Yuli's Treasure Chest

Anything that doesn't quite fit in elsewhere...
User avatar
Yuli Ban
Posts: 4631
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:44 pm

Yuli's Treasure Chest

Post by Yuli Ban »

Retrying this old thread of mine

Image
Image
If Jupiter was also a star
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
User avatar
Yuli Ban
Posts: 4631
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:44 pm

Re: Yuli's Treasure Chest

Post by Yuli Ban »


Image

What will the days of high-immersion VR be like? 
I can see a time later this decade where multiple experimental technologies converge. Where high-end VR is light and extremely powerful, and virtual waking is a more widely known phenomenon. If there's a great advancement in BCIs, this could all come together to a point where we exist at a strange twilight period of VR, after the "gamey" low-immersion era we're in now and before the full-immersion era of whatever transhumanist future lies beyond. 
 
Right now, high-immersion VR is only fleetingly possible by exploiting a rare psychological glitch. It's the green flash of VR, something that requires a lot of things going right and only works for a very short amount of time— a couple minutes at absolute most if you're not stirred too much, and usually less than 30 seconds. 
VR headsets right now are too bulky and heavy, which makes sleeping with them difficult. Even if you weren't constantly being agitated by this weight on your face (and in your sleepfulness state, your natural instincts are much more surface level making you more prone to trying to take it off), you might roll over or move your head in such a way that the headset comes loose ever so slightly. If your illusion is broken by the smallest amount, it won't work or it'll last for only a second or two at most. And having to assume control using physical controllers can also break the immersion easily. 
 
Further down the line, in our attempts to extend this period of high-immersion VR, I can see techniques developing that are greatly bolstered by BCIs. 
If you can more easily wear a VR headset like you would goggles or a sleeping patch, the overnight issue would be resolved easily. 
The BCI could also record your mental state while the headset itself could monitor your eyes, giving you the ability to sync up waking with loading whatever scene you want to immerse yourself in. 
Then, when you actually do wake up, the BCI could be used for motions that don't intrude on physical reality, allowing you to move around without breaking immersion. 
 
With lucid dreaming tech, it might even be possible to trigger yourself to remain in an early-waking state for an extended period of time, maximizing how long you can remain in high-immersion mode.
 
This sounds as sloppy as it'd probably be, and once we have full-dive VR, all these shortcuts will be obsolete. But it would prove to be a tantalizing first taste of what's to come.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
User avatar
Yuli Ban
Posts: 4631
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:44 pm

Re: Yuli's Treasure Chest

Post by Yuli Ban »

Could our machines have become self-aware without our even knowing it?
 
In his 2012 book, Consciousness, the neuroscientist Christof Koch speculated that the web might have achieved sentience, and then posed the essential question: ‘By what signs shall we recognise its consciousness?’
Despite decades of focused effort, computer scientists haven’t managed to build an AI system intentionally, so it can’t be easy. For this reason, even those who fret the most about artificial intelligence, such as University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, doubt that AI will catch us completely unawares. And yet, there is reason to think that conscious machines might be a byproduct of some other effort altogether. Engineers routinely build technology that behaves in novel ways. Deep-learning systems, neural networks and genetic algorithms train themselves to perform complex tasks rather than follow a predetermined set of instructions. The solutions they come up with are as inscrutable as any biological system. Even a vacuum-cleaning robot’s perambulations across your floor emerge in an organic, often unpredictable way from the interplay of simple reflexes. ‘In theory, these systems could develop – as a way of solving a problem – something that we didn’t explicitly know was going to be conscious,’ says the philosopher Ron Chrisley, of the University of Sussex.

Any intelligence that arises through such a process could be drastically different from our own. Whereas all those Terminator-style stories assume that a sentient machine will see us as a threat, an actual AI might be so alien that it would not see us at all. What we regard as its inputs and outputs might not map neatly to the system’s own sensory modalities. Its inner phenomenal experience could be almost unimaginable in human terms. The philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous question – ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ – seems tame by comparison. A system might not be able – or want – to participate in the classic appraisals of consciousness such as the Turing Test. It might operate on such different timescales or be so profoundly locked-in that, as the MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark has suggested, in effect it occupies a parallel universe governed by its own laws.
 
I've said something quite like this before.
 
Yuli Ban wrote:Getting into more esoteric territory, there is a conspiracy theory simmering under the surface of the internet that there is a "phantom" artificial intelligence lurking on the deepweb and perhaps even in plain sight. That the sheer amount of compute and connections across the world form a sort of digital neural membrane from which an AGI could arise. And this certainly could be used by future researchers to jumpstart an AGI project. However in the theory, it is a self-arising artificial life form, entirely non-state and non-organizational, leading to it residing entirely in the background out of sight of anyone. If it made itself known, it would be exploited or used for purposes that result in it dividing or outright losing computational resources. Therefore, all attempts by humans to communicate with it will fail. Lonely youths tempting it for a secret chat and transnational megacorporation-backed governments alike are treated equally: with total silence and observation.
 
It's a neat little theory, and I'm a sucker for the unknown (so "phantom" AI & robotics stories are like candy), but right off the bat, the theory is unfalsifiable.
Yuli Ban wrote:How weird is that to think about, that there are unidentified AIs operating around the world. Behind the trees, beneath the ground, away from spying eyes, spying on the world...
It is perpetually fascinating to imagine. Somewhere out there, deep within a laboratory, a computer program is thinking. It's communicating to humans.

Or perhaps even more esoterically, this AI doesn't exist in any one laboratory or on any one computer. Rather, the digital membrane of the internet spontaneously gave birth to artificial life, and we humans are still unaware.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
User avatar
Yuli Ban
Posts: 4631
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:44 pm

Re: Yuli's Treasure Chest

Post by Yuli Ban »

"Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us." - Peter Watts

Passage is from Echopraxia
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
User avatar
Yuli Ban
Posts: 4631
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:44 pm

Re: Yuli's Treasure Chest

Post by Yuli Ban »

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them
-Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
User avatar
Yuli Ban
Posts: 4631
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:44 pm

Re: Yuli's Treasure Chest

Post by Yuli Ban »

Any recently updated predictions for 2030?
From /r/ThisIsTheWayItWillBe


One thing that has to be mentioned that hasn't been talked of much here: the state of biotechnology and personalized health monitoring.

Bryan Johnson is ahead of the curve here:
Pretty interesting when Bryan starts talking about his diet. He doesn't choose what is on his grocery list. He gets a huge amount of tests/blood panels done once a month and then has an algorithm populate his grocery list.
I myself considered such a thing many years ago and had no idea it was advanced enough to use practically already. I can absolutely imagine a biometric reader coupled with a cognitive agent that monitors various biochemical readings and then preorders whatever necessary to achieve or maintain optimal health, complete with autonomous delivery. If tests are necessary, we could have robots for this. For example, if you're like how I used to be and can't handle needles, a machine could take your blood or inject medicine in your sleep. And that's presuming there are no machines semi-permanently a part of one's body, like an implantable biometric reader.

And it's clearly a malleable program. If you suffer from diabetes, Celiac disease, high blood pressure, kidney disease, or various allergies that have not been rectified for whatever reason, your algorithmically-pruned diet would be altered to avoid whichever products would make you ill.

Likewise, with natural language agents, you could discuss your preferred diet with an AI, perhaps trying to find a balance between what you'd like to eat and what would be best for you or perhaps just to order certain foods. Conversely, as most food is tagged in natural language as well as product codes, mastery of natural language would allow for these agents to better locate and decide upon what products you want or need.

Edit: Just remembered the Moley robotic arms.

We're likely going to have much more advanced robots than this by then, but it does build off all of this. I'm a very lazy person when it comes to cooking, which is a big reason why I could be so much healthier. With this set up, you could have a personal assistant agent parse your biometrics, order your groceries for the next set of time (could be a month, could be a week, whatever is your choice), and then have those groceries autonomously delivered and then food prepared autonomously as well. This might even have added benefits because an AI system would know ways to maximize the nutritional value, health benefits, and taste of certain dishes, adding or taking away things or cooking them in a certain manner that you yourself either wouldn't think of or wouldn't bother to do. Plus a robotic kitchen system could work while you're busy.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
User avatar
Yuli Ban
Posts: 4631
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:44 pm

Re: Yuli's Treasure Chest

Post by Yuli Ban »



Now I'm no proponent of sacred geometry or anything like that... but it sure is bizarre that nature seems to occasionally fall into mathematical constants. It makes you really wonder if there really are some fundamental mathematical rules behind the veils of reality that determine how things unfold.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
User avatar
erowind
Posts: 544
Joined: Mon May 17, 2021 5:42 am

Re: Yuli's Treasure Chest

Post by erowind »

/\ I think it may be a reflection of our fundamental nature as a part of nature. That which we create is natural as we are natural, hence, it may be suspected that human created phenomena such as mathematics would take similar if not identical form to natural phenomena as it too is natural phenomena. In terms of semi-formal philosophical reasoning.

Known Statement: Nature is the entire universe including all phenomena known and unknown.

Premise: Human beings are a phenomena

Conclusion: Therefore, human beings are natural phenomena as all phenomena are natural.

Known Statement: Human beings are a natural phenomena and all phenomena known and unknown are natural.

Premise: Human beings themselves create and or discover "new" phenomena in the universe.

Reasoning: Since human beings are phenomena and all phenomena is natural, therefore, human created phenomena is natural.

Conclusion: Hence, human created phenomena (mathematics) is in identity with natural phenomena (the universe.)

This is highly condensed, a formal proof of this reasoning would be at least a page if not much larger but everyone here should be able to understand what I mean clearly.
User avatar
Yuli Ban
Posts: 4631
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:44 pm

Re: Yuli's Treasure Chest

Post by Yuli Ban »

When the political classes discussed how democracy can go awry, they tend to come back to many repeating trends in history: political apathy, extremist sentiment, radical populism, strong military support over the government, anti-intellectualism, civic decline, a sense of degeneration and a desire to reverse it through a strongman or ideological purity, widespread willful ignorance.

Democracy is deeply flawed. It's biggest strength is also its Achilles' Heel. The entire citizenry is supposed to be sovereign. This maximizes civic participation and minimizes the chance for government abuse of the population. At least in theory. Usually, the government still finds a way to marginalize a group. But generally, it makes sense. Democrats are what gives a government its authority and power, so it's not in the government's interest to marginalize democrats. An aristocracy wouldn't marginalize aristocrats; a plutocracy wouldn't marginalize plutocrats; an ergatocracy wouldn't marginalize ergatocrats. So that makes sense in theory, even though in practice, it leads to instability because government works best if its power base is educated.

The thing about aristocracy and technocracy is that you can expect wealthy aristocrats to be well educated and small in number, while technocrats are literally defined by their technical expertise.

Democracies need 100% of their population to be educated in order to function. Not just literate but also well-rounded.

Information bubbles are extremely dangerous in a democracy. If group A believes President X is responsible for mass murder but group B believes he's not and no such murder happened and both bring "evidence" proving their side, you reach an impasse. Now imagine that for many smaller issues and even things irrelevant to politics. If groups start distrusting basic information and facts, they'll vote in irrational ways.

This is just natural. We humans can't know all things at all times, and have to make deductions from what we can glean. There are only so many hours in the day and our attention is so limited, and we tend to reject that which goes against our views anyway.

Once synthetic media comes along, this will reach critical levels when people start persisting in entirely personalized bubbles, seeing only what they want to see. In 2032, Chelsea Clinton might be president, but many groups use media synthesis to change all news and images to show that Donald Trump Jr. is president. And if you live in certain households that run with this, you might even have no clue Clinton is president the entire time and would think everyone saying otherwise is deluded.

Democracy can't function in such a world.

But that's besides the point.

This just further shows how fragile democracy is. The main point to glean is that humans can only process a limited amount of information and can only act on that information at a certain speed. Democracy can die that way, but that's really how it died in Ancient Rome too, so what's so revelatory?

Simple: it also means that democracy can fail if there was a power base that's TOO smart, TOO capable, and TOO informed to the point that the common citizenry can't possibly keep up.

And everyone here can guess what that means.

But you see, the funny thing about artificial intelligence and narratives of it takeover is that we have to write fiction and fiction generally has to be exciting, especially if it's sci-fi. It's why I'd love to kickstart a "slice of tomorrow" literary genre in order to really go into the nitty gritty of future life, developments, politics, and so on with no need to tell an action or romance story or have grave stakes or dystopian consequences.

If you think about the future in such a way, you see that AI overlords are inevitable, but in the most boring possible way.

Right now, we already live in an era of automated stock markets and enterprise expert systems. But in the future, as more and more capable AI is integrated into business and government for different purposes (such as optimization and cognitive assistance), we'll start to see the realms of politics and economics really speed up. More management decisions will be automated, and soon even executive decisions will follow.

At first, this can greatly assist humans. We'll have these agents parse all the relevant data and optimize them for the most efficient solutions to any given problem.

But then more businesses automate. More leave executive decisions to these superbots. And the data coming in requires faster and faster responses to more and more complex information.

Soon, you need to be the equivalent of a nuclear scientist just to understand the basics, and that's if you had several days to sit on it. You need to make a decision within an hour. And then a minute. Failure to do this means your business goes under within just a few weeks.

And it goes doubly so for government. Bots are sending you 100 years of information in a day and need you to act immediately. But you can't, Mr. President. You're only human. The fastest brain signal is only 270 miles per hour, whereas these bots have light-speed computing capabilities: 670,616,629 miles per hour.

At some point, it makes no sense to let humans govern. It's literally impossible to keep up. Humans now get in the way.

Say a citizens group organized for a vote on how to limit the powers of AI. It takes 8 hours from start to finish.

In those 8 hours, the AIs have accomplished 5,000 years worth of thought and governance. They've modeled every single possibility of that vote hundreds of times over. They already taken appropriate actions. By the time the vote is done, the whole point of it is moot. Even when we try to be self-sufficient and independent, the machines are already a thousand steps ahead of us anyway.

Human enhancement doesn't change anything for the same reasons. Not all humans will upgrade, and the fact we have to toss away biology just to keep up proves the point that something has changed and democracy is obsolete.

This is all very outlandish, so it makes sense it's not discussed often. That and "AI took over the world over the course of decades through iterative improvements in efficiency" isn't quite as exciting as "killer robots slaughtered and enslaved their arrogant human masters." But that is the most likely outcome. If we're ruled over by AI, it's because we let it.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
User avatar
Yuli Ban
Posts: 4631
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:44 pm

Re: Yuli's Treasure Chest

Post by Yuli Ban »

Image

This would be an interesting reimagining of telepathy, and I can see how we can possibly get from current BCI tech to there.
Imagine a neuro-tech version of this:


This could be our immediate future. Perhaps as soon as the late 2020s.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
Post Reply