Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
No bio...
User ID: 102
I'm trying to figure out what I should be thinking about AI (largely in attempt to get away from rat-sphere's alarmists and their uncomfortably plausible arguments), so I started by doing the first obvious thing: looking for notable AI skeptics.
Here's the punchline: I used chat GPT for that purpose. Not without mistakes, but on cursory look it seems like the answers are largely correct, most of these are actual people matching the criteria. It gave me five, then I asked "give me some more" and it gave me more. Few months ago something like that would take me a lot more effort in googling, unless I lucked out and someone already did the job for me and I could find it somewhere on internet's surface.
Fuck.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
3yr ago
I don't follow, why give preference to spatial-reasoning tasks when defining who is smarter? Why not the one at which women are better?
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
4yr ago
You had me wondering for a minute what could possibly happen to Contrapoints that he managed to become a conservative Warhammer enthusiast.
Too late. Retrospectively, this development makes sense - Kulak always stood out from rat-influenced writers with his passionate diotribes relying less on well-thought, charitable arguments than evocative and sharp language mercilessly cutting through all the things, ideas and people many of us resent so much. Not exactly academically strict discourse, but fun to read, so whetever shortcomings he had were easy to ignore.
Alas, I strongly suspect that from now on, when stumbling on his posts I will remember that one time he managed to get his opinion entirely coincide with most hilarious excerpts from Russian state TV, chuckle a bit, and close the tab.
Farewell Icarus, it was fun to watch you fly before you burned your wings.
Are there actually many sci-fi books that excel not just at exploring fun sci-fi themes, but at actually delivering good prose and characters? The trend of having only the former is so persistent that I came to assume that having these two at the same time is supremely difficult for some reason, like running out of skill points when creating an RPG character.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
4yr ago
it seems to me it's a bit of a cop out to not characterize and end-state here
I know, right? I just don't like the idea of arriving at some kind of end-state and calling it a day.
At the very least, this end-state should be far, far beyond what we can now comprehend. Wouldn't the universe just feel cramped otherwise?
To desire to be more is a part of being human.
Where's the limit to what a human can be? Who's to say? Perhaps there isn't one. If we were to attempt to trap ideal individual in a conceptual box, to limit him to a specific set of characteristics, then at some level, disappointment appears to be inevitable. Any given definition can be retorted with - "That sounds great, a lot better than now, sure. But is it really all we can be?"
When put in theological terms - it's our mission to climb the ladder to God, using tools that he gave us. Estimated time of arrival: one eternity from now.
Ideal human society in this framework is one of multitudes rather than unity, one that allows for experimentation and different ways of being, acknowledging that we don't actually know what is the best way of going forward.
First, we don't really know how consciousness works (nor do we know how to even begin to study it), so we must place some discount on animal lives all things being equal. Of course, it can also be applied to other humans, but to much lesser degree. Wouldn't it be a shame to go through so much trouble if it turns out that all or most animals we eat are good old cartesian machines?
Okay, this point is more of a funny food for thought than a serious argument; it's far more likely than not that some animals have subjective experience and can suffer. But if they do...so what?
As buddists figured out millenia ago, suffering is inextricable part of life. But what makes a life, even filled with suffering, worth living, worth preserving? It's quite tough to grap it precisely with language, but here's my take - it's the ability to choose your path, to ponder life's meaning, to appreciate the moment. You know, metacognition. Agency. All of the things animals lack.
Imagine that you died, and arrived at an audience to some kind of heavenly authority and it said - “Your mortal coil is over now, you could go to heaven, if you so desire. Though they say it's bit boring, would you be interested in reincarnation?” You nod.
“Alright. Let's see what positions are vacant right now…I know, there's one that would fit you very well. How about a cow? You will be born to a nice pack, in a lovely farm in rural France. A couple of years of chewing grass and shitting on it. I'm sure you will fit right in. Ready to embark?”
Good set up, good punchline, good joke, by all accounts. Don't know about you, but I would smile, maybe politely laugh a bit. But of course I would refuse. Because that's all that is - a joke. A life as a cow is self-evidently worthless to me.
Another angle - trolley dilemma. Is there a point at which you would sacrifice a human to save X number of cows? 100? 1000? even more zeros attached to the 1? For me, there's no such point.
All these bazillions of cows can go to hell as long as there are human lives at stake.
Resources are scarce. Time is precious. Why on earth would I spend it on improving well being of cattle?
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
4yr ago
What makes you think that the planet can support only 2 billion long term? "Carrying capacity" is just a function of available technology. We can support much more than few centuries ago already. Long term ecological strain, global warming and so on are likewise, merely problems of engineering.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
4yr ago
I think that makes sense, we could use it to raise activity, at least until this forum is more stable
This woke plague kind of ruined many themes and tropes, and by extension many pieces of media that perhaps didn't deserve it, at least for me. My inner critic is always on alert, looking out for wokeness, ready to dismiss anything that sets off enough alarms.
I might exaggerate a bit, but it's at least partly true for me. Maybe that's my flaw, but the general instinct to use heuristics like that for quick judgement is sound and useful. So there's an ironic dimension to it - overflow of wokeness and focus on quantity, instead of quality of woke propaganda likely keeps a lot of people from treating it seriously. Well, I guess it's better than the alternative.
Latter. I just think that the times I live in are sufficiently interesting
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