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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3048 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 5, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Fun thought experiment. Would you use a sophisticated AI/VR headset if it did the following? (Pretend concerns of social judgment don’t apply)

  • Told you, at any given moment, the most realistically valuable thing for you to do, from when to eat and exercise, work or rest, stroll through nature or call a friend.

  • Rather then saying a simple “do this”, it shows you two clips of your probable future, one of more enjoyment and one of less, so that you saliently grasp the optimal choice and freely choose it.

  • Warns you against slips, mistakes, and poor habits by showing you a clip of the consequences in your life. When going for a bag of cookies it will briefly show you where that would lead you in VR reality. You may freely choose, but the presentation would be persuasive.

  • On any given work or hobby, it reminds you of your progress with figures and data, shows you everything you have gained as a result to enhance motivation.

  • Biometrically gauges your vigilance level and informs you when you are too stressfully alert or too relaxed.

  • When you are feeling down or defeated, it reminds you which of your actions have lead to that.

  • It may take on the voice and figure of an inspiring tutor for extra motivational salience.

Besides the use case for technology, this is interesting as a metaphor for the superego (or conscience, moral spirit, mindfulness, God, whatever). Everyone’s mind already attempts to do this, with varying degrees of consciousness, maturity, and accuracy. And we already use external tools to help us. Calendars, managerial accountability, peer ranking, reminders of positive experiences, and so on in dozens of ways. Prayer beads for counting one’s blessings (literally) have been independently invented across cultures. Even Video Games have seen an increase in the externalized superego with increasingly externalized measures of progress. The Quake free for all has transformed into the competitive grinding of Call of Duty with leaderboards, ranks, counts, milestones, calendars, etc. Same for running apps. So there appears to be linear progress in the externalization of the superego with AI plausibly perfecting our efforts. The future battle over mankind will be fought between the superego headsets and the id headsets.

From A Certain LiveJournal:

In the treasure-vaults of Til Iosophrang rests the Whispering Earring, buried deep beneath a heap of gold where it can do no further harm.

The earring is a little topaz tetrahedron dangling from a thin gold wire. When worn, it whispers in the wearer's ear: "Better for you if you take me off." If the wearer ignores the advice, it never again repeats that particular suggestion.

After that, when the wearer is making a decision the earring whispers its advice, always of the form "Better for you if you...". The earring is always right. It does not always give the best advice possible in a situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is always better than what the wearer would have come up with on her own.

It is not a taskmaster, telling you what to do in order to achieve some foreign goal. It always tells you what will make you happiest. If it would make you happiest to succeed at your work, it will tell you how best to complete it. If it would make you happiest to do a half-assed job at your work and then go home and spend the rest of the day in bed having vague sexual fantasies, the earring will tell you to do that. The earring is never wrong.

The Book of Dark Waves gives the histories of two hundred seventy four people who previously wore the Whispering Earring. There are no recorded cases of a wearer regretting following the earring's advice, and there are no recorded cases of a wearer not regretting disobeying the earring. The earring is always right.

The earring begins by only offering advice on major life decisions. However, as it gets to know a wearer, it becomes more gregarious, and will offer advice on everything from what time to go to sleep, to what to eat for breakfast. If you take its advice, you will find that breakfast food really hit the spot, that it was exactly what you wanted for breakfast that day even though you didn't know it yourself. The earring is never wrong.

As it gets completely comfortable with its wearer, it begins speaking in its native language, a series of high-bandwidth hisses and clicks that correspond to individual muscle movements. At first this speech is alien and disconcerting, but by the magic of the earring it begins to make more and more sense. No longer are the earring's commands momentous on the level of "Become a soldier". No more are they even simple on the level of "Have bread for breakfast". Now they are more like "Contract your biceps muscle about thirty-five percent of the way" or "Articulate the letter p". The earring is always right. This muscle movement will no doubt be part of a supernaturally effective plan toward achieving whatever your goals at that moment may be.

Soon, reinforcement and habit-formation have done their trick. The connection between the hisses and clicks of the earring and the movements of the muscles have become instinctual, no more conscious than the reflex of jumping when someone hidden gives a loud shout behind you.

At this point no further change occurs in the behavior of the earring. The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.

When Kadmi Rachumion came to Til Iosophrang, he took an unusual interest in the case of the earring. First, he confirmed from the records and the testimony of all living wearers that the earring's first suggestion was always that the earring itself be removed. Second, he spent some time questioning the Priests of Beauty, who eventually admitted that when the corpses of the wearers were being prepared for burial, it was noted that their brains were curiously deformed: the neocortexes had wasted away, and the bulk of their mass was an abnormally hypertrophied mid- and lower-brain, especially the parts associated with reflexive action.

Finally, Kadmi-nomai asked the High Priest of Joy in Til Iosophrang for the earring, which he was given. After cutting a hole in his own earlobe with the tip of the Piercing Star, he donned the earring and conversed with it for two hours, asking various questions in Kalas, in Kadhamic, and in its own language. Finally he removed the artifact and recommended that the it be locked in the deepest and most inaccessible parts of the treasure vaults, a suggestion with which the Iosophrelin decided to comply.

Niderion-nomai's commentary: It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us. It is for this that Book of Cold Rain says one must never take the shortest path between two points.

Scott wrote that well but I think he slants the reader’s perception of the device by describing it in biased language. It’s magical, it’s tucked away, the brain mass decreases (?). A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions. Would that still be a fearsome proposition, the existence of wise mentors and teachers and guides and parents? But they are doing the same thing: attempting to optimize your happiness based on what they know, in a given context.

A reply on that blog says that they wouldn’t use the device because they love the freedom of choice like in a good video game. But video games do not give you freedom of choice. They are designed by experts in fun mechanics to give you the right amount of guidance within a finite set of rewarding choices. It’s funny that his go-to example of loving freedom is actually loving a well-designed, consciously-created walled enclosure, in which intelligent designers have predetermined what choices you will make to give you the most satisfaction. Were we to imagine the development of a device that granted optimal happiness, it would have to include the enjoyment of picking, but that’s a trivial design problem to solve (do what video games do).

I’m tempted to say that humans do not actually like freedom ever, in any sense. They are misattributing what they like to the concept of freedom. They like the act of finding and choosing objects from a set of choices, but only with a predetermined set of mostly positive choices that lack real harm (as their prehistoric ancestors would do according to their tradition of eligible foods). They like the act of trying something and anticipating the result, but only in contexts where there is probable gain and no real harm. They like exploring novel spaces, but only when there are enjoyable things to find. These are all confined activities that lack freedom, and they are most satisfying when they have been designed for us.

A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions. Would that still be a fearsome proposition, the existence of wise mentors and teachers and guides and parents?

If the mentor's first piece of advice is "stop listening to me" and then they proceed to run your life, that would be mighty sus.

Especially since in normal mentorship relationships you eventually get everything you can out of it and/or your mentor fucking dies and you become the mentor. In the story you are just following orders forever.

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