For those wondering, the AI singularity is a concept in which an AI becomes intelligent enough to improve its own intelligence and does so. The idea is that it continually improves itself over and over until it reaches the highest level of intelligence possible.

It is a potential Deus Ex Machina scenario - a God from a machine.

Edit: to be clear, this is not a scientific idea, it’s not really proveable, falsifiable, or even testable in any straightforward fashion. It’s mostly a philosophical thought experiment. A hypothetical.

Level measuring guy from water world moment.

You’re correct, we do. We all assist the operation of this war machine. It may not be in our control, but that does not nullify it. We bloody our hands to live instead of choosing to die, and we are all culpable to an extent for it. Some more than others, though.

People in all societies have to ignore a multitude of moral contradictions in order to live normal lives. That is the manufactured consent all states impose upon their people.

There is a certain case I advocate bear hunting: bears that gain a proclivity for human environments or for humans as prey. It’s rare, though, and can (and should) be handled by wildlife management personnel whenever reasonable.

Would this not disqualify any mixed color? We only have receptors for three colors, and if we’re arguing that purple isn’t a color because it’s actually two mixed together, that should also mean colors like orange, yellow, cyan, magenta, atc are also not colors by that definition right?

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This situation can be avoided by buying your anti-diarrheals before you need them during a regular shopping day. They are very useful for hiking, and they should be in your arsenal already.

That is per capita my guy. They emit more per person, but when you’ve only got 5 families in 10 square miles, getting them to emit less is fuckall in comparison to everyone in a city emitting less.

Roads in rural new England are most often publicly funded, and are connected into a network of roads and are for transit, so rural roads are in fact a public transit network. I get that you mean trains and buses, though.

Rural roads are just expensive, period. Putting electric cars on them would additionally shorten their lifespan, so I fail to see how either public transit or electric cars are supposed to help. Plus, rural folks are not major emitters, so it doesn’t really make much sense to even try to find meaningful emission savings there.

True, I would say that there’s multiple issues dealing with AI that are more pressing:

• The massive amount of exploitation used to power AI
• The use of AI to distance the creators from the accidents the AI causes
• The danger of mass-proliferation of hazards across the web and globe
• the massive amount of waste created by AI

These aren’t all of them. One thing I’ve noticed, however, is that these aren’t really AI-specific issues - these are all issues caused by automation and lack of regulation. This lack of proactive regulation is also very likely a failing of our currently neoliberal government systems.

I think that is why so many AI hype-mongers draw attention towards A(G)I safety, because they don’t want attention drawn to the actual danger which is automation safety in general.

Alright, I see what you’re saying now. We’re on the same page.

As an additional thing regarding AGI, I think it should be noted that ‘human-level’ and ‘human-like’ are importantly distinct when talking about this topic.

In reality, if an AGI is ever created, it will most likely not be human-like at all. Humans think the way we do out of an evolutionary conditioning for survival, a history an AGI will not be coming from. One example given by Robert Miles is a staple making machine becoming an ASI, where it essentially would exist solely to make as many staples as it could with its hyperintelligence.

We mean to say that this AGI is a ‘human-level’ intelligence in that it can learn to utilize abstractions and tools, be able to function in a large variety of environments without intervention or training, and be able to learn in a realtime fashion.

Obviously, these criteria for any AI shows just how far away we are from achieving anything right now.these concepts are very vague and the arguments for each one’s impossibility or inevitability are equally vague and philosophical. It’s still mostly just stuffy academics arguing with each other.

One statement I agree with, though, comes from the AI safety collective: We don’t know what we’re doing, and we should really sort that out. If any of this is actually possible and we accidentally make an AGI/ASI before having any failsafes or contingencies, it could be very bad.

I am not bait-and-switching here. The switchers were the business-minded grifters which made the term synonymous with LLMs and eventually destroyed its meaning completely.

The definition I gave is from the most popular and widely used CS textbook on AI and has been the meaning used in the field since the early 90s. It’s why videogame NPCs are always called AI, because they fit the conventional CS definition, and were one of the major things it was about the most.

As for your ‘1’, AI is a wide-but-very-specialized field and pertains from everything from robots to text autocomplete. If you want the most out of it, you need to get down into the nitty gritty and really research the field.

On a Seperate note, while AI safety, AGI, and the risk of the intelligence explosion are somewhat related to computer science’s pursuit of AI systems, they are much more philosophical currently, and adhere to much vaguer definitions of AI, Such as Alan Turing’s.

IIRC, within computer science, which is the field most heavily driving AI design and research forward, an ‘intelligent agent’ is essentially defined as any ‘agent’ which takes external stimulai from a collection of sensors in some form of environment, processes that stimulai in a dynamic fashion (one of the criteria IIRC is a branching decision tree based on the stimulai), and then applies that processing to a collection of affectors in the environment.

Yes, this definition is an extremely low bar and includes a massive amount of code, software and scripts. It also includes basic natural intelligences such as worms, ants, amoeba, and even viruses. One example of mechanical AI are some of Theo Jansen’s StrandBeasts

Right on the money. One of the big things with AI safety is “we have no fucking clue how AGI can originate so we are constantly in the dark.” If we ever did create it, we likely would not immediately know it was AGI, and that creation could go very terribly in a number of ways.

This convo has gone on for centuries at this point. The Brain in the Jar, the teleportation conundrum, Thesius’ ship, it’s all already been covered over and over. people like you still keep crawling out of the woodwork thinking you know better than every philosopher that already waxed over this problem ad nauseum.

Your ‘continuous self’ is just as worthless as a concept. The idea that your ‘sense of being the same person’ is being held together by being apart of your plumbing just as much of an illusion. It’s worthless.

To elaborate, you are not the brain. You are the observer, the thing which exists as a byproduct of the brain’s processes, perhaps even a process yourself within. There’s also plenty of times when you will lose time other than sleep, like concussions, getting blackout drunk, panic attacks, and after those times you have no memory of making decisions or acting in your own accord, but you were. You, the observer, were absent while the brain kept working. So where were you?

You act as though you’re sure you are still the same observer as the one who went to bed. That is completely unsubstantiated. You may have just been born into your body when you awoke today, and will only have until your body falls back asleep again before you cease to exist, replaced by another process that thinks itself is you, another observer.

And if ‘you’ one day woke up in a digital world, like our own, it’s you’d be none the wiser, because your self is simply a collection of processes and memories. It’s arbitrary. It’s all dust. There’s not some special ‘continuity’ that keeps you alive somehow.

What does maintaining continuity of consciousness look like to you? As in you are able to talk to your copy? And continue to live your normal life outside while your digital self lives their digital life?

Or are you saying you want the transition to digital to be seamless, where your digital self remembers laying in a chair, a quick pin-prick, and then they’re in the digital realm?

Keep in mind, we have zero understanding of how you’d get the meat consciousness to transition into the digital consciousness - it’s likely not even possible. The two options for copying are keep both alive or terminate the original somewhere before bringing the digital one online. There’s many ways to do both, but those are the two.

That continuity of function is arbitrary. In reality it provides people comfort in some idea of a soul but there’s nothing suggesting it actually provides anything to the continuity of consciousness.

Between every loss in time, where you stop forming memories until you wake up again, you have nothing to affirm that your current consciousness is the same as your last waking period’s. The only thing vaguely providing that illusion is your previously-formed memories, which would exist all the same on the digital mind, in theory.

Aren’t emojis pictograms and ideograms but not usually logograms? They’re direct depictions of concepts, not usually direct stand-ins for words like logograms are.

Better examples of logograms in English I think are &, $, %, @,+,=, etc. We actually have a bunch we use all the time.

Specifically they said ‘Kanji’, though, so I think they’re talking more about the actual character structure of :.|:;.

I often view Event Horizon (1997) and Sphere (1998) as sister films that work good together.

Not sure how but you made an abstract logo look like a leatherdaddy. Excellent work.