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PaperclipPerfector  10hr ago (text post)   407 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 22, 2025

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I had a terrifyingly linear and coherent nightmare last night. My wife and I woke up in some dystopian mega complex with no explanation. It was bright, white and clean, and absolutely jam packed with people hurrying about like drones. We were quickly swept up in the flow and struggled not to get separated in the press of bodies. The corridors appeared to be one way and incredibly maze like. Eventually we got swept to a cafeteria and tried to get a handle on the situation.

I grabbed a plate of food that didn't seem terrible, although it was indistinct slop of various colors and consistencies. It still hit all the taste centers, and had that distinctive salty and savory punch that junkfood often has. The only utensil looked like a broken fork, with one middle prong completely snapped off and one middle prong only half snapped. I struggled to use it.

While I'm eating this kid is yelling at me that I'm eating wrong, I'm not eating the food in the correct order. I ignore him, but I notice people asking some AI questions out loud, although I don't hear any of the answers back. I ask the kid about it, cause kids are easy to pump for information, and he once again yells at me that it's not "AI" it's "At". I guess they named their LLM "At". At this point my wife and I try to dispose of our plates and utensils, but it's close to the one way exit and my wife gets swept up in the press of bodies and whisked down a corridor. I try to catch up, but I simply can't. At this point my top priority is trying to find my wife.

I try asking At where my wife is, but it doesn't work. I'm getting intensely scared and frustrated, afraid my wife will be lost for ever in this complex and I'll never see her again. I somehow figure out that At needs to be installed directly into your brain. I get to a kiosk to do it, and I'm just mashing the touch screen as fast as I can. I don't realize there are levels that At can be installed at, and each press of the button increases the level.

The first level just tries to use parts of your brain that you aren't using. The last level fully uploads "you" to the cloud and At uses your whole brain as part of it's cloud compute. But of course, the more of your brain you give to At the more convenience it confers. Level 1 lets you ask it questions and receive answer, Level 2 gives you a HUD in your vision and highlights things in your environment to assist with the task you are trying to perform. The highest level can hijack your entire body, turn you off, and walk you to where you are trying to get to.

I accidentally get the highest level installed. I feel different. Everything I feel towards my wife feels somehow muted, or turned down. In the nightmare this terrifies me even more. I ask At to take me to my wife, and it finds her, I black out, and then I'm there. Something is different between us now, and my wife seems unsettled by me. I ask At to guide us out and it takes us to the exit. As we go to leave, a warning pops up in my vision that since I'm running 100% in the cloud and my brain has been formatted to run At completely, I'll die if I leave. My wife takes the exit, and I wake up from the nightmare.

Everything I feel towards my wife feels somehow muted, or turned down.

We can certainly say that this is one of the general effects of AI integration, yes.

How well does this dream correspond to conscious, waking thoughts that you've experienced previously? Is the narrative of this dream a familiar line of thought to you, or did you experience it as something new?

It definitely had aesthetic aspects of Black Mirror episodes, especially Fifteen Million Merits. But the central conceit of people allowing AI to use part or all of their brains as cloud compute I don't think I was ever exposed to, or consciously thought of until the dream.

Ah, I was asking more about the symbolic meaning of the narrative -- the coming technological dystopia, the alienation from our humanity, a sense of impending irrevocable loss, etc. How often do you consciously ruminate on those sorts of things?

Ruminate? Hmmm, from time to time. Though as far as yesterday goes, not at all.

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