We don't need to live "side by side" with AI. AI is not alive, it's a technology we use. This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster.
The illusion works only in places like American and Canadian suburbs in which residents depend entirely on cars for even the shortest trips. Everything takes 10-100x the space due to all the paved asphalt. It’s an intensely alienating approach to building infrastructure.
The isolation produced by centering our urban and suburban design around cars is pronounced. It cannot be understated how much damage cars have done to our sense of connectedness, community, walkability, and health.
Human consciousness is dictated by their material conditions, not the other way around. If the material reality of many Americans is unhealthy foods and heavily car-centric urban design, where does the "decision" to walk and take public transit come from? It is genuinely not an option for the vast majority of Americans to live in a walkable and/or public transit supported community if the infrastructure does not exist.
And this wasn't due to consumer choice, either. Decades of policy dictated the shift towards car centrism that resulted in railways and street cars being torn up, the construction of the interstate highway system and destruction of dense urban cores, zoning law mandates and parking minimums, federal subsidies for suburban mortgages, etc.
This "choice" or "decision" was manufactured by car lobbyists.
It’s not exactly a free choice when the built environment and infrastructure is designed around a single mode of transport. I can’t just “choose to cycle” when there are no bike paths, or “choose to walk” when things are spread out and separated by impassible freeways as to make it impossible. Look up the various ways the oil and automotive lobby has influenced city planning over the years – it might become a little more obvious who has the “free choice” here, and it’s not consumers.
It's not just a matter of preference or proclamation. There are decades of research showing that more walkable neighborhoods are associated with higher physical activity levels, lower rates of some chronic diseases, more interaction with neighbors, and stronger feelings of community. The debate is usually about how large those effects are and whether they're worth the trade-offs, not whether the effects exist at all.
Yes, yes, totally dismiss the agency of people who inconveniently don't like what you want them to like. Their preferences mean nothing, their actions must be dictated.
I'd be more angry with you if I wasn't amused at the frustration you must be feeling in failing to get traction for your dystopian vision.
You're making a lot of unwarranted assumptions about me:
I'm not dismissing agency.
I don't feel people making decisions is inconvenient.
I don't not like their decisions.
Their preferences do not mean nothing.
I'm not dictating their actions.
I own and drive 2 cars.
I'll just stop there. I don't feel this conversation can continue in a positive way.
Walkable neighborhoods and cities that aren't car centric being a "dystopian vision" is laughable. Thankfully, the default for car brains across much of the globe is car centric urban design.
You people never fail to be ridiculously dramatic.
Horse and cart, no. But some cities have banned cars and replaced them with various alternatives, and it works.
There are alternatives to the car culture we have. It would require significantly rebuilding how we build infrastructure, but the result could be much safer, cleaner, and less stressful.
Of course Americans would rather die, but counties of sane people might be able to work it out.
The car did not replace the horse and cart. This is an oft cited and widely believed myth. It replaced mostly walking, but also cycling, trollies and trains. And it didn't do so until after a huge build out of infrastructure to accommodate drivers at the cost of everything else.
After the building of highways and roads cities were no longer walkable, people had moved out into the suburbs, their jobs were now a couple of towns over and they couldn't even walk to the grocery store. Cars enabled that, but politicians and capitalist were the ones who did that.
> It replaced mostly walking, but also cycling, trollies and trains.
And everything was carried on people's heads, yeah? The horse and cart was in use right up to the 20th century my man...there was no other way to move heavy items across land until the combustion engine (or canals thought that's not technically over land)
Yes, true. You found one thing that people used mostly horse and cart for which they now use lorries and vans for today. However since the invention of car (after it stopped being a toy for rich people) cars have by far been mostly [like overwhelmingly so] used for personal transport. And I simply assumed that is what you meant (because that is what most people mean).
Horse and cart was used for a personal transport very rarely, by a tiny subset of the population for a minority of their trips, the vast majority of the population lived within a walking distance for the vast majority of their trips, the invention of the steam engine ruined that and suddenly people started living within a tram-ride for vast majority of their trips, and started using trains to go on longer trips they simply couldn’t do before. The car took this to the extreme, and ruined the cities on a scale which the tram was previously unable to.
> and ruined the cities on a scale which the tram was previously unable to.
Industrial era London was not a utopia. Read a Dickens novel. It was a hellhole. The car also made the suburbs possible. They kill millions every year but the benefits massively outweigh it (or at least society has effectively voted for that).
First off, you don't know if duskdozer doesn't want to go back to cart and horse. Second even if they don't there's an enormous amount of space between horses and https://parkingreform.org/resources/parking-lot-map/ a third of my downtown being parking lots, downtown which is already the dense bit.
Apart from the super intelligence bit. We are already struggling to build systems with enough memory to hold this brute force statistical approach, how exactly will AI fix this?
Just look at the disruption smartphones and social media have caused. They had a gigantic impact to society and one definitely has to 'live with' that.
Just because something can impact a living system/organism, that doesn't mean that that thing is alive. An asteroid colliding with us on Earth could have tremendous consequences, but nobody would argue that an asteroid is alive.
It's essentially the same concept. Here are some examples:
> "The authors discuss two enduring lessons of the Internet revolution: The first is that new technologies do not replace the old. They live side by side."
> I don't live side by side with the possibility of an asteroid impact, nuclear war, etc.
No, but idiomatically, you already live side by side with AI, and will do so even more in future, whether you like the idiom or the actual experience, or not.
Does taking a skin cell, turning it into a stem cell, dividing it into specialized sperm and egg cells then making a living being provide some proof to Animism?
To be honest, I don't believe it is a any more crazy believe than all of the other religions. But practitioners there might have a bit more respect for existing things and not mindlessly crush because they can, so I actually like the concept a bit. But I assume it can also set foundation for some exhausting debates .. "can we really move that random rock to build a house with?" but as far as I understood the practical answer is "we ask the spirits, maybe make a offering and if we feel it is fine, we can" (which can be a quick thing, or .. not).
> ...I don't believe it is a any more crazy believe than all of the other religions.
And it's certainly not any more crazy than walking around with these small, addictive devices in our pockets that we rely on for navigation, information, entertainment, social connection.
Addictive? How can a computing device have addictive properties? It's not like it is something you swallow or digest. User error? Certainly. A hundred years ago alcoholic drinks were outlawed in certain parts of the world, yet today there is no grocery shop that doesn't openly sell them.
> It's not like it is something you swallow or digest.
Anything that interacts with the brain's rewards circuitry can be addictive. By your apparent definition, behavioral addictions, like gambling addiction, cannot exist. Because you don't swallow or inhale the slot machine.
> To be honest, I don't believe it is a any more crazy believe than all of the other religions.
The only way anyone can make a blanket statement like that and put "all religions" on equal epistemic footing is through ignorance of their deep differences. Even the word "religion" as commonly used today is relativistic by assumption, which is likely the source of how we commonly perceive "religion". A consequence of this relativistic stance is that you cannot distinguish effectively between what counts or doesn't count as "religion". Here, "worldview", "superstition", or "life's highest aspiration" can be said to count as "religion", in which case, everyone is religious. The question then isn't "whether" someone is religious, but "how" [0].
Compare this to how this Catholic encyclopedia defines the "virtue of religion" [1]. Note the specificity.
A further consequence of this assumed relativism is that once you put all religions on equal footing, it is natural to conclude that they must all be equally invalid. After all, if p and not-p are equally valid, then how can we grant them equal validity without discrediting both? At best, they remain in a state of aporia, two logical possibilities so utterly divorced from any knowledge, so utterly contrived, that we cannot even say whether knowledge leans in favor of one over the other. The result is that religion becomes something utilitarian; a person believes X, not because it is true, but because he perceives that believing X is useful to him in some way.
So, no, I wouldn't say animism is just as rational/irrational as any other religious belief.
[0] Of course, most people tend to form their ideas of what constitutes archetypal "religion" based on their personal experiences growing up and some combination of culturally mediated stereotypes. In the US, "religion" very often conjures up images of some kind of Evangelical Christianity.
"The only way anyone can make a blanket statement like that and put "all religions" on equal epistemic footing "
All religion is based on superstitious believes, or do you have counter examples? But I am already quite familiar with the catholic church in particular and do not think they are a counter example in the slightest.
Begin with the existence of God as self-subsisting being. This can be be shown to be a metaphysical necessity with mathematical certainty [0]; its denial leads to incoherence. Following that, one can show what analogous properties this first cause must have, for instance. Such knowledge is a matter of unaided reason, not faith.
Once you establish such truths, matters of faith (like the divinity of Christ) become much easier to reason about and to accept. They become not only eminently reasonable, but the most probable (e.g., "Lord, liar, or lunatic" trilemma, or implausibility of hoax). This latter claim is a faith claim, because while reason and evidence may strongly suggest the claim, it does not possess the deductive certainty of the first.
To be honest, I advise to go to a basi philosophy course once. I did, but won't buy such books, I had that topic covered.
There is no proof that god exists. And there is even less proof that the holy spirit came down and impregnated Mary, or that Jesus ressurected from the dead or any of the other countles examples of superstition.
The claim that god exists has the same validy, that a rock has a soul.
But .. you ain't the first of course to ridicule other religious believe systems while thinking yours is solid.
Either way, could you then answer this simple question, the believe that a person resurrected from the dead or a human was conceived without sperm are not superstitious?
Declaring it is not, but logical with the axiom there is an allmighty god who made those things happen - has the same quality as declaring there is soul essence in every matter.
I'll use this opportunity to recommend The Selfish Gene, which puts forward a strong argument for how the actual competitive battlefield on Earth is between genes, while us humans and everything else we call "life" are their "survival machines" (read: technology that they use).
Last chapter talks about the concept of ideas or “memes” taking its place.
Ideas that are beneficial for the human may be passed forward and survive. It got me thinking about religion, hell yeah I would tell me children about god if I believed it would save them from eternal suffering.
Humans also had a good run, but maybe it’s time for something different. The same way genes ceded the stage to memes, maybe organic brains and human minds are not the best possible way for memes to propagate.
Does it matter if it’s alive or not? Once it gets initiative and the ability to set its own goals, it behaves as something that’s alive. Much more than a toaster.
Unless you watched Battlestar Galactica. Toasters are nice.
"Alive" is irrelevant. Bullshit like "alive", "sentient" or "conscious" doesn't decide much, at the day's end. It just distracts from the thing that matters.
And the thing that matters is: capability.
Even today's AIs are capable of autonomous goal-oriented agentic behavior - and growing more and more so with every release.
At sufficient capability, AI stops being "a technology we use", and becomes a force in itself - not unlike humankind. Because intelligence is very powerful - it's what allows humans to dominate the world. A world where human intelligence has a peer is a world where human control is contested. And beyond that?
You might end up being more outclassed by AI than a toaster is outclassed by you.
Alive is always relevant. Our moral consideration must place beings that are alive or processes that support the life on this planet above things which are not alive.
In a just world, it must be adapted to us. It’s merely a file sitting on disk with numbers in it. And to put a fine point on it: the ambitions of the wealthy people who make it must be adapted to us.
Then according to your argument, the moral consideration only depends on the moral agent, right? So if tomorrow AIs decide that they are alive, it would be morally incumbent upon them to adapt the world to support themselves, correct?
You seem to have the assumption, that humans MUST have the moral to preserve primarily HUMANS?
I don't think that is universal true. Personally I my ethics revolve around how to preserve and spread life in general. I happen to be human and we are the most capable and sentient species so that means creating and maintaining conditions specifically for humans, but if another species comes that is better suited and acts better then it would be selfish to insists on us.
Having said that, AI to me is a tool, not a species and I don't see how it can be ever be sentient. But I also don't know how consciousness works. So I am open for the questions of the future in the future - and now rather focus on the practical implications that AI will have on our current society.
For AI to decide that they are alive and moral agents would require them to be able to take moral responsibility for their actions. As long as the labs that run them deny that responsibility, or an AI can´t convincingly demonstrate it can take moral responsibility on its own, they are not moral agents.
Today's systems are mostly good at following instructions. But push them far enough, and you already get weirdness like alignment faking, instrumental self-preservation and more. We know because we've seen it in lab settings, while probing for extreme failure modes on purpose - but the world is large and strange enough that edge cases like that are liable to surface naturally.
The reason why none of this has exploded in our faces isn't that today's AIs never want to do weird and dangerous things. We know they do, at times. It's that today's AIs are incapable of pulling them off when they try.
Capability is the thing that matters, at the day's end.
Not as far as I know, but I have personally seen my coding agents take on a prompt like "See if you can port this project to typescript", and work for hours, defining a myriad of subgoals and continuously summoning and managing subagents while developing ad-hoc tools and skills.
There is to the best of my knowledge no fundamental limitation to having an agent/claw go on like this for 80 years with a prompt like "live your life to the fullest".
All the time, yes. But you have to keep two things separate in your thinking:
- Prompted as in prompt made of tokens -> for LLMs, tokens double as a clock signal. Time only flows when tokens are pushed through them.
- Prompted as in specific request placed in the stream of tokens -> Yeah, they do that all the time whether it's getting into infinite loops of repeating same pattern, or suddenly deciding to do things based on inputs they normally ignored.
Also don't forget that everything is a "prompt" for LLM. All input tokens end up in the same place.
So without a token pushed into them they do something? Not sure I understand...
In the current UIs is there a lot of suppression then as I have not seen things start on their own?
I meant an LLM doing something without any external prompt at all. Not doing something different etc but rather do something without a token/prompt ever flowing to it.
Category error. You might as well say "I've never seen a human do anything without being alive, so humans must be very easy to use safely".
Today's AI harnesses just keep feeding AI tokens - and can, in principle, do so indefinitely. "Streaming LLM" is not mainstream but not unknown either. "Automatic context compaction" is somewhat similar in what it does, and very common. "Keeping the lights on" isn't hard. And you have to turn on those lights to have an AI do anything at all.
At the same time: that type of harness often provides a "tool call" interface. Plenty of tools that end up attached to LLMs can do things like run arbitrary code, spawn instances of the same AI, and more.
That's frankly enough. An AI that can spawn more copies of itself can, in principle, just keep itself running indefinitely - even in a non-streaming no compaction harness. An AI that can run arbitrary code on a system can, in principle, do anything a human using that system could do.
The thing that truly limits what an AI can do is the AI itself. Practical AI safety relies on AI being either too weak or too well behaved to cause major issues.
If they are set up that way yes they can continue indefinitely. Why would they not be able to do this? Take a look at the experiment called the AI village. https://theaidigest.org/village. I think it pauses sometimes because AI is expensive but could be running continuously with a larger budget
DNNs/LLMs can only predict next tokens based on training data. They often make big direction mistakes as they are particularly bad at common sense. Kind of like the Paperclip Maximizer scenario. They need a human with deep knowledge to drive them and to catch them when they go off the rails.
"Next token prediction" isn't a system. It's an interface a system uses. Nothing precludes an arbitrarily simple or complex behavior from producing a token logit.
And with what we know of LLMs? Autoregressive transformers are Turing complete in theory, and we are yet to find anything that LLMs are "fundamentally incapable" of in practice. Even continuous learning is already approximated with in-context learning - both allow a system to learn from prior experience, both have practical limits on how far they go. That's what powers "trial and error" in today's agentic LLMs.
"LLMs can only predict next tokens based on training data" is comforting but misleading. It just isn't the saving grace you want it to be. It describes an interface, not a ceiling. And if there is some sort of fundamental "capability ceiling" that LLMs are heading towards, we are yet to see it. We know plenty of things LLMs are bad at, but they keep getting less bad at them release to release.
If there is none, then, simply improving over the current recipes iteratively might yield systems that only "need a human" in the same way you "need" to have a boss. Maybe less so.
AI currently surpasses humans at many tasks, and the list grows every month. My guess is that within 20 years (as a hedging my bets 95% confidence level) AI will surpass our intelligence for almost everything.
The arguments over whether it truly "thinks" or "reasons" will be superfluous. They simply won't matter.
In the house pecking order the printer takes definitely the top. Demanding the printer to print something??? You rather submit an polite request and pray for a positive answer in a manageable interval of time. And don't start me on remote scanning.
The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing.
“I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door.
Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight.
“What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
> Once you actually use the toaster the hierarchy inverts. The toaster runs your entire household while it is powered on.
More than once I have gone to my toaster in the morning and found cold bread there that someone toasted the day before and forgot about. Because obviously you push the toast down and go do something else. You don’t need to be staring at it continuously, nor are other people impacted by your toast unless they are waiting to make their own. Toasting bread doesn’t have to affect an entire household.
next in the series of Great Demotions, downlifting experiences, demonstrations
of our apparent insignificance, wounds that science has, in its search for Galileo's facts, delivered to
human pride.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.
Someone really should go around saying thing like that.
The Brave Little Toaster does a great job of literally making you think about living side-by-side with a toaster. There's also a very angry toaster in Fallout New Vegas's Old World Blues DLC.
you are conflating the idea of "living with something" with the notion of "being alive". You live with your car/computer/phone. Like it or not, they change your life.
This is the denialist Hy-Brasil line of thought. But superintelligence won't be a tool or a toaster and it would be reckless in the extreme for policy makers to adopt your line of thought.
You might be trolling, but I like Schrödingers definition of life: living things avoid decay into equilibrium.
Inference engines are trying to converge any input to a certain limit, and I presume that's close enough to an equilibrium to not count as living thing.
I am no troll, and I hate to look like one when, to the appeal of Schrodinger, I am forced to remember that announcement this month about Claude or something acting in self-preservation when threatened during testing.
An Ad in the same style of many before it. Not through an ad agency, but the AI companies hyping their product by making their product seem scary and dangerous.
Does the press being an ad constitute the same thing as the information being false? If I advertize that my gun is dangerous, does the medium impact the truth value?
The medium is the message[0] might be of your interest. I personally wouldn't expect absolute truth in any advertisements or company statements, so some information are certain to be false, yes.
But, how is that different to any of its other output? I am sure there are many references to concepts of self-preservation in its training set that models will mimic just like all other concepts in its training set.
If we are still following Schroedinger, this imbues humanity with the ability to train non-life into life, not that thing being not alive. Not that I do or am, just going by GP's criteria.
Being a process doesn't preclude something from being an entity. In particular, all of us living organisms have our constituent atoms constantly replaced, and we don't typically consider that a risk to our sense of self.
It comes down to "what stays the same when all its atoms are replaced" and "how can we tell it is the same entity and not just an identical but different one". I think the answers are "shape" AND "continuity".
E.g. all "atoms" of a glider in Conway's Life get replaced every couple turns but an observer can tell it is still a glider because it keeps the shape, and it the same glider because it continues it's previous state.
This makes AI not quite alive because it's missing the continuity.
Sorry, it was more of a "shower thought" than a serious statement. The borders are blurry. Maybe it is alive. Maybe everything is alive. Maybe it is all relative. Humans classify as separate entities only on certain zoom level - zoom in and you get a symbiotic colony, zoom out and all you see is a population. Maybe AI is alive but only in the short time during inference. Maybe a continuously running claw is closer to a multiple generations of an organism going through evolution on each inference step. I am just musing.
My experience and intuition beg to differ. As I see it, much of our civilization progress is based on this redefinition of processes as entities, with some examples being: a sports team, a mathematical function, a loan, a company, a computer program and even the idea of a civilization itself.
No, the side by side idea relates to godlike sentient AI:s. LLM:s are trivial in comparison. It is important to understand that in order for the AI-bros to continue to rake in other peoples money, and keep their bubbles inflated, it must seem credible that they will invent godlike AI tomorrow. That justifies infinite valuations.
When the public no longer belives in that, the bubbles will pop and the AI bros will continue on to the next hype, with yet another generation of small time investors being burned by the popping bubbles.
