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Notes -
I read a lot of science fiction for fun and there are a few concepts that I’ve read about for years that seem to become more clear in light of modern AI
Peter F Hamilton’s E-butler and U-shadow. The E butler concept was invented by Hamilton, I don’t know, 10-20 years ago? It’s essential a near future agentic AI helper that can interfere with the internet and accomplish any administrative task you throw at it. In Hamiltons world, planets have a “cyber sphere” or planetary network (internet). Cyber spheres aggregate to the Unisphere which is the civilization wide internet. The U shadow is essentially a far future digital “you” that lives in the Unisphere and does what you ask. The U Shadow is essentially a perfected Guardian Angel.
Hamiltons Commonwealth series is terrific and really presents a palatable if not optimistic view of how society could evolve and essential keep this free market liberal capitalism machine going for a few hundred years. Maybe it’s all the hours I’ve spent with these books, but the GA concept really intrigues me and I think it may be necessary to avoid a total distopia.
Separately, Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series has major trans human themes regarding digitizing people. There is a concept of “simulations” of people. Alpha level sims are perfect digital copies of a person developed though destructive scanning of a persons brain. Beta simulations are developed by observing every minute of a persons life and aggregating that data with an AI that learns and can perfectly predict a persons next thought or action. As it relates to GA or LLMs, if you had enough compute to have a GA shadow you for years, could it be possible that the LLM gets perfectly aligned to you?
Even writing all this out is bittersweet. It does seem somewhat obvious that these things are not impossible. Would a GA beta simulation perfectly replicate you? Maybe not, but it should would be a lot better than Claude. It strikes me that both government and corporations would fight all of this tooth and nail. Perhaps an open source path exists, but it seems really unlikely that it would ever get wide adoption. We will be funneled down the Claude path and it’s likely going to be total shit.
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