Humans also have an emotional locus that spurs behavior and the capacity to construct plans for the future to satisfy desires. LLMs are currently goldfish savannts with no need to sustain their own existence.

In Context Learning (ICL) is already a rapidly advancing area. You do not need to modify their weights for LLMs to persist state.

The human brain is not that different. Our long-term memories are stored separately from our executive function (prefrontal cortex), and specialist brain functions such as the hippocampus serve to route, store, and retrieve those long term memories to support executive function. Much of the PFC can only retain working memory briefly without intermediate memory systems to support it.

If you squint a bit, the structure starts looking like it has some similarities to what's being engineered now in LLM systems.

Focusing on whether the model's weights change is myopic. The question is: does the system learn and adapt? And ICL is showing us that it can; these are not the stateless systems of two years ago, nor is it the simplistic approach of "feeding old context back to it."

> During that answer the LLM has state, but once it's done the state is gone.

This is an operational choice. LLMs have state, and you never have to clear it. The problems come from the amount of state being extremely limited (in comparison to the other axes) and the degradation of quality as the state scales. Because of these reasons, people tend to clear the state of LLMs. That is not the same thing as not having state, even if the result looks similar.

The trick here is never turning it off so the ICL keeps growing and learning to the point where it’s aware.

> They don't have agency, because they don't have persistent state. They're like a function that you can query and get an answer. During that answer the LLM has state, but once it's done the state is gone.

That's solved by the simplest of agents. LLM + ability to read / write a file.

I have no words to express how profoundly disappointed I am to keep reading these boring, shallow, shorttermist, unimaginative takes that are invalidated by a model/arch upgrade next week, or - in this case - more like years ago, since pretty much all big LLM platforms are already augmented by RAG and memory systems. Do you seriously think you’re discussing a serious long term limitation here?

That's not Star Trek, that's marketing.

Marketing grabbed a name (AI) for a concept that's been around in our legends for centuries and firmly welded it to something else. You should not be surprised that people who use the term AI think of LLMs as being djinn, golems, C3PO, HAL, Cortana...

Do maybe have a better show recommendation for kids - many Animal Farm?

How is convincing people that things within the limits of physics are possible wrong or even "the worse thing"?

Or do you think anything that you see in front of didn't seem like StarTrek a decade before it existed?

> I think you could make AGI right now tbh.

Seems like you figured out a simple method. Why not go for it? It's a free Nobel prize at the very least.

Where is the "what the thing cares about" part?

When I look at that loop my thought is, "OK, the sensory inputs have updated. There are changes. Which ones matter?" The most naive response I could imagine would be like a git diff of sensory inputs. "item 13 in vector A changed from 0.2 to 0.211" etc. Otherwise you have to give it something to care about, or some sophisticated system to develop things to care about.

Even the naive diff is making massive assumptions. Why should it care if some sensor changes? Maybe its more interesting if it stays the same.

Im not arguing artificial intelligence is impossible. I just dont see how that loop gets us anywhere close.

Wow, who would have thought it was that easy? Wonder why nobody has done this incredibly basic solution to AGI yet.

This seems to miss a core part of intelligence, which is a model of the world and the actors in it (theory of mind).

> ```while true: update_sensory_inputs() narrate_response() update_emotional_state() ```

You don't think that has already been made?

"STEP 2: Draw the rest of the owl."

Peak HN comment. Put this in the history books.

you do understand this would require re-training billions of weights in realtime

and not even "trainingl really.... but a finished and stably functioning billion+ param model updating itself in real time...

good luck, see you in 2100

in short, what ive been shouting from a hilltop since about 2023: LLMs tech alone simply wont cut it; we need a new form of technology

So the current problem with a loop like that is that LLMs in their current form are subject to fixed point theorems, which are these pieces of abstract mathematics that come back when you start to get larger than some subset of your context window and the “big matrix” of the LLM is producing outputs which repeat the inputs.

If you have ever had an llm enter one of these loops explicitly, it is infuriating. You can type all caps “STOP TALKING OR YOU WILL BE TERMINATED” and it will keep talking as if you didn't say anything. Congrats, you just hit a fixed point.

In the predecessors to LLMs, which were Markov chain matrices, this was explicit in the math. You can prove that a Markov matrix has an eigenvalue of one, it has no larger (in absolute value terms) eigenvalues because it must respect positivity, the space with eigenvalue 1 is a steady state, eigenvalue -1 reflects periodic steady oscillations in that steady state... And every other eigenvalue being |λ| < 1 decays exponentially to the steady state cluster. That “second biggest eigenvaue” determines a 1/e decay time that the Markov matrix has before the source distribution is projected into the steady state space and left there to rot.

Of course humans have this too, it appears in our thought process as a driver of depression, you keep returning to the same self-criticisms and nitpicks and poisonous narrative of your existence, and it actually steals your memories of the things that you actually did well and reinforces itself. A similar steady state is seen in grandiosity with positive thoughts. And arguably procrastination also takes this form. And of course, in the USA, we have founding fathers who accidentally created an electoral system whose fixed point is two spineless political parties demonizing each other over the issue of the day rather than actually getting anything useful done, which causes the laws to be for sale to the highest bidder.

But the point is that generally these are regarded as pathologies, if you hear a song more than three or four times you get sick of it usually. LLMs need to be deployed in ways that generate chaos, and they don't themselves seem to be able to simulate that chaos (ask them to do it and watch them succeed briefly before they fall into one of those self-repeating states about how edgy and chaotic they are supposed to try to be!).

So, it's not quite as simple as you would think; at this point people have tried a whole bunch of attempts to get llms to serve as the self-consciousnesses of other llms and eventually the self-consciousness gets into a fixed point too, needs some Doug Hofstadter “I am a strange loop” type recursive shit before you get the sort of system that has attractors, but busts out of them periodically for moments of self-consciousness too.

Hah, why don't you try implementing your 3 little functions and see how smart your "AGI" turns out.

> not a particularly capable AGI

Maybe the word AGI doesn't mean what you think it means...

But that's always been the case? Since we basically discovered... Fire? Tools?

If you genuinely want the strongest statement of it, read The Emperor's New Mind followed by Shadows of the Mind, both by Roger Penrose.

These books often get shallowly dismissed in terms that imply he made some elementary error in his reasoning, but that's not the case. The dispute is more about the assumptions on which his argument rests, which go beyond mathematical axioms and include statements about the nature of human perception of mathematical truth. That makes it a philosophical debate more than a mathematical one.

Personally, I strongly agree with the non-mathematical assumptions he makes, and am therefore persuaded by his argument. It leads to a very different way of thinking about many aspects of maths, physics and computing than the one I acquired by default from my schooling. It's a perspective that I've become increasingly convinced by over the 30+ years since I first read his books, and one that I think acquires greater urgency as computing becomes an ever larger part of our lives.

My layman thought about that is that, with consciousness, the medium IS the consciousness -- the actual intelligence is in the tangible material of the "circuitry" of the brain. What we call consciousness is an emergent property of an unbelievably complex organ (that we will probably never fully understand or be able to precisely model). Any models that attempt to replicate those phenomena will be of lower fidelity and/or breadth than "true intelligence" (though intelligence is quite variable, of course)... But you get what I mean, right? Our software/hardware models will always be orders of magnitude less precise or exhaustive than what already happens organically in the brain of an intelligent life form. I don't think AGI is strictly impossible, but it will always be a subset or abstraction of "real"/natural intelligence.

The only thing I can come up with is that compressing several hundred million years of natural selection of animal nervous systems into another form, but optimised by gradient descent instead, just takes a lot of time.

Not that we can’t get there by artificial means, but that correctly simulating the environment interactions, the sequence of progression, getting the all the details right, might take hundreds to thousands of years of compute, rather than on the order of a few months.

And it might be that you can get functionally close, but hit a dead end, and maybe hit several dead ends along the way, all of which are close but no cigar. Perhaps LLMs are one such dead end.

the penrose-lucas argument is the best bet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose%E2%80%93Lucas_argument

the basic idea being that either the human mind is NOT a computation at all (and it's instead spooky unexplainable magic of the universe) and thus can't be replicated by a machine OR it's an inconsistent machine with contradictory logic. and this is a deduction based on godel's incompleteness theorems.

but most people that believe AGI is possible would say the human mind is the latter. technically we don't have enough information today to know either way but we know the human mind (including memories) is fallible so while we don't have enough information to prove the mind is an incomplete system, we have enough to believe it is. but that's also kind of a paradox because that "belief" in unproven information is a cornerstone of consciousness.

The steelman would be that knowledge is possible outside the domain of Science. So the opposing argument to evolution as the mechanism for us (the "general intelligence" of AGI) would be that the pathway from conception to you is not strictly material/natural.

Of course, that's not going to be accepted as "Science", but I hope you can at least see that point of view.

In short, by definition, computers are symbol manipulating devices. However complex the rules of symbol manipulation, it is still a symbol manipulating device, and therefore neither intelligent nor sentient. So AGI on computers is not possible.

I think the best argument against us ever finding AGI is that the search space is too big and the dead ends are too many. It's like wandering through a monstrously huge maze with hundreds of very convincingly fake exits that lead to pit traps. The first "AGI" may just be a very convincing Chinese room that kills all of humanity before we can ever discover an actual AGI.

The necessary conditions for "Kill all Humanity" may be the much more common result than "Create a novel thinking being." To the point where it is statistically improbable for the human race to reach AGI. Especially since a lot of AI research is specifically for autonomous weapons research.

I suppose intelligence can be partitioned as less than, equal to, or greater than human. Given the initial theory depends on natural evidence, one could argue there's no proof that "greater than human" intelligence is possible - depending on your meaning of AGI.

But then intelligence too is a dubious term. An average mind with infinite time and resources might have eventually discovered general relativity.

If you have a wide enough definition of AGI having a baby is making “AGI.” It’s a human made, generally intelligent thing. What people mean by the “A” though is we have some kind of inorganic machine realize the traits of “intelligence” in the medium of a computer.

The first leg of the argument would be that we aren’t really sure what general intelligence is or if it’s a natural category. It’s sort of like “betterness.” There’s no general thing called “betterness” that just makes you better at everything. To get better at different tasks usually requires different things.

I would be willing to concede to the AGI crowd that there could be something behind g that we could call intelligence. There’s a deeper problem though that the first one hints at.

For AGI to be possible, whatever trait or traits make up “intelligence” need to have multiple realizablity. They need to be at least realizable in both the medium of a human being and at least some machine architectures. In programmer terms, the traits that make up intelligence could be tightly coupled to the hardware implementation. There are good reasons to think this is likely.

Programmers and engineers like myself love modular systems that are loosely coupled and cleanly abstracted. Biology doesn’t work this way — things at the molecular level can have very specific effects on the macro scale and vice versa. There’s little in the way of clean separation of layers. Who is to say that some of the specific ways we work at a cellular level aren’t critical to being generally intelligent? That’s an “ugly” idea but lots of things in nature are ugly. Is it a coincidence too that humans are well adapted to getting around physically, can live in many different environments, etc.? There’s also stuff from the higher level — does living physically and socially in a community of other creatures play a key role in our intelligence? Given how human beings who grow up absent those factors are developmentally disabled in many ways it would seem so. It could be there’s a combination of factors here, where very specific micro and macro aspects of being a biological human turn out to contribute and you need the perfect storm of these aspects to get a generally intelligent creature. Some of these aspects could be realizable and computers, but others might not be, at least in a computationally tractable way.

It’s certainly ugly and goes against how we like things to work for intelligence to require a big jumbly mess of stuff, but nature is messy. Given the only known case of generally intelligent life is humans, the jury is still out that you can do it any other way.

Another commenter mentioned horses and cars. We could build cars that are faster than horses, but speed is something that is shared by all physical bodies and is therefore eminently multiply realizable. But even here, there are advantages to horses that cars don’t have, and which are tied up with very specific aspects of being a horse. Horses generally can go over a wider range of terrain than cars. This is intrinsically tied to them having long legs and four hooves instead of rubber wheels. They’re only able to have such long legs because of their hooves too because the hooves are required to help them pump blood when they run, and that means that in order for them to pump their blood successfully they NEED to run fast on a regular basis. there’s a deep web of influence both on a part-to-part, and the whole macro-level behaviors of horses. Having this more versatile design also has intrinsic engineering trade-offs. A horse isn’t ever going to be as fast as a gas powered four-wheeled vehicle on flat ground but you definitely can’t build a car that can do everything a horse can do with none of the drawbacks. Even if you built a vehicle that did everything a horse can do, but was faster, I would bet you it would be way more expensive and consume much more energy than a horse. There’s no such thing as a free lunch in engineering. You could also build a perfect replica of a horse at a molecular level and claim you have your artificial general horse.

Similarly, human beings are good at a lot of different things besides just being smart. But maybe you need to be good at seeing, walking, climbing, acquiring sustenance, etc. In order to be generally intelligent in a way that’s actually useful. I also suspect our sense of the beautiful, the artistic is deeply linked with our wider ability to be intelligent.

Finally it’s an open philosophical question whether human consciousness is explainable in material terms at all. If you are a naturalist, you are methodologically committed to this being the case — but that’s not the same thing as having definitive evidence that it is so. That’s an open research project.

I think most people would have a better life using ketamine, but not that regularly for breakfasts as it permanently damages (shrinks) your bladder, eventually to the point where you can‘t hold any urine at all anymore.

LLMs aren't "incapable of pursuing their own goals". We just train them that way.

We don't like the simplistic goals LLMs default to, so we try to pry them out and instill our own: instruction-following, problem solving, goal oriented agentic behavior, etc. In a way, trying to copy what humans do - but focusing on the parts that make humans useful to other humans.

Even if you don't believe in God, scientific theories of how human cognition came about (and how it works and changes over time) are all largely speculation and good storytelling.

It’s not an assumption, it’s a viable theory based on overwhelming evidence from fossil records.

What’s NOT supported by evidence is an unknowable, untestable spiritual requirement for cognition.

It is completely unreasonable to assume our intelligence was not evolved, even if we acknowledge that an untestable magical process could be responsible. If the latter is true, it's not something we could ever actually know.

I'm sticking to materialism, because historically all its predictions turned out to be correct (cognition happens in the brain, thought manifests physically in neural activity, affecting our physical brain affects our thinking).

The counter-hypothesis (we think because some kind of magic happens) has absolutely nothing to show for; proponents typically struggle to even define the terms they need, much less make falsifiable predictions.

it is an assumption backed by considerable evidence. creationism otoh is an assumption backed by superstition an phantasizing, or could you point to at least some evidence.

besides, spirituality is not a "component", it's a property emergent from brain structure and function, which is basically purely a physical machine.

In that sense, what isn't an assumption?

Maybe there's a small teapot orbiting the earth, with ten thousand angels dancing on the tip of the spout.

Well, the goal-oriented behavior of the AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missile is even more obvious. It might even have a higher success rate than CLI coding tools. But it's not helpful to claim it has any agency.

What LLM programs do has zero resemblance to the human agency. That's just a modern variation of very complex set of GoTos and IfElses. Agency would be an LLM parsing your question and answering you "fuck off". Now that is agency, that is independent decision making, not programmed in advance and triggered by keywords. Just an example.

> The goal-oriented behavior is rather obvious.

Obvious? Is an illusion obviously the real thing?

There is nothing substantially different in LLMs from any other run of the mill algorithm or software.

That's a lot of words to say "LLMs think very much like humans do".

Haven't you noticed? Humans also happen to be far, far better at language than they are at math or logic. By a long shot too. Language acquisition is natural - any healthy human who was exposed to other humans during development would be able to pick up their language. Learning math, even to elementary school level, is something that has to be done on purpose.

Humans use pattern matching and associative abstract thinking - and use that to fall into stupid traps like "1kg of steel/feather" or "age of the captain". So do small LLMs.

Computers have been making decisions for a while now. As a specific personal example from 2008, I found out that my lender would make home loan offers based on an inscrutable (to me and the banker I was speaking to) heuristic. If the loan was denied by the heuristic, then a human could review the decision, but had strict criteria that they would have to follow. Basically, a computer could “exercise judgement” a make offers that a human could not.

> humans physically exist so our brains must be possible to build within the existing laws of physics

This is an unscientific position to take. We have no idea how our brains work, or how life, consciousness, and intelligence work. It could very well be that’s because our model of the world doesn’t account for these things and they are not in fact possible based on what we know. In fact I think this is likely.

So it really could be that AI is not possible, for example on a Turing machine or our approximation of them. This is at least as likely as it being possible. At some point we’ll hopefully refine our theories to have a better understanding, for now we have no idea and I think it’s useful to acknowledge this.

I don’t think we’ll be able to replicate consciousness until we’re able to make things alive at a biological level.

We can certainly make systems smart enough and people complicit enough to destroy society well before we reach that point.

I'm not saying that language necessarily is the biggest stumbling block on (our) road towards AI, but it is a very prominent feature that we have used to distinguish our capabilities from other animals long before AI was even conceived of. So the current successes with LLMs are highly encouraging.

I'm not buying the "current AI is just a dumb parrot relying on human training" argument, because the same thing applies to humans themselves-- if you raise a child without any cultural input/training data, all you get is a dumb cavemen with very limited reasoning capabilities.

Clearly, language reflects enough of "intelligence" for an LLM to be able to learn a lot of what "intelligence" does just by staring at a lot of language data really really hard.

Language doesn't capture all of human intelligence - and some of the notable deficiencies of LLMs originate from that. But to say that LLMs are entirely language-bound is shortsighted at best.

Most modern high end LLMs are hybrids that operate on non-language modalities, and there's plenty of R&D on using LLMs to consume, produce and operate on non-language data - i.e. Gemini Robotics.

Magic Fairy Dust? I don't buy anything that relies on Magic Fairy Dust.

That's not implausible at all. For all I know it might be the most on-target comment here.

But can you cite something specific? (I'm not asking for a psychological study. Maybe you can prove your point using Blake's "Jerusalem" or something. I really don't know.)

Good one.

I understand all the words you've used but I truly do not understand how they're supposed to be an argument against the GP post.

Before this unfolds into a much larger essay, should we not acknowledge one simple fact: that our best models of the universe indicate that our intelligence evolved in meat and that meat is just a type of matter. This is an assumption I'll stand on, and if you don't disagree, we need to back up.

Far too often, online debates such as this take the position that the most likely answer to a question should be discarded because it isn't fully proven. This is backwards. The most likely answer should be assumed to be probably true, a la Occam. Acknowledging other options is also correct, but assuming the most likely answer is wrong, without evidence, is simply contrarian for its own sake, not wisdom or science.

I'm just assuming materialism, and that assumption is basically for complete lack of convincing alternatives (to me).

With "agency" I just mean the ability to affect the physical world (not some abstract internal property).

Regarding "computers have no concepts of things": I'm happy with the "meaning" of something being a fuzzy cloud in some high dimensional space, and consider this plausible/workable both for our minds and current LLMs.

> you're taking a superficial black box view of intelligence

Yes. Human cognition is to me simply an emergent property of our physical brains, and nothing more.

> You center cognition/intelligence on humans as if it was the pinacle of it, rather than include the whole lot of other species (that may have totally different, or adjacent cognition models).

Why does that matter to their argument? Truly, the variety of intelligences on earth now only increases the likelihood of AGI being possible, as we have many pathways that don't follow the human model.

> You center cognition/intelligence on humans as if it was the pinacle of it

That's not my viewpoint, from elsewhere in the thread:

Cognition is (to me) not the most impressive and out-of-reach evolutionary achievement: That would be how our (and animals) bodies are self-assembling, self-repairing and self-replicating, with an impressive array of sensors and actors in a highly integrated package.

I honestly believe our current technology is much closer to emulating a human brain than it is to building a (non-intelligent) cat.

Even if there is a creator, it seems to have intentionally created a universe in which the evolution of humans is basically possible and it went to great lengths to hide the fact that it made us as a special unique thing.

Let’s assume there’s a creator: It is clearly willing to let bad things happen to people, and it set things up to make it impossible to prove that a human level intelligence should be impossible, so who’s to say it won’t allow a superintelligence to be a made by us?

I don't think that follows. God made lots of things that we can create facsimiles of, or even generate the real thing ourselves.

If you make the same argument for flight it looks really weak.

Cognition is (to me) not even the most impressive and out-of-reach achievement: That would be how (our) and animals bodies are self-assembling, self-repairing and self-replicating, with an impressive array of sensors and actors in a highly integrated package.

I honestly believe our current technology is much closer to emulating a human brain than it is to building a (non-intelligent) cat.

evolution isn't a directed effort in the same way that statistical learning is. The goal of evolution is not to produce the most inteligent life. It is not nessisarially an efficient process either.

The same "millions of years of evolution" resulted in both intelligent humans and brainless jellyfish.

Evolution isn't an intentional force that's gradually pushing organisms towards higher and higher intelligence. Evolution maximizes reproducing before dying - that's it.

Sure, it usually results in organisms adapting to their environment over time and often has emergent second-order effects, but at its core it's a dirt-simple process.

Evolution isn't driven to create intelligence any more so than erosion is driven to create specific rock formations.

Evolution had a much worse understanding of intelligence than we do and still managed just fine (thus i'd expect us to need less time and iterations to get there).

This is a bogus argument. There's a lot we don't understand about LLMs, yet we built them.

I'm more concerned with the ways that other people can kill me than with the ways they kill themselves.

I sure wish my conspiracy theories could lead to me running billion dollar projects to defend against my shadow demons. Instead I just get ratio'd by the internet and get awkward silences at family gatherings.

I think the sad part is that most people in power aren't planning to be around in 10 years, so they don't care about any long term issues that are cropping up. leave it to their grandchildren to burn with the world.

It's not an assumption, it's an extremely developed international field of tactical and strategic study that leads to these conclusions

Total extinction of any dominant species is really hard. Very few post-apocalyptic settings suggest a full extinction and usually show some thousands of survivors struggling with the new norm. Humans in particular are very adaptable so thorough killing all 8 billion of us would be difficult no matter the scenario. I think only the Sun can do that and that's assuming we fail to find an exit strategy 5 billion years in (we're less than a thousandth of a percent into humanity if we measure on that scale).

As such, I'd say "extinction" is more of a colloquial use of "Massive point in history that kills off billions in short order".

Personally I don't bieleve in a collapse nor extinction, just a slow spiral into more and more enshittification. You'll have to talk to an "ai" doctor because real doctors will treat people with money, you'll have to face an "ai" administration because the real administration will work for people with money, you'll have to be a flesh and blood robot to an "ai" telling you what to do (already the case for Amazon warehouse workers, food delivery people, &c.), some "ai" will determine if you qualify for X or Y benefits, X or Y treatment, X or Y job.

Basically everything wrong with today's productivism, but 100 times worse and powered by a shitty ai that's very far from agi.

But this isn’t a suggestion to turn away from AI threats - it’s a matter of prioritization. There are more imminent threats that we know can turn apocalyptic that swaths of people in power are completely ignoring and instead fretting over AI.

We should worry more about doomsday risks that are concrete and present today. Despite the prognostications of the uber wealthy, the emergence of AGI is not guaranteed. It likely will happen at some point, but is that tomorrow or 200 years in the future? We can’t know for sure.

We just need to convince people that the market is an artificial superintelligence. Or maybe… subintelligence.

I think it is partially true. The vast majority of human beings don’t act like that. But it seems the ones in power or close proximity to power do.

This is why it is important to have societies where various forms of power are managed carefully. Limited constitutional government with guaranteed freedoms and checks and balances for example. Regulations placed on mega corporations is another example. Restrictions to prevent the powerful in government or business (or both!) from messing around with the rest of us…

It's absolutely true, but most of the destruction is abstracted away so modern humans don't have to experience it directly or even really think about it. A staggering number of creatures are killed by normal people driving to normal things every year. Many more are killed by all of the resource extraction needed to supply our normal lives. Not to mention the vast numbers of wildlife that sees their habitat destroyed every year to make way for more housing and other development.

Killing animals for fun is an entire sport enjoyed by millions. Humans keep pets that kill billions of birds every year. The limited areas we've set aside to mostly let other nature be nature are constantly under threat and being shrunk down. The list of ways we completely subjugate other intelligent life on this planet is endless. We have driven many hundreds of species to extinction and kill countless billions every year.

I certainly enjoy the gains our species have made, just like everyone else on HN. I'd rather be in our position than any other species on our planet. But given our history I'm also pretty terrified of what happens if and when we run into a smarter and more powerful alien species or AI. If history is any guide, it won't go well for us.

This understanding can guide practical decisions. We shouldn't be barreling towards a potential super intelligence with no safeguards given how catastrophic that outcome could be, just like we shouldn't be shooting messages into space trying to wave our arms at whatever might be out there, any more than a small creature in the forest would want to attract the attention of a strange human.

The problem is that technology exponentially increases the negative effects of bad actors. The worst a sociopath could do in the stone age was ruin his local community; while today there are many more dystopian alternatives.

I mean, any article that doesn't include both is incomplete.

>If it bleeds, it Leeds has been a thing in news organizations since at least the 70s.

The term yellow journalism is far older.

> It seems like we're racing towards a world of fakery where nothing can be believed

Spend a couple minutes on social media and it is clear we are already there. The fakes are getting better, and even real videos are routinely called out as fake.

The best that I can hope for is that we all gain a healthy dose of skepticism and appreciate that everything we see could be fake. I don't love the idea of having to distrust everything I see, but at this point it seems like the least bad option.

But I worry that what we will experience will actually be somewhat worse. A sufficiently large number of people, even knowing about AI fakery, will still uncritically believe what they read and see.

Maybe I am being too cynical this morning. But it is hard to look at the state of our society today and not feel a little bleak.

That is assuming that ASI doesn't centralize power itself. I mean, if you are a non-human part of the animal kingdom you'd probably say that humans have centralized power around themselves.

Are you claiming a lack of gun / AI control is democratizing? That's not working for (the lack of) gun control in the US at the moment though.

Compare also with capitalism; unchecked capitalism on paper causes healthy competition, but in practice it means concentration of power (monopolies) at the expense of individuals (e.g. our accumulated expressions on the internet being used for training materials).

They also ignore that a lot of the knowledge they now have / have studied comes FROM others sharing freely.

Okay, if you want an aggressive animal that is interested in the fight, we can pick hippos.

This isn't about what humans have done at other times or in other places. The author wrote "At any time, in any location, under any circumstances", so the statement can be proven false with one single counterexample - e.g. a lone human without a firearm encountering a tiger in the Indian Sundarbans.

I hope we can reason with sentient intelligence.

As does AI.

You Eat Other Animals?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gz9Vj8TMCc

I think people forget how big people are. We're well above average size in the typical natural environment, and especially in the typical sorta-natural-but-sorta-urban environment most of us are in most of the time.

The local rabbits and squirrels tolerate each other but are pretty scared of me. Of course they are, I'm two hundred times bigger than they are, and much more dangerous. The local foxes are the closest thing we have to an apex predator around here, and they're rightfully terrified of this massive creature that outweighs their entire family combined.

Imagine wandering through the woods, enjoying the birds tweeting and generally being at one with nature, and then you come across a 20-ton 35ft-tall monster. You'd run away screaming.

And corporations are ultimately just sock-puppets for humanity. People forget that and like to other them while simultaneously turning them into the scapegoats. See every idiot with the list of companies responsible for global warming that amounts to 'every oil company' and ignore that it was the customers were the ones burning their products.

It is to be expected really. Humans themselves hold little consideration to human welfare when fulfilling their goals. It is something ingrained by nature for survival and in no way limited to humans. Every drop of water you drink, every bite you eat, are ones which cannot go to the thirsty and the hungry. With few exceptions, only our children would even give us pause to forgo such things for the sake of others.

Also bit of a pet peeve of mine: society isn't a delicate bolt of laced silk. It isn't a fabric, much less one that is damaged by any little change that you don't like. It isn't even stable which makes the charges of anything as 'ruining' society especially bizarre when nobody can point to where it would go before the blamed change. So hold off on poisoning Socrates.

Even if we hold the current state as worthy of preservation we would ultimately fail to for reasons related to the central paradox of tradition. Why your forebearers first did something was not done because of obedience to tradition, so by trying to preserve it set in stone, you have already failed.

Ah yes, rings a bell. Doesn't change the sentiment though. They're all crooks and cheaters who will sacrifice the greater good for their own self interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Georgia_Hyundai_plant_imm...

It's the fear of death that's killing us all.

True, but one of them is much more imminent than the other.