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Johnathan Reid's avatar

You took me by surprise there by veering into poetic prose. It brushed against the purple in the early stages, but I think you just about scraped through (at least for me). You could start a new religion with this level of abstraction, but please don't quote me on that.

Two big assumptions which I'll always question:

1) We're rational beings, with a cogent plan and a set of envisaged future states which we strive, even rush, towards, to the detriment of almost everything else around us. Begone, foolish entropy!

2) The 'universe's laws' we've constructed to explain our existence are believed by everything within it.

Pascal Montjovent's avatar

Alberto, your poetic essay felt to me like a mind-bending journey into the heart of our fears about AI, and our hubris as a species.

You've got a real knack for making abstract concepts feel visceral and immediate.

I'll be chewing on the ideas you've raised for a long time to come. Thanks for putting this out there and making us all think a little harder about where we're headed.

imthinkingthethoughts's avatar

I personally went through the chaos of fundamental rule changes recently at 21. I was diagnosed with an incurable life-long autoimmune condition that has sucked the life out of me.

I realised just how insignificant I truly am. All the years of learning, planning, considering, all to suddenly be taken away.

The medication I was on also stopped my ability to think, the one thing I most strongly identified with, for the gift of lessened disease activity and reduced pain.

Now I realise that life is simply the best in the experience of day to day things most take as menial. All we have is now and this ‘now’ can be very fickle indeed.

Michael Karassowitsch's avatar

The entire AI discussion places emphasis on thinking. Thinking is a part of conscious awareness. It is not all of awareness and awareness is not dependent on it alone.

It seems to me that what Alphonso is pointing to is the fields that people will realize and rely on more, now that the authors of sci-fi have made machines copy thinking so well.

What is the drop in the ocean? The drops are you and I, and the ocean is love. This is a ‘fact’. The AI can talk or write about it. There are plenty of resources to scour. Any one of us can live that with more or less effort depending on their starting point. The computer, as well as the authors who feel they are computers, however, face darkness and oblivion.

Shon Pan's avatar

The problem is not that dreams could have come true or even instability, imo.

It is that cosmic horror, of being in a fatalistic and materialistic universe of uncaring horrors, is the one we seem to be in. A world without magic, beauty or even life, and some people are pushing this on us.

AI is the demonic evil and there are those who yet worship it.