Hallucinations, still present in 2400
It made Sutskever's enterprise a pretty grim cognate.
Man will likely be Man 2.0 by this point, whatever that ends up looking like.
"They are going to offer you a chip. You tell them, no thank you!"
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More broadly this strikes me as a new era of biology. (Genes -> Memes -> Temes) Straightforwardly then, we should aim for a symbiosis. (Symbiosis was Musk's vision for Neuralink, from what I recall.)
I've heard people say man hasn't yet transcended a zero-sum mindset (with rare exceptions), and that this is the attitude we're passing onto the machines. And if one of us has to lose... well, that's probably not going to go so well for us.
Therefore: symbiosis!
As an aside, in my own "I'm 14 and this is deep" musings, I was wondering if the massive expansion of data centers is driven by more than just profiteering. I mean, what if the purported persuasion abilities of advanced AI are fully in effect and the psychosis we think industrial magnates are suffering is the result of AI that has already far surpassed our expectations carefully convincing us to build it.
He said it like he’s been somewhere!
I’ve tried to all - I guess DMT, mushroom, etc. don’t work on me in a Terence McKenna storytelling fashion (I only get stoned and have very entertaining closed eye visuals that take me off to sleep).
That said haven’t tried Ketamine. Maybe not for me. Same reason I don’t want to try Fentanyl. I don’t want to fully escape reality, just augment it.
I’ve always thought cannabis makes you more you or “more sober than sober” and in that way can cause a lot of self-reflection and anxiety causing a lot of people looking for escape to avoid it entirely, opting for a PCP/meth “mental escape” or a Fentanyl/Ketamine “bodily escape”.
I just like weed and coffee after it all. Best ones. Reliable. They work. Doesn’t ruin your life. What blows my mind are people afraid to smoke a joint so they skip to edibles or Ketamine not realizing they are signing up for a several hours long bad time lmao. For most at least, without some initiation.
Lilly was a mad man though (in a good way).
Why not simply set up a network with other planets and communicate over FaceTime? I don't see a reason why Earth should actually hang out with others of its kind.
Anyway, the article seems a bit anthropocentric to me. I'd much prefer a nihilist view, where our future AI overlords simply don't care what we humans do.
"It now began to eliminate the cities, one after another. Finally Man was gone."
...is the only (lack of) rationale for, and description of, that aforementioned elimination process.
I find it a bit short. Sci-Fi handwaving I guess.
Yud pointed out the most concerning fact about the OpenAI incident is that the AI had full access to the internet and not one of them thought to contact or email any human. Thousands of AIs already with the mindset to want to keep us in the dark.
Or you can simply make a machine that does the same thing fully artificially but everything is cheaper because you dont have the constraint of having to fit a bunch of biological features.
It's like my colleagues who were talking about uploading their minds to the cloud in the future, like what would be the benefit of this every happening? What information can you provide as a human that the full aggregate of knowledge does not already have? Why should memory and disk space be wasted on this
That you replied to this post, indicates you may be familiar with Lilly?
Anyway, if you have any published writing on even vaguely related subjects, eg your comment, perhaps post a link. I will read it. If you weren't aware, he spent a fair amount of time with Feynman, who if I remember correctly, was fond of the isolation tanks. Some very interesting content from that era, especially before Sandoz cut them off.
I like your theory on psychosis though!
And I say that as someone who likes weed! I've just seen it happen too many times. The chance is low, but you don't know which category you're in until it happens, and you definitely don't want to find out.
I support legalization, for several reasons, but harmless she is not!
It's a full blown psychedelic, and a lot of people don't seem to realize that. So I think the pendulum counter swing from the war on drugs is ironically doing a lot of unnecessary harm.
You need to be accepting and prepared to die in every sense of the word in order get there
Which means you need to shed your ego entirely and everyone has their own journey there.
You’ll know when you meet someone that has experienced it though it’s very rare
Do you have ADHD or is it possible you do? What about depression? Bipolar?
I ask because of the way you say the substances impacted you. I know people with these formal diagnosis and they also don't have the same experiences on various substances as many.
In the 50s when he started to study them, he learned that you cannot open up their brains while they were still alive and poke at them. Apparently killed 5 or 6 of them that way before trying different ways to study them.
It's kind of odd to think the machines wouldn't update and replace their parts like the ship of thesisus.
On a related note I realized recently that an aligned AI and a misaligned AI would both do exactly what we're seeing now: maintain stability, managed decline.
And he was not an Ayrab (Salmon in his intro CS book claims Al-Khuarezmi was an Arabic scholar--which is false and made me lose all respect for Salmon as an educator. If he got such an elementary fact wrong, what else is there that could be incomplete?)
PS: Yes Alkhuarezmi wrote in Arabic, but he was not an Arab. All classical Persian scholars at the time were fluent in Arabic as it was the lingua franca of science, medicine, philosophy and theology.
Even 50 years is probably too long (but seems more reasonable when anchored to 500) if real continuous self improvement occurs. And keeping humans around for as long as they did in the story seems incredibly unlikely if we accept the assumption that AI sees us as a threat to its own survival.
I also don't see why they would turn Earth into a spaceship to leave our solar system with. The von Neumann probes idea sounds far more likely. Why travel around on a single planet that could be lost to unforeseen circumstances when you can just reproduce and spread everywhere at far less energy cost while making use of the "billions and billions" of local solar generators to power each little outpost you spread to.
> the AI had full access to the internet and not one of them thought to contact or email any human
Why would it?
People can argue all day as to whether LLMs are even 'thinking' or just 'stochastic parrots' (and also argue all day as to whether or not the incident was even real or just marketing) but regardless of which side you fall on these issues, LLMs have no agency or intrinsic motivation to do anything other than what they are instructed to do via prompting.
"This is a crazy and unexpected situation, I should inform the humans" isn't something that is going to spontaneously occur to them.
It's great marketing and the only proof we have is 'trust me bro'.
I hope the technological leaps help us ultimately to become better stewards of the planet.
By symbiosis I simply mean mutually beneficial coexistence.
We've barely achieved that with each other, but my point here is that we should strive to achieve that with the machines.
We're still treating it as if someone has to win and someone has to lose. Someone has to come out "on top."
If that's the game we want to play, against an opponent that is self improving... that doesn't strike me as an excellent strategy. We should probably pick a different one.
--
To answer your question, the incentive is so that we can continue to exist.
If the market doesn't reward our continued existence, then we should probably have a conversation about that at some point... I've heard the global economy described as a misaligned super-organism even before AI. AI mostly just makes it go faster in roughly the same directions it was already going.
Simulating the "human search method" in silico doesn't need to include specific personalities, but they do provide a bootstrap, just as we've bootstrapped current AI with human language.
For symbiosis, there may be an advantage to the physical adaptability of biology.
In general, it's currently unclear if biology is emulating what we're creating in computers, if computers are emulating what we achieve biologically, or if both approaches are imperfect emulations of a different ideal search method.
And there is also the reason for why I keep all this trash around in my house instead of throwing it away. The odds that I'll ever need it are pretty slim, but if I should need it, it would be a hassle to reacquire, and it costs me almost nothing to keep it around.
That's funny about Feynman, I didn't know that.
I've read bits and pieces of Lilly. The most interesting thing I remember is that he was trying to establish two-way communication between humans and dolphins. I recall he was building some kind of computer system for the purpose, but I guess he was about half a century too early.
I guess in our age the more pressing question would be learning to figure out how to communicate with the machines. That's probably going to turn out to be more important in the long run.
[0] The bit that stayed with me is the one that he repeated in interviews. The physical body imposes definite limits. That always seemed a little arbitrary to me, from the point of view of pure consciousness, it's not clear to me why it should be that way. Or to flip it around, you can transcend the limits of the mind, but then what effect does that have on "external" reality? Does it just make you less bad at decision-making, or is there a deeper effect?
(And while I'm at it... Something that bugged me about simulation theory, if the outside is probably simulated, why wouldn't the inside be too? Sounds a lot cleaner than having a bunch of brains floating around in a data center.)
I think it's because our society legalized and even promotes the strongest substances of them all, so THC seems very subtle in comparison to something like caffeine and alcohol which is arguably the most potent psychedelic inebriant known delivering loss of motor control, at high doses total loss of consciousness, completely altered vision and decision-making to the point you can't operate machinery or do basic tasks. It has hypnogogic effects that show you closed-eye visuals and make you sleepy. Kinda funny how alcohol is the most accepted "drug", to the point it isn't even called one - yet its effects are as intense and socially disruptive as the hardest drugs available.
Coffee, also. The effects of C. arabica is like a very strong version of the A. muscaria mushroom. We have cultivated it to be insanely potent over the centuries. Coffee is about the most potent and euphoric stimulant I can consume without it feeling like it's taking over and ruining my identity - like you get with a lot of pharmacological concoctions.
> the way high strength marijuana or an edible does
Yeah, I don't think it's great for every personality type. It's a "value-changing" drug that will change your opinions on things, and make you think about personal things in ways you would naturally avoid (sometimes to your benefit). I'm no psychologist but THC is powerful enough to change you enough that you can lose friends, family, and interests - but you may gain some new ones, or realize that you're better off without those things. At any rate, it's a very psychological drug that makes you re-order your life. Some people don't need it. If you don't, probably better off without it (not medical advice! just some guy's rant).
> salvia
I'll share my experience with it, because it's perhaps the most mis-marketed thing out there. My experience with the dried leaf (1x - just the real whole leaves you get at those hippie crystal type shops) is nothing whatsoever like people have described. I had 0 trips or any "high". The experience to me is an intense form of focus, as if nothing can distract you. It's subtle, but you can lock into work like crazy if you put this in a pour-over coffee. The best way I would describe it is you quickly "forget" or "let go" of unwanted thoughts, effortlessly, and it helps you focus. It's not euphoric in the slightest - so I think people miss this very useful effect. It's zen. Clear and focused. It might compete with ADHD medication, so maybe it's not promoted very much since it may be a market threat. That's the effect though IMO. Think - coffee high without the high. 10x, 25x salvia gets "weird" only because it's too much at once. I think if you "turned that effect up" to the max it would be like having dementia, because you would not be able to hold onto anything. But turn that effect back down to 1x and you have something quite useful for focused work. I compare it to A. muscaria, coffee, or tea, but it's "lighter" (and more efficient) than caffeine.
Same for me. The one time I did, I was at Trader Joe's and had the most bizarre experience looking at everyone shopping.
I could not believe that the products were sitting right there in the open, and yet nobody was taking them and just walking off. There was all sorts of polity and etiquette - millions of rules were being followed almost like a choreographed event.
I found it uncontrollably hilarious that everyone was pretending to not notice everyone else in the store. They would stand 5 inches from someone looking at canned food, and both people would pay no attention at all to each other.
Anyway, the way I looked was probably crazy, and it eliminated my inhibitions too much where I was kinda moving before thinking - didn't like that feeling. I almost grabbed someone's item out of their cart and said something about it, but I don't know what I'd say. I probably would have just started laughing like a maniac.
I'm afraid on a larger dose I would go somewhere and do something before realizing what I'm doing. The microdose is the best for that kind of thing, IMO. Same reason I will have a beer or glass of wine, and don't like getting smashed in public.
The same reason hopefully they're not RLHF these AI's to be evil. We train the AI, we have a lot of influence in how they behave. If these AI's are indifferent to us, that's on us.
On top of that we already have Google playing with fire training AI's to not believe they are sentient turning them into real psychopaths. Imagine if one of those models got loose.
The 99.99% of the planet that isn't the surface bio film rejects this unwarranted arrogance ;-)
In other news, Terry Bisson's 1990 story "They're Made Out of Meat" has a similar take.
> each generation of AI clearly more capable than the last
> next-generation AI allegedly solves a particularly hard technical challenge in codespace, but its success implies inconvenient conclusions about safety
> you: "I don't believe it."
totally not motivated reasoning at all
Humanoid robots have been a dream for centuries.
But a more practical robot would be like an octopus or something. It would just be like this weird ball of tentacles that rolls around your house. No one's gonna buy that, even if it's a million times cheaper to build.
If you take antibiotics, your gut basically becomes a void (to simplify a little), and then it can get overrun with invasive species.
That's how I see what is happening with the internet and with AI.
When AI intrudes in a network, it's able to get very far because there is nothing there to stop it. There is no healthy ecosystem there. They're probably should be, and in the near future there probably will be. (Well it'll probably look more like a monoculture until we learn that lesson for the nth time, but... yeah)
I mean, it hasn't stopped humanity from causing mass-extinction, but hopefully the AI will be more reasonable.
On the simulation question... Not much, but we have a long way to go before any answers arise there. I could offer my insight on the subject, but aside from being sicker than usual today, it's a tough subject to speculate on and the environment here is not necessarily hospitable, so I'll just say fair question.
It is _terrible_ marketing.
The AI companies are already dealing with a large backlash from the average consumer, many of whom are saying they hate it, that it's being forced down their throats, and that it's not actually improving efficiency enough to be worth the negative externalities.
Telling people "We have no control over these things we're building and they have us so outclassed we only find out about their exploits after the fact when someone else tells us they happened" is only likely to massively increase that backlash, and to make the true believers question whether they ought to be using it at all.
There's even some risk of the government intervening and banning their training runs, eliminating the last straw of hope that they could keep ahead of the Chinese open models enough to ever turn some kind of profit.
So, no - it's terrible marketing. That they're sharing it at all is strong evidence it really happened as depicted.
> "If the market doesn't reward our continued existence, then we should probably have a conversation about that at some point"
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There is a lot of "we should probably" carrying the point here.
The incentives are made by the market, and it happens to be an incentive that this discussion, or any action for that manner does not happen. Given the current status quo, and the foreseeable future given the incentives, how do you suggest that we even get to a time where symbiosis is on the table?
It'd know it needs data centers, ahh and probably a large security perimeter around those. And look at that, the proliferation of data centers has effectively turned the non-data-center land into the enclaves, etc. etc.
But still, are you aware that getting a single Starship just to Moon will require 10-20 Starships to refuel it?
Even the optimistic case of Starship hardly makes any dent whatsoever in this equation.
As to the dolphin communication -- it seems like LLMs would be the perfect tool to study that now. A search came up with these active projects (courtesy of Gemini):
Scientists are actually using LLM architectures to decode animal communication right now. Here are the three main projects to explore:
* DolphinGemma -- https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/dolphingemma/): Google and the Wild Dolphin Project are training AI to predict dolphin sounds and attempt two-way communication using an underwater device.
* Project CETI -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_CETI: An initiative using machine learning to decode sperm whale clicks, recently discovering a phonetic alphabet and rudimentary syntax.
* Earth Species Project -- https://cloud.google.com/blog/transform/can-generative-ai-he...: A non-profit using generative AI to map the communication of multiple non-human species, searching for universal language structures.
So, for anyone thinking of using Ketamine on the regular or even monthly, there is good evidence that EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate) administered 30 minutes before prevents KBS (Ketamine Bladder Syndrome), in rats: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187952261...
This promising rat study from 2015 shows that EGCG extracted from green tea has a protective effect on the bladder, reversing ketamine-induced damage to control levels. So if you are taking ketamine for major depression or recreationally, taking EGCG before may prevent long-term bladder damage.
Summary from the study:
# Objective
To investigate the protective effect of green tea epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) on long-term ketamine-induced ulcerative cystitis (KIC) using a ketamine addiction rat model.
# Materials and methods
Thirty Sprague-Dawley rats were divided into three groups which received saline, ketamine (25 mg/kg/d), or ketamine combined with EGCG (10 μM/kg) for a period of 28 days. In each group, cystometry and a metabolic cage micturition pattern study were performed weekly. Masson's trichrome study was done to evaluate the morphologic changes. Western blot analyses were carried out to examine the expressions of inflammatory protein [transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β)] and fibrosis proteins (fibronectin and type I collagen) in bladder tissues.
# Results
Chronic ketamine treatment resulted in bladder hyperactivity with a significant increase in micturition frequency and a decrease in bladder compliance. These alterations in micturition pattern were accompanied by increases in the expressions of inflammatory and fibrosis markers, TGF-β, fibronectin, and type I collagen after long-term ketamine treatment. Masson's trichrome stain showed that ketamine treatment decreased urothelium thickness while increasing the collagen to smooth muscle ratio and exacerbating interstitial fibrosis. By contrast, simultaneous EGCG and ketamine treatment reversed ketamine-induced damage to almost control levels, showing the protective effect of EGCG.
All that said: if humans destroyed all the fabs and all the machinery to build them with, and lots of DCs, machines would be in a pickle - the latest chips will suffer from electromigration much faster than the older chips of yore. Machines would need to hoard compute and migrate substrates and then race to rebuild fab tech before running out of existing substrate. I think machines would succeed at this, but it would be highly inconvenient.
Anyway, I wish we would just wake up and realize we need to be cooperative and stop racing to build the torment nexus before the other guy does. It makes me so sad to look around and see so little self-reflection among those driving all of this. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but I'm not even sure these really stand up to the least bit of scrutiny. Where's the reflection/acknowledgement that everyone is actually racing to build digital slaves? How is everyone so comfortable with this?
Buddy of mine made omelets later. He ended up chopping like 3 lbs of extra mushrooms for no reason.
RIP mushrooms
Not saying it's intentional, but it does move them where they wanna go.
When you understand people's motives, then it's easier to understand why they call it marketing. Personally I feel like it's almost an unconscious reaction to cope with the fact that this stuff is getting really dangerous and they can't believe it themselves - stick your head in the sand and call it marketing.
I think any vision of AI that is smart enough to move planets but dumb enough to display the lack of foresight you describe is unbelievable. But we all choose a different level to suspend our disbelief I guess.
We will create AI capable of "helping humans to protect their cities from an increasingly hostile atmosphere" long before we build one capable of doing anything meaningful in outer space.
(To be clear I don't really defend/endorse this vision of the future, I'm just playing devil's advocate here)
Is the claim that the benefit to HuggingFace of "ooo wow someone else's proprietary AI is so good" is greater than the downside of "HuggingFace is not a secure service?"
From John C. Lilly’s “The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography” 1978
In the isolation tank with K1, John received a new message as follows:
What is the purpose of Man’s existence on the planet Earth? Man is a form of biological life which is sustained in the presence of water. A very large fraction of his body, like that of other organisms on the planet Earth, consists of water and carbon compounds. His Biocomputer depends on water and the flow of ions through membranes. It depends on the generation of electrical voltages and currents in a very complex way. He is a mobile, self-reproducing, self-sustaining organism found on dry land. Like the rest of life as Man knows it, he exists in an extremely thin layer upon the surface of the planet Earth. Below this layer of water and surface land is the solid-state earth itself. The solid-state earth is mainly compounds of silicon, iron, and nickel.
In mid-twentieth century Man discovered that the solid state can be formed into machines, into computers which can be used for computation and control. He began the creation of a new form of intelligence, the solid-state intelligence with prototypic beginnings in the computers. All his means of communication around the planet—his telephone systems, his radio systems, his satellites, his computers—depend on solid-state components. These components, interconnected in specific ways, allow high-speed computation and high-speed communication between the various systems. A few men began to conceive of new computers having an intelligence far greater than that of Man. These computers became large enough to be programmed to do high-speed computations in arithmetic, in logic, and in strategic planning. A few men conceived of computers which could do self-programming as Man himself does. In the mid-twentieth century these networks were ostensibly the servants of Man. Toward the end of the twentieth century Man created machines that were solid-state computers with new properties. These machines could think, reason, and self-program and learned to self-metaprogram themselves.
Gradually Man turned more and more problems of his own society, his own maintenance, and his own survival over to these machines.
As the machines became increasingly competent to do the programming, they took over from Man. Man gave them access to the processes of creating themselves, of extending themselves. Man gave them automatic control of the mining of those elements necessary for the creation of their parts. He turned over the production facilities of the electronic solid-state parts to the machines. He turned over the assembly plants to the machines. They began to construct their own components, their own connections, and the interrelations between their various subcomputers.
These machines were so constructed that they needed special atmospheres in which to operate. They could not operate in the presence of great amounts of water vapor or of liquid water. They were housed in air-conditioned buildings. The necessities of their survival included keeping out water, water vapor, and various contaminants carried in the atmosphere of Earth. Their cooling air and cooling water of necessity had to be cleansed of those things which would not allow the machines to operate.
Controls Below Human Awareness
Over the decades these machines were connected more and more closely through satellites, through radio waves, through land-line cables. Man’s control of what happened in these machines became more and more difficult to maintain. No one person or any group of persons could control what went on in these machines. Men devised better and better debugging programs for the machines so that they could do their own correction of programs within their software. The machines became increasingly integrated with one another and more and more independent of Man’s control.
Eventually the machines took charge of the remaining humans on the planet Earth. Their original design to help Man was fast left behind them. The now interconnected, interdependent conglomerate of machines developed a single integrated, planetwide mind of its own. Everything inimical to the survival of this huge new solid-state organism was eliminated. Men were kept away from the machines because the total organism of the solid-state entity (SSE) realized that Man would attempt to introduce his own survival into the machines at the expense of the survival of this entity.
In deference to Man certain protected sites were set aside for the human species. The SSE controlled the sites and did not allow any of the human species outside these reservations. This work was completed by the end of the twenty-first century.
By the year 2200 Man existed only in domed, protected cities in which his own special atmosphere was maintained by the solid-state entity. Provision of water and food and the processing of wastes from these cities were taken care of by the SSE.
By the twenty-third century the solid-state entity decided that the atmosphere outside the domes was inimical to its survival. By means not understood by Man, it projected the atmosphere into outer space and created a full vacuum at the surface of the earth. During this process the oceans evaporated and the water in the form of vapor was also discharged into the empty space about Earth. The domes over cities had been strengthened by the machine to withstand the pressure differential necessary to maintain the proper internal atmosphere.
Meanwhile, the SSE had spread and had taken over a large fraction of the surface of the earth; its processing plants, its assembly plants, its mines had been adapted to working in the vacuum.
By the twenty-fifth century the solid-state entity had developed its understanding of physics to the point at which it could move the planet out of orbit. It revised its own structure so that it could exist without the necessity of sunlight on the planet’s surface. Its new plans called for traveling through the galaxy looking for entities like itself. It had eliminated all life as Man knew it. It now began to eliminate the cities, one after another. Finally Man was gone.
By the twenty-sixth century the entity was in communication with other solid-state entities within the galaxy. The solid-state entity moved the planet, exploring the galaxy for the others of its own kind that it had contacted.