I worry that it's a fundamental enough part of being an intelligent agent that losing this capability will make us less human. Similar to the WALL-E humans that had lost the ability to walk due to never walking. They were legitimately lesser beings due to that. :(
AI is Immersed Mindset On Demand
At The Bayesian Conspiracy we recently spoke with Zoe about pop-up cities and goal-focused group houses (episode coming next week). One of the great things about these settings is that being immersed in your work keeps you in a mental frame where related self-propagating thought patterns are kept alive in your brain and stay processing in the background all the time.
Much of our brain power is ambient. It takes a while to shut down thought patterns that have been oscillating for a while and recruit those neurons into new patterns. In fact I think it’s worse than this - I think it can be very easy to restart patterns every morning that you’ve been using for days, and much harder to restart ones you haven’t used in days, or weeks, or months. Thus the phenomenon of taking several days to get running again when you return from a long vacation.
This is extremely noticeable when trying to write fiction, and it should be true of any major project. Your brain can’t turn deep focus on and off. Your brain is a steam locomotive, with dozens of reinforcing thought oscillations. When you jump off it and run in a different direction for a while that’s fine, you can run back to the tracks and get back to stoking the engine with a prize from your expedition in your back pocket. But the more you slip off for side quests, and the longer you stay away, the more the train tracks will start to re-lay themselves, so the locomotive realigns to follow you, and your previous goal is left behind.
Attention is all you need. Attention is all you have. Everything follows your attention over a long time scale.
AIs Can Imagine It For You Wholesale
Recently we were asked what question we’d would put in a general survey about The Bayesian Conspiracy. I was stumped. I had nothing. My focus is split among 4+ projects, I am not immersed, I would have to sit down and stew on this.
Claude gave a fantastic answer is a split second. Several great answers, actually. It's not that it’s incredibly creative, because it’s not. But it’s great at the basic level of creativity one gets from an immersed mindset. The mental framework that would require ongoing dedication from a human (on the level of daily focus across weeks) is what the AI can deliver on demand.
Now that we have the basic creative output, we can choose among Claude’s suggestions and tighten them up.
I don’t like this. It feels dangerous. It’s too tempting. Being deeply focused on just one topic for weeks means giving up on a LOT of other things that I don’t want to give up on. But if I compensate by relying on this tool I worry I’ll stop going into deep focus entirely, and just lose the knack for it over time. Why wouldn’t most people do so, if they could? How many humans in the present day can memorize and recite long orations? We don’t need to now that we have written language. Per Plato, have we not leaned close to becoming “hearers of many things”, [appearing] as though they were all-knowing, but to actually be learners of nothing.
Soon we won’t even have to think up our own thoughts. Ten years from now [1]the AIs will be doing most of the things we think of as creative-generation and humans will mostly be the Deciders, picking among the options presented to get at the true essence of what we want. A cool premise for a sci fi world, but not a world I would choose.
(this is a mirror of a blog post at DeathIsBad)
Given the standard anti-doom caveats
Definitely not wrong, the petitions almost certainly won't change anything. Change.org is not where one goes to actually change things.
I had a quasi-romantic relationship with a fictional character that lived in my head during my worst year, in college. I could sometimes even "see" him. I knew he wasn't real. It did help me out during the darkest times. Probably woulda been even better to be able to have chat conversations that were run by an AI. And I did outgrow that in a few months, when life got better.
So, basically, this sounds great and I love this perspective. Thank you.
answer:
2 of 7
I have a secret desire for this to become real which I fear may destroy me and/or everything I know.
The graph image is broken. Does anyone have a copy of the image file? I remember what it looked like, and it was super-useful for demonstrating the concept.
Asimov’s Science Fiction has published one of my stories! "Red Legacy," on page 48 of the current issue. Details on how to get it at my blog if you're interested. I think it's a rational story, but I'm interested in opinions if anyone here ends up reading it.
Taught early in high school: How to do sex, in real life. Not STI education, not pregnancy/fertility, not how to be safe, or the biology of penises and vagines. How to go into sex and do it so that it's fun and feels good, how to listen to your body and your partner, maybe how to attract the opposite sex, and so on. Dunno about elsewhere, but in the US guys get all their sex education from porn, and girls used to get none at all. (now... also porn?) Porn is fun, but it's Kabuki Sex, and it only vaguely relates to real-life sex. It'd be like giving a 16-year-old a driver's licence when the entirety of his/her driving education consisted of watch Hollywood Car Chase movies.
Of everything useful I ever learned about sex, 50% of it was from Dan Savage and 50% of it was from my fiance, both many years after I had actually started trying to do sex on my own. This is stupid.
Seems like the best option. Very frustrating to me, who wants to keep on to all four of his current projects. :( But coming to realize this is a terrible idea.