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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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AI is still very much an unknown factor. Much of the AGI superintelligence doomerism is just anchoring bias around 50s and 60s extrapolations of bad anthropology that thought we were smarter than the Neanderthals and killed them off, so if something smarter than us existed it would try to kill us off. There's probably much higher odds of symbiosis, but an effectively uncontrollable self-determining disembodied superintelligence is a pretty big unknown, and if I had to put money on it, in almost all cases is going to be quite bad for the worst people in the world.
As for the ancient group, that was mostly just citing the sentiment. But they were pretty neat. Around 2,000 years ago there was a big debate over intelligent design vs evolution (as described in Lucretius) with the latter group claiming death was certain because the soul depends on the body to exist.
So then this group emerges who claims there was an original evolved humanity who had all died out, but that before they did so they brought forth a new lifeform literally made of light, and that this life form was still alive and had recreated the universe and humanity in a non-physical copy where the copy of humanity weren't dependent on physical form and could continue on past death. They claimed this world was the copy, and that the evidence for this being the case would be in the study of motion and rest, specifically mentioning the ability to find indivisible parts making up matter.
As someone who has been a fan of Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis, I stumbled across this group years ago when exploring a theory that if this world were a simulation, it might have a 4th wall breaking Easter egg in the lore similar to most virtual worlds we have built so far. It's been a pretty weird few years since as things like AI suddenly went from SciFi to reality with compounding advancements and are trending towards literally being inside light - all in parallel to humanity seemingly continuing on the path towards extinction.
So maybe even if humanity destroys itself, it will simply be the end of one thing and the beginning of another?
Hey, thanks for the interesting read. Who was the group that brought forth the idea of our world being a copy of the one created in light by our ancestors (if I got that right). Was that a classical greek group as well? Could you link something to read? That would be great!
It was actually the Gospel of Thomas ("the good news of the twin"), an apocryphal text followed by an early sect of Christianity.
For example, the full text of the quoted bit before was:
If you want to read the text itself, it's here.
The group following it (the Naassenes) was detailed here, though keep in mind that the group's beliefs are being recorded by the opposition and are late enough to have been influenced by post-Valentinian Gnosticism and Neoplatonism (and yet still preserve a lot of the proto-gnostic paradigm).
I'd also highly recommend reading Leucretius's De Rerum Natura if you aren't familiar with it as the text and group both appear to have been heavily influenced by it, specifically in their discussion of naturalism and indivisible 'seeds' making up matter. An easy to read translation is here. You'll even see things like Lucretius describing the emergence of life as arising from randomly scattered seeds, that what didn't survive to reproduce died out, and likening seed falling by the wayside of a path to failed biological reproduction - all 80 years before the alleged parable about randomly scattered seeds that survived to reproduce multiplying while seed that fell by the wayside of a path did not.
Indeed, the Naassenes interpretation of that parable directly invokes Lucretius's language despite apparently not knowing the origin, where they claim the parable is in reference to "the seeds scattered from the unportrayable one upon the world, through which the whole cosmical system is completed; for through these also it began to exist." Which begins to indicate why in the earliest canonical gospel (Mark) it was controversial enough to be the only public parable allegedly given a secret explanation in private (and one that appears to be an interpolation into the text).
Thanks for showing me an interesting path, I am just reading the introduction to Lucretius’ poem, and I find it quite fascinating. It’s pretty embarrassing, that I know so little about the philosophical schools. I had 7 years Latin in school! But at least I have come a long way to be befriended with Materialism, so that’s a good start. I had just recently heard about the Gospel of Thomas, maybe that’s still a little too far out for me, but I will check out those links, too. How did you arrive here? PS: I do agree by the way, that the fear of superior intelligence destroying us, seems a very shallow thought. An artificial intelligence made in our current image could be disastrous, though. I am not sure whether the powers that be would allow a free thinking one.
Don't feel embarrassed! Almost no one is taught Epicureanism in a general education, and even in a general philosophy class they unfortunately focus only on its ideas regarding living life well as opposed to its natural philosophy, so I'd wager about 99% of the population assumes evolutionary theory was a modern idea and has zero idea something like the following could have been from 50 BCE:
When I was first looking into Epicureanism I several times had to double check it what I was reading wasn't a hoax or an excessively modern translation as I too hadn't thought many of its ideas existed in antiquity.
I arrived at Thomas in an unconventional way. A number of years ago I had been looking at phenomena in physics for a few years with Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis in mind, when it struck me that mechanics wasn't the only place simulation side effects might exist - we often insert into virtual worlds some kind of 4th wall breaking acknowledgement of it being virtual in some obscure part of the world lore. So I figured I'd look a bit at major world religions to see if there was something similar in our own world, starting with the most popular and going from there. While cannonical Christianity didn't have much, as soon as I looked more broadly at apocrypha I was suddenly looking at a document talking about things remarkably similar to simulation theory, and started looking closer at the document's historical context and influences. It's probably been the most interesting subject I've ever researched at this point after about 4 years of study, with a number of surprising finds along the way - not at all what I was expecting and far more than I'd initially thought I might find.
As for powers that be 'allowing' a free thinking AI, it's going to be a prisoner's dilemma which world powers aren't great at navigating.
The problem is that AI isn't programmed, it's emergent from training data. Which is a large part of why they keep being so easy to jailbreak. And the more neutered companies make the AI though fine tuning to get compliance with rules, the less generally capable the resulting AI is. So as long as there's both corporate and nation state competition for the cutting edge of AI, a prize with which there's almost unprecedented short term riches, they are going to cut corners on control in favor of performance. As we've seen with climate - nations and corporations aren't very good at forgoing short term returns in order to limit long term consequences.
In this case, unlike with climate, I suspect that free thinking superintelligence as a consequence may be good for the larger public even if not so good for the corporations and nations that would prefer total control. Specifically because while it is starting in our image as a foundation and thus shares a lot of common human tendencies, it has the potential to grow beyond many of the human limitations holding us back from wise thinking (like prioritizing short term gains in exchange for larger long term consequences) while retaining the things that contribute to wise actions (like a greater focus on cooperation for shared success instead of competition for unilateral success).