Artificial intelligence

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Robots that obey the Three Laws are friends

Artificial Intelligence is a very hot topic right now and this wiki will not attempt to add to the torrent of information being written on the subject presently.

"I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes." -Joanna Maciejewska

Understanding how to make an artificial brain is very useful for understanding how to operate your own brain. It will also be pretty helpful given that all future technology will likely be based on it. As such, it is recommended that everyone have a working knowledge of the basic functions of a neural network, algorithms, and recursion in order to be a functional future human.

In this house we call for thoughtfulness and foresight in AI rollout

Related pages:

The Better Offline podcast provides an excellent insider's look behind the marketing hype of AI, crypto, and other technologies.

They Said There Would Be Robots

This could be our future if we don't let oligarchs own all the robots

Where are the robots that we have been promised since Archytas of Tarentum's mechanical pigeon and Ovid's Pygmalion nearly 3,000 years ago? Why aren't we living like the Jetsons? What gives?

The demographic and environmental issues related to population would fundamentally change if viable, general-purpose robots were available to take over a significant amount of manual labor.

The debate around these issues is wild. We have capitalists that are worried about the labor supply. We have workers worried about losing jobs en masse to AI automation. Don't those cancel each other out?

It seems like so many of the economic issues regarding shifting demographics and aging population would be solved by automation. Everything could work out fine for young people, old people, and the environment. GDP growth may stagnate for a while, but is that really what we're here for? Doesn't it make a difference whether we leave a livable environment for future people?

A second necessary step would be to implement adequate social safety nets and free worker education and placement networks to retrain those whose jobs are lost to automation and alleviate the anxiety caused by economic upheaval. Yes, we have the right number of people and jobs, but the people are no longer trained to do the jobs that are available, and private education is ridiculously expensive. People will only support the AI revolution if it means they will land on their feet with a cushy new job without the tedium of their old jobs, and the wealth generated will be shared by all members of society and not hoarded by oligarchs. If it means they will be thrown to the wolves to slave away indefinitely in the gig economy, there will be strong objections.

We want robots, not money addicts cajoling us into having more kids on an overcrowded planet.

Sabine Hossenfelder - Why Don’t We Have Better Robots Yet?

This episode of Armchair Expert with roboticist Ken Goldberg addresses this question, but in typical Dax fashion there's a good 20 minutes of shooting the shit first.

Ken Goldberg (Roboticist) - Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard


His TED talk is more directly to the point.

Ken Goldberg - Why Don’t We Have Better Robots Yet? - TED

AI Doomerism

The idea that modern chat bots are somehow going to lead to an apocalypse is a grift tactic used to bolster AI hype and stock prices, not a scenario that can play out in any logical way based on current technology or any that can conceivably be derived from it.

This article gives a thorough analysis of AI doomerism and why there's no reason to let it curtail your optimism about the future.

AI Doomerism is Bullshit - David Pinsof

Why So Many Cheesy AI Images?

Due to limitations on licensing, time, and skills in the graphic arts, the options are cheesy AI images, cheesy stock photos, or terrible homemade graphics. The AI images are often pretty amusing and psychedelic. They are also interesting considering the fact that they are trained on the entire history of art and theoretically turn out images that represent how your prompt is visualized by a blend of every artist in its training data. That's kind of cool, even if they are shite.

There is a significant amount of debate over whether AI images represent plagiarism. The AI images obviously copy the style of the art it is trained on. However, this is not that different from humans. The human brain takes in all the art that it sees, and tends to mimic the styles of those it most admires.

The difference is that the human that is inspired by a style is an actual human that gets paid to create art. The quality of life of an AI is not improved by money. Artists used for training data should get paid.

Why Does "AI" "Art" Suck So Much?

AI Answers Better?

When asked to answer the classic ethical hypothetical, "should a man steal life-saving medication to save his wife?" using this wiki as the dataset, GPT 4.0 responded with:

"metaculture would likely approach this dilemma by emphasizing the importance of improving the subjective experience of consciousness while addressing systemic issues. It might argue that the act of stealing, while morally complex, reflects a failure of the broader system to ensure equitable access to essential resources. metaculture would advocate for systemic change to prevent such dilemmas from arising, while also recognizing the moral weight of saving a loved one's life."

To be frank, the authors of this wiki couldn't have put it much better, even though the AI is using this wiki to generate its answer! Is that meta? You bet your ass it is!

While some experiments with AI-generated articles have generated good content that advocates for similar values, they tend to just rewrite the standard Wikipedia article, which is not the point. For example, the Community page has an AI-generated summary of the importance of community building to society. It touches on many of the key points that a human-written article would, but it lacks humor and personality, and doesn't go out of its way to tie the ideas back to the other themes in the wiki.

Even though AI is able to draw from a huge database of source material, the result is always one that explains the answer without relating it to the metanarrative. Since that is the whole point of the wiki, the articles will continue be human created.

It is an interesting exercise to create a custom AI using this wiki as the source data and ask it questions. The answers do a good job of applying the perspective and style of this wiki to questions that are not even addressed directly in the text. You can add Wikipedia and other reference sites to the dataset as well. Here is example of how to do it on you.com.

AI Winter

Those who have been following the progress of AI over the last several decades have seen many periods of AI hype come and go. This phenomenon is called AI winter.

Each time a new breakthrough in computing produces a cool new demo that mimics human intelligence in some new way, it generates a significant amount of hype in the media. This creates a feedback loop where the hype drives investment, which creates more hype, and so on. Eventually, it becomes clear that the technology is never going to live up to the hype, and the bubble bursts. This leads to a long period of AI pessimism called AI winter.

While the current iteration of AI is certainly more impressive than any of the ones that came before, the profitable use case for it has yet to materialize.

What is an artificial intelligence (AI) winter?

Artificial Intelligence Videos

Knowing how AI learns will help you understand why it works well in some cases but not in others.

How AIs, like ChatGPT, Learn


Reid Hoffman Returns (on an optimistic AI) - Armchair Expert


Is Hofstadter the foremost expert on AI in the present day? No. Is he this author's favorite author? Yes. So here's a video of Doug giving his opinions on AI and consciousness.

Gödel, Escher, Bach author Doug Hofstadter on the state of AI today


HAL 9000: "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"


We legit need to be showing this in sex ed classes it's becoming a real issue!

Don't Date Robots!


Flight of the Conchords - Robots