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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2844 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 5, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Fun thought experiment. Would you use a sophisticated AI/VR headset if it did the following? (Pretend concerns of social judgment don’t apply)

  • Told you, at any given moment, the most realistically valuable thing for you to do, from when to eat and exercise, work or rest, stroll through nature or call a friend.

  • Rather then saying a simple “do this”, it shows you two clips of your probable future, one of more enjoyment and one of less, so that you saliently grasp the optimal choice and freely choose it.

  • Warns you against slips, mistakes, and poor habits by showing you a clip of the consequences in your life. When going for a bag of cookies it will briefly show you where that would lead you in VR reality. You may freely choose, but the presentation would be persuasive.

  • On any given work or hobby, it reminds you of your progress with figures and data, shows you everything you have gained as a result to enhance motivation.

  • Biometrically gauges your vigilance level and informs you when you are too stressfully alert or too relaxed.

  • When you are feeling down or defeated, it reminds you which of your actions have lead to that.

  • It may take on the voice and figure of an inspiring tutor for extra motivational salience.

Besides the use case for technology, this is interesting as a metaphor for the superego (or conscience, moral spirit, mindfulness, God, whatever). Everyone’s mind already attempts to do this, with varying degrees of consciousness, maturity, and accuracy. And we already use external tools to help us. Calendars, managerial accountability, peer ranking, reminders of positive experiences, and so on in dozens of ways. Prayer beads for counting one’s blessings (literally) have been independently invented across cultures. Even Video Games have seen an increase in the externalized superego with increasingly externalized measures of progress. The Quake free for all has transformed into the competitive grinding of Call of Duty with leaderboards, ranks, counts, milestones, calendars, etc. Same for running apps. So there appears to be linear progress in the externalization of the superego with AI plausibly perfecting our efforts. The future battle over mankind will be fought between the superego headsets and the id headsets.

It sounds like the Oversoul.

I find headsets uncomfortable to wear for even short periods of time.

Who controls it/created it?

It seems to not be body-hijacking and mind-erasing like the Whispering Earring from Til Iosophrang vaults, so it is not an instant no.

But who controls it? With which values it was set? Can it be remotely tweaked, disabled or controlled? Can I inspect or change its value system?

How likely is that it will list as "the most realistically valuable thing for you to do" participating in conspiracy to assassinate $POLITICIAN? How it would react to my daughter $CULTURE_WAR_LIFE_DECISION?

Is it calling back home and reporting back things? Can it be enabled to do so? Can police/court obtain warranty to see logs? What is logged there?

(Yes, the same applies to existing software. Yes, I apply it. Yes, that is reason why I strongly prefer open-source self-hosted software even if it is of worse quality and poorer UX*)

*amusingly, open-source software gets better ux than proprietary - often due to etshiffication, see Linux vs Windows.

No, I wouldn't use it. Because it would make me dependent on an external intelligence and agency, and weaken my own.

Where do you think yours comes from?

Part of the problem with omniscient omnibenevolent omnipotent hypotheticals is that they have an answer to any possible objection. Maybe the headset would tell you to do some quick and effective intelligence-and-agency strengthening exercises.

You'd be effectively enslaved forever.

Sounds like removing the headset would be the most realistically valuable thing to do in that situation. It's also a slip, mistake, or poor habit to over-rely on the headset, so it would warn you away from it.

Every objection to the headset can be countered with "but it'll do good things instead of bad!"

*more dependent on an external intelligence and agency than you currently are

Obviously.

I was trying to make a version of this using LLama v3 (70bn) and a predictive algorithm which learns to predict the user's replies (and therefore implicitly actions, thought processes and needs). It's a work in progress: I turned it on, it told me to get up out of my chair and do something useful, and I turned it off.

But a 'programmable superego' is exactly what I want out of AI.

An AI powerful enough to be usefully accurate in such predictions makes me obsolete and irrelevant. Such a machine could surely do any work better than I could, at a much lower price.

Such a battle over mankind may well happen and it may have vast effects, billions of lives altered. But it will be secondary to the big picture issues of 'is there any future for humanity at all' and 'who is in control and what are their preferences'. You could imagine such machinery used in humiliation rituals for unfavoured populations, to bully them into submission or mould them ideologically. Maybe it's more fun to do old-style brainwashing than boring direct mental rewriting.

From A Certain LiveJournal:

In the treasure-vaults of Til Iosophrang rests the Whispering Earring, buried deep beneath a heap of gold where it can do no further harm.

The earring is a little topaz tetrahedron dangling from a thin gold wire. When worn, it whispers in the wearer's ear: "Better for you if you take me off." If the wearer ignores the advice, it never again repeats that particular suggestion.

After that, when the wearer is making a decision the earring whispers its advice, always of the form "Better for you if you...". The earring is always right. It does not always give the best advice possible in a situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is always better than what the wearer would have come up with on her own.

It is not a taskmaster, telling you what to do in order to achieve some foreign goal. It always tells you what will make you happiest. If it would make you happiest to succeed at your work, it will tell you how best to complete it. If it would make you happiest to do a half-assed job at your work and then go home and spend the rest of the day in bed having vague sexual fantasies, the earring will tell you to do that. The earring is never wrong.

The Book of Dark Waves gives the histories of two hundred seventy four people who previously wore the Whispering Earring. There are no recorded cases of a wearer regretting following the earring's advice, and there are no recorded cases of a wearer not regretting disobeying the earring. The earring is always right.

The earring begins by only offering advice on major life decisions. However, as it gets to know a wearer, it becomes more gregarious, and will offer advice on everything from what time to go to sleep, to what to eat for breakfast. If you take its advice, you will find that breakfast food really hit the spot, that it was exactly what you wanted for breakfast that day even though you didn't know it yourself. The earring is never wrong.

As it gets completely comfortable with its wearer, it begins speaking in its native language, a series of high-bandwidth hisses and clicks that correspond to individual muscle movements. At first this speech is alien and disconcerting, but by the magic of the earring it begins to make more and more sense. No longer are the earring's commands momentous on the level of "Become a soldier". No more are they even simple on the level of "Have bread for breakfast". Now they are more like "Contract your biceps muscle about thirty-five percent of the way" or "Articulate the letter p". The earring is always right. This muscle movement will no doubt be part of a supernaturally effective plan toward achieving whatever your goals at that moment may be.

Soon, reinforcement and habit-formation have done their trick. The connection between the hisses and clicks of the earring and the movements of the muscles have become instinctual, no more conscious than the reflex of jumping when someone hidden gives a loud shout behind you.

At this point no further change occurs in the behavior of the earring. The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.

When Kadmi Rachumion came to Til Iosophrang, he took an unusual interest in the case of the earring. First, he confirmed from the records and the testimony of all living wearers that the earring's first suggestion was always that the earring itself be removed. Second, he spent some time questioning the Priests of Beauty, who eventually admitted that when the corpses of the wearers were being prepared for burial, it was noted that their brains were curiously deformed: the neocortexes had wasted away, and the bulk of their mass was an abnormally hypertrophied mid- and lower-brain, especially the parts associated with reflexive action.

Finally, Kadmi-nomai asked the High Priest of Joy in Til Iosophrang for the earring, which he was given. After cutting a hole in his own earlobe with the tip of the Piercing Star, he donned the earring and conversed with it for two hours, asking various questions in Kalas, in Kadhamic, and in its own language. Finally he removed the artifact and recommended that the it be locked in the deepest and most inaccessible parts of the treasure vaults, a suggestion with which the Iosophrelin decided to comply.

Niderion-nomai's commentary: It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us. It is for this that Book of Cold Rain says one must never take the shortest path between two points.

Scott wrote that well but I think he slants the reader’s perception of the device by describing it in biased language. It’s magical, it’s tucked away, the brain mass decreases (?). A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions. Would that still be a fearsome proposition, the existence of wise mentors and teachers and guides and parents? But they are doing the same thing: attempting to optimize your happiness based on what they know, in a given context.

A reply on that blog says that they wouldn’t use the device because they love the freedom of choice like in a good video game. But video games do not give you freedom of choice. They are designed by experts in fun mechanics to give you the right amount of guidance within a finite set of rewarding choices. It’s funny that his go-to example of loving freedom is actually loving a well-designed, consciously-created walled enclosure, in which intelligent designers have predetermined what choices you will make to give you the most satisfaction. Were we to imagine the development of a device that granted optimal happiness, it would have to include the enjoyment of picking, but that’s a trivial design problem to solve (do what video games do).

I’m tempted to say that humans do not actually like freedom ever, in any sense. They are misattributing what they like to the concept of freedom. They like the act of finding and choosing objects from a set of choices, but only with a predetermined set of mostly positive choices that lack real harm (as their prehistoric ancestors would do according to their tradition of eligible foods). They like the act of trying something and anticipating the result, but only in contexts where there is probable gain and no real harm. They like exploring novel spaces, but only when there are enjoyable things to find. These are all confined activities that lack freedom, and they are most satisfying when they have been designed for us.

the brain mass decreases (?) (...) A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions.

No. The story describes earring hijacking body and no longer being advisor, but instead of controlling body directly, skipping conscious mind. As in, some alien intelligence killing you and taking over your body.

As it gets completely comfortable with its wearer, it begins speaking in its native language, a series of high-bandwidth hisses and clicks that correspond to individual muscle movements. At first this speech is alien and disconcerting, but by the magic of the earring it begins to make more and more sense. No longer are the earring's commands momentous on the level of "Become a soldier". No more are they even simple on the level of "Have bread for breakfast". Now they are more like "Contract your biceps muscle about thirty-five percent of the way" or "Articulate the letter p". The earring is always right. This muscle movement will no doubt be part of a supernaturally effective plan toward achieving whatever your goals at that moment may be. Soon, reinforcement and habit-formation have done their trick. The connection between the hisses and clicks of the earring and the movements of the muscles have become instinctual, no more conscious than the reflex of jumping when someone hidden gives a loud shout behind you.

Though

The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.

(on the other hand "usually" is a big issue anyway - if less usual end being successful mass-murderers or similar than even on purely utilitarian grounds it would be hard to justify)

A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions. Would that still be a fearsome proposition, the existence of wise mentors and teachers and guides and parents?

If the mentor's first piece of advice is "stop listening to me" and then they proceed to run your life, that would be mighty sus.

Especially since in normal mentorship relationships you eventually get everything you can out of it and/or your mentor fucking dies and you become the mentor. In the story you are just following orders forever.

A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions. Would that still be a fearsome proposition, the existence of wise mentors and teachers and guides and parents? But they are doing the same thing: attempting to optimize your happiness based on what they know, in a given context.

No, there's a bound on how minutely a mentor can influence your actions. Scott's decision to take it all the way to the absurd, to have it dictating muscle contractions and phonemes to you, was an exercise in examining just how much influence we can take on before we do lose our agency. It's contemplating the line between mentee and thrall, where most would be distressed at the prospect of becoming a thrall if sufficiently warned at the beginning.

A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions. Would that still be a fearsome proposition, the existence of wise mentors and teachers and guides and parents?

Yes. Teachers and mentors can be useful only to the extent they're moving you to be able to make decisions and understand problems on your own. Otherwise, at best they're just moving you from place to place, more often just babysitting you. Outsourcing your ability to evaluate evidence is costly no matter who or what is doing the evaluation; outsourcing the process of doing evaluation is impossible and is just simplified badly in this thought experiment.

A reply on that blog says that they wouldn’t use the device because they love the freedom of choice like in a good video game. But video games do not give you freedom of choice. They are designed by experts in fun mechanics to give you the right amount of guidance within a finite set of rewarding choices.

Depends very heavily on the environment and game. I've gotten the GregTech bug again, and in one sense, yes, there are a limited number of options, and the worst of them are still not going to reach out and club you in the head, and broader modpacks can make that even more varied. There answers are available, but even the most hand-holding of modpacks won't run you through the full process, and outside of skyblock most can't.

Okay, that's an extreme case, and most games aren't Minecraft-likes. We're looking at 2012, so what about Mass Effect? There are build options, but most of them suck, and you can still beat the game with a bad one. There are choices, but most of them are wrong, and you can still make bad choices and win. And by Mass Effect 2, a lot of the 'bad' decisions were just delaying, like trying to do literally anything with the stupid scanning mechanic. You can't choose to survive schtupping Morinth Because Radical Freedom, and often the dialogue options were extremely constrained. (Indeed, some explicit advice from the in-game advisor is wrong, in ways that kill the character giving the advice..

But Mass Effect's designers don't know what would give me the most fun, and not just in the sense that they eventually dropped the ending to ME3. A lot of people loved the Vanguard charge builds, and other people (myself included) found them absolutely obnoxious to play. Some people like having all the morally-cleanish people on their team with all of their Personal Issues being solved, and other people like to intentionally make non-optimal decisions because they say better things about the story.

((In my case, I'm trying to automate a GregTech skyblock factory solely using Create for long-distance item transportation. ngmi, but I find it fun.))

If you're referring to his comment, Douglas Scheinberg was comparing the earring to video game walkthroughs, and that's got meaningful difference. The exact point where this hits varies from person to person -- there are people who don't like mechanics spoilers as simple as 'wiremill or plate bender' for gregtech modpacks, while other people are fine with getting romantic advice for their GarrusXShepard playthrough -- but eventually you've gone from guide to backseat driver.

They like the act of finding and choosing objects from a set of choices, but only with a predetermined set of mostly positive choices that lack real harm (as their prehistoric ancestors would do according to their tradition of eligible foods). They like the act of trying something and anticipating the result, but only in contexts where there is probable gain and no real harm.

I think this is not wrong, but it's incomplete. For most people, there is a necessary component of variation and surprise that is vital to make something feel like entertainment rather than chore.

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Now I'm really curious if you've played Dragon Age, and if so, your feelings about the new one that was announced!

Now I'm really curious if you've played Dragon Age,

DA:O was great, I've played through it multiple times (I think I installed the Fade-skip patch after my second playthrough, though)

DA2 was meh. It's peak BioWare companions, and I didn't like the companions in the game.

I didn't even try DA:I

and if so, your feelings about the new one that was announced!

Alien(s) and The Terminator are two perfect dilogies and I'm glad they haven't made any sequels to either franchise. That just about sums up my feelings about DA4.

I played DA:O and DA:I. DAII is on my to-play list, though I'll admit it's been there for a while. DA:O was the one I played the most, if with pretty normie gameplay decisions for most runthroughs and complaining about The Deep Roads pacing every fucking time. As gameplay matters, both are very happy to let you take subobtimal decisions, but it's also far more punishing than Mass Effect: most of my runs used Arcane Mage approaches, because I found that origin most interesting, but Arcane Mage could faceroll hard and readily challenge nightmare difficulty where Shapeshifter-only struggled on medium and even easy, especially with some of the unavoidable fights. And fights were long enough that struggling was less fun.

While DA:I suffered a bit from throwing in random game mechanics to fill time, it really built on a lot of the setting ideas. Cole explores a lot of the spirit world stuff better than Wynne did, imo, and as much as Iron Bull (and the game in general) suffers from the Drizzt problem where every named member of a race is explicitly defying the stereotypes (and explicit rules, given the Qun!) rather than just being more complex than the stereotypes, he was still executed as well or better than Sten as someone you'd actually want to work with. Actual combat gameplay was a lot more even, both in highs and lows, and there's a bit more handholding for character builds.

It's good to hear that DA4 hasn't been cancelled, since it'd been pretty much incommunicado for a while now, and there's definitely some interesting balls left in the air after DA:I that would be pretty frustrating if they never land. The series has been a lot less than Mass Effect, for better or worse -- I don't think anyone expect the Big End Game Decision from DA:O to mean the last game in the series will want your save file, even if that necessarily cuts off a large portion of the lore and characterization space (eg, warnings that killing all the Archdemons will cause an apocalypse don't work great if one of the archdemons is in a Schrodinger's cat, Cole's loyalty quest limits what DA4 can do with him short of declaring one choice canon). But if that means the game also doesn't devolve into choosing between three big lights at the end, I'm willing to accept weird retrocanon.

I never even considered having the fan particles run along the length of the belt! What a great idea.

Running a single fan over a long belt like that is slower for cooking than the traditional lava ring fed by smart chutes, but if you're already throughput limited elsewhere (in this case, both the press and the burners for the steam engines are pretty slow), this approach is a lot better at limiting unnecessary entities. Not sure where I first saw it, probably someone's Create:Above and Beyond play?

Create is an absolute blast of a mod for having little options like this, and for having most of them simultaneously be very hard to guess would work from scratch and obvious at a glance after it's been done Oh Of Course. Using Item Drains as one-block unpowered belt alternatives is one that I only learned about just a couple months ago, dropped offhand by Beardstone in the middle of an otherwise very typical build, and it cleans up so many builds.

What would the id headset be? Endless porn/satisfaction tiktok?

Maybe: AI would determine which fantasy traps your attention the best (whether game, drama, porn) and then play that in front of your eyes at all times using Character-AI-like persons and a plotline written by AI according to the media you have consumed and enjoyed previously. AI would realistically predict which aural and visual cues have been associated with the most pleasure in your life and then place that into its stimuli, effectively rewriting your memories in the process. We can easily imagine a corporation supplying the idset in exchange for something resembling slave labor.

The prominence of CharacterAI hasn’t been explored enough. Kids are already addicted to chatting with a fake AI persona, something like 20% of google queries are made by CharacterAI already. That’s just text. It won’t be long until it is a visuospatial and aural VR experience.

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