make it nicer would be voice support for Claude Code, so I could watch the game and chat with CC what could be done better, without having to read/write.)
I have a schizoid brother. He never worked for a living his whole life (he's 46). He lives off my mum's income, and spends his day in front of the computer screen. He has no friends and no relationships.
Horrible, right? But he has a chemical engineering degree, and in his late 30s started to learn to cook. And, he (to the extent he's not addicted to the screen) helps my mum with chores.
So even he found a way to motivate himself to do something useful. And look, most people are not schizoid.
Under UBI, if you have some skill, you can get paid by people (possibly from their UBI) to do stuff they don't want to deal with. Many people will take that offer (to work more), just like many people pick more work, higher wage job over less work, lower wage.
Really depends. These are people in the same social class. But I have never seen a cleaning lady that works as a contractor being invited to a corporate party event.
That being said, I think his straussian worldview is probably his own.
Another difference is the binary code - I can run the same agent on a different computing substrate (e.g. different CPU), but with humans no one can do that. That has implications, we can study or modify AI agent behavior, for instance.
But I am going in an opposite direction. Instead of rejecting formal languages in favor of natural ones, I think we should embrace formalism even on the level of specifications, requirements and our model of the world. Partly because that's what LLMs actually do - they de facto formalize these things.
On the other hand, there exist programming languages (like Jot, a certain encoding of combinatory logic) where every binary string is a valid program.
But even if we write in Python like foo.bar(), the interpretation depends on what is in module foo and function bar, how they are defined contextually.
You can try to find some difference but most modern AI agents come more close to a language interpreter than not, if the actual instructions are given.
OTOH, giving instructions to people is not programming. People do not consist of binary code that is reliably executed; they are biological organisms subject to environmental pressures such as being tired. They have their own consciousness and will, and can refuse to follow the instructions. LLMs are programs; they cannot decide not to respond.