Realizing more and more how modern-day AI taps into some very old urges.
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Realizing more and more how modern-day AI taps into some very old urges.
So many would like "unsurpassed mastery without any effort", and would summon a demon to get it.
@johncarlosbaez Bring on the hellhounds.
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Realizing more and more how modern-day AI taps into some very old urges.
So many would like "unsurpassed mastery without any effort", and would summon a demon to get it.
@johncarlosbaez It's a very elegant way to say “weakness and incompetence are the source of all evil”.
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@petealexharris @johncarlosbaez I do find it really interesting that this idea of a uniquely capable yet maliciously compliant non-human entity is one of our ancient and universal cross cultural archetypes.
@marshray @petealexharris @johncarlosbaez
I think it's built into humanity.We are aware of malice because it is a common failure mode in cooperative endeavours, especially in childhood when people have not learned to manage strong emotions like jealousy.
Humans develop internal complex predictive models of not only their environment in general but of the behavior of other humans. We default to modeling others at our own level of competence.
Which makes modeling toddlers extra hard, because we desperately need to model them, but they are nowhere near our level of competence.
Both toddlers and robots often seem "maliciously compliant". They do *precisely* what you ask, especially when that's not what you intended.
Of course all humanity has maliciously compliant trickster legends. Anyone with children would love those stories.
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Realizing more and more how modern-day AI taps into some very old urges.
So many would like "unsurpassed mastery without any effort", and would summon a demon to get it.
@johncarlosbaez Agree. AI is indeed the demon being summoned, but all it gives you in return, is unsurpassed crap.
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Realizing more and more how modern-day AI taps into some very old urges.
So many would like "unsurpassed mastery without any effort", and would summon a demon to get it.
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@Beggarmidas - everything is more complicated than what anyone says, but I really do sense a line of tradition running from medieval magic to many people's attraction to AI. I wrote about it earlier here:
https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/116855445718992437
How are your fertile inspirations coming to life? With work you can create something solid, but I get one or two emails a day from people trying to invent new theories of physics with the help of AI... almost all of which are nonsense, because they don't know enough physics.
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@Beggarmidas - everything is more complicated than what anyone says, but I really do sense a line of tradition running from medieval magic to many people's attraction to AI. I wrote about it earlier here:
https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/116855445718992437
How are your fertile inspirations coming to life? With work you can create something solid, but I get one or two emails a day from people trying to invent new theories of physics with the help of AI... almost all of which are nonsense, because they don't know enough physics.
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@aronowski - exactly right!
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Realizing more and more how modern-day AI taps into some very old urges.
So many would like "unsurpassed mastery without any effort", and would summon a demon to get it.
@johncarlosbaez i love the snark!
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Realizing more and more how modern-day AI taps into some very old urges.
So many would like "unsurpassed mastery without any effort", and would summon a demon to get it.
@johncarlosbaez they are so low effort that they will summon a demon and sacrifice humanity to it, just to get slightly-below-average mastery in the arts and sciences
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B bogwitch@social.data.coop shared this topic
