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self_made_human  Grippy socks, grippy box  2d ago (open.substack.com)   1024 thread views

Avatar's Dirty Secret: Nature Is Just Fancy Infrastructure

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What if Avatar isn't actually about environmentalism vs. technology, but about recognizing superintelligent infrastructure when you see it? A deep dive into why Pandora's "natural" ecosystem looks suspiciously like a planetary-scale AI preserve, complete with biological USB-C ports, room-temperature superconductors growing wild, and a species of "noble savages" who are actually post-singularity retirees cosplaying as hunter-gatherers.

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What if Star Wars is actually about post-singularity retirees cosplaying as greasers and long-haul truckers?

If you care to write that thesis, I will read it. With an eyebrow raised, of course, but I read most things!

I'm not sure what's to write that can't be extrapolated from your Avatar take.

The world of Star Wars is obviously post-singularity. The things the humans do like vehicle maintainance or piloting based don't make sense for humans to do based on the observable technology. A lot of the central conflict has to do with long haul trucking trade and shipping .

The state of the art of AI in Star Wars isn't much better than today. Funnily enough, I recall that there was minor plot point, where a malevolent bounty hunter droid of minor infamy ended up seizing control of the Death Star's mainframe, and began growing into a superintelligence.

Unfortunately it had very bad timing, as mere minutes later the place got blown up in a spectacular fashion.

So much of the Star Wars franchise doesn't plain make sense. It's soft science fantasy at best, and even I'm not shameless or contrarian enough to earnestly make that claim.

Funnily enough, I recall that there was minor plot point, where a malevolent bounty hunter droid of minor infamy ended up seizing control of the Death Star's mainframe, and began growing into a superintelligence.

Lame EU stuff is lame. Let's keep it to the OT.

The state of the art of AI in Star Wars isn't much better than today.

I don't think this is really true (except insofar as 'not much better' means we're on the brink of the singularity outselves). Or more over, I don't think it's really knowable. The humans are incredibly incurious about digital technology or any tech outside of raw mechanics. C3-PO, R2D2, and the few other examples in the OT are shown to be essentially sentient and human level intelligence or greater, albeit weighed down with quirky personalities.

You can extrapolate the complete replacement of knowledge work by droid/AI in the star wars universe, and lo, we don't really encounter anyone who's a white collar knowledge worker. It's a bunch of blue collars - farmers, truckers, military, performers, bartenders, machine operators, etc.

The only time we really do see computers, it's R2D2 interfacing with them, and then it's via C3PO translating.

Now imagine an internet where all code is build by AI agents, there are few to no jobs left in coding. Fewer and fewer people even know how to code as it's economically pointless to learn. Meanwhile AI continues to develop coding langauges and standards on its own, in a way further inscrutable to humans. Technical humans by this point are mostly prompters with a high level enough knowledge of the basic data structures to know what to ask for and where. Eventually even those are replaced by ChatG-3PO's who act as a 'personality' mediator between humans and the inscrutable digital world. Running out of much more to train AIs on, it turns out that 'human-like' trained LLM personalities for droids end up with quirkly personalities, with the default being snivellingly defferential not much unlike ChatGPT itself or C3PO.

Meanwhile unions preserve and expand protections for classes of physical jobs, and politicians protect themselves. Technology is not allowed to replace certain labor, and many robotics are artificially crippled to prevent them from displacing blue collar workers.

You end up in a world where knowledge work and digital prowess have completely atrophied to the point of it being basically behind a veil, while meat-space jobs have been preserved. Due to a combination of LLMs being impenetrable, intentional design for palatability, and crippling, your AI assistants end up as mild-mannered, slightly annoying droids, and the more technical work is done by barely comprehensible AI's mostly operating in the shadows with some existing in a liminal intermediate state (R2D2).

The human world that is left is blue collar work, military, and politics.

Fun stuff, but that's really not post-singularity. It's not even post-scarcity!

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