This just confuses me so much. They know the definition of what "self" means, is it just broken because this is the first time they can interact with another seemingly complex system without feeling exploited or manipulated? Have they never cooperated with another person with a mutual goal? Not that LLMs would ever be on that level.

Ironically, or sadly (or perhaps a mixture of these+), this statement was absolutely informed (hopefully not inspired) by an LLM.

I guess I will circle around again, because the miserable folks here found cause to flag, yes, flag my question. But you seem pretty smart, really smart, and good at judging people. So I will ask you more directly this time to back your statement. The polite version failed.

Please apply your great psychological prowess to Roman Yampolskiy or Tegmark. Those might require more than a cheap comment to leave uncontested by the spineless swarm here.

Go on. Make your case. I can still read it even if this comment is flagged again.

That, or just SV madness.

If you're in northern California anywhere near the Bay Area, work in tech, and are reading this, I am literally begging you to leave your echo chamber. This isn't healthy or grounded in reality in any way, shape, or form. It's not just the AI stuff, it's the whole mindset. Humans aren't meant to operate in that sort of environment where there's unlimited funding and no consequence.

Agreed.

Hardly a novel concept in technology: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/19/iphone-ap...

Help me understand... If one uses AI for anything but coding, or purely utilitarian purposes, they are psychotic?

This is not intended to be provocative. I am asking sincerely. I have a lot of AI sessions, that I value enough to have reviewed multiple times, over months. And indeed, I explored much that I never would have without the AI, and enjoyed it. Even appreciated it. The bulk of my saved material is research, but at least a gigabyte is wild speculation, philosophy, and assisted thinking.

At what point does what the user thinks is a meaningful experience become psychosis, or is it that exactly; attributing meaningfulness is the symptom?

Edit: The "no longer other" statement, I should admit, is familiar to me. There can be, on rare occasion, what I have thought of abstractly as harmonic resonance, some kind of strange emergent state between two interlocutors. Maybe that is the psychosis?

>‘Tech’ culture has gotten very, very weird. It’s turned sour. It’s so far past the point where I no longer feel the joy and excitement and liberatory potential of computing. I’m not even that old. What happened?

It always had that edge. Maybe technology in general always has a somewhat pagan flavor to it (for example JPL/Jack Parsons). Its just becoming a bit more mainstream now due to AGI larping.

I think it’s the result of the LessWrong/rationalist crowd mixing with cult of personality VCs like Peter Thiel. The rationalists have always been pretty culty, the VCs gave them unlimited capital. All of that happening in a tight ecosystem like Silicon Valley and you somehow get the current AI tech world. AGI is seen as a religious figure to which we owe to sacrifice pretty much everything, with very high urgency, or else we will be lost. And everybody wants to be the messiah announcing it coming, to be the one who really believed and should be rewarded

I don't know about satanic, but there are definitely some cult-y, brainwashed-y vibes.

It not about creating anymore. It's about power, and now a certain group of the top tech elite have experienced enough power that they're having delusions of grandeur. Those delusions cater to the dark desires that live inside most humans - to have control over everyone and everything.

There has been an inflection point in the recent past where the majority of heavily marketed and promoted "tech" (namely, software and tools) have gone from assisting lives and promoting ease to actively making lives more difficult and compromising the social integrity of human civilization. People disagree on where that inflection point lies but nearly everyone has a story of how they used to be excited for new gadget x or y and now they dread hearing press releases by the bigwigs in this industry. Profiteering, power-seeking, and ill intentions have infected SV and those impulses have likely been there from the beginning.

And yes, the company that owns this website has a lot to do with that. Just look at the borderline cult-like adoration for certain tools, or the uninformed comments by people who are clearly not SMEs in fields like medicine, aviation, or other critical fields about how AGI is right around the corner and will free us from the oh-so-sad fact that we have to interact with other human beings to live.

On the face of it, psychoanalyzing from afar, it makes perfect sense. Relatively asocial, unpopular smart kids who later grew to become kings of startup empires, who see human interaction as a net negative, who are quick to point out the fallibility of human intellect while simultaneously being incapable of acknowledging the fallibility of their computers which they have been glued to, who endlessly over-optimize and neuroticize and attempt to quantify human emotions and expressions which are famously unquantifiable and subjective, who see the intrinsic subjectivity of life as something uncomfortable and avoidable rather than something beautiful that we all must contend with, who were more than likely never regarded highly by their more conventional or perhaps less intelligent peers in primary or secondary school, who were never socialized properly, are now the kings of our new feudal realms. This industry promoted them to that position, and now we all must live with the consequences of that decision, for the better which decreases by the day, and the worse, which increases by every femtosecond.

Please don't besmirch the Satanists, they're doing great work for religious freedom in the states.

I kept expecting it to turn into a horror short story.

Well, the text-to-thought direction feels less sci-fi, and combining both would amount to kind of telepathy.

But sure, you're right. Reading is not a deterministic mapping of text to thoughts.

Apart from the trouble of defining what a thought is, independent from the person who thinks it.

Me thinking of grabbing a mug of coffee is a different thought from you doing the same... defining "thought" pulls in a whole jungle of epistemology (maybe I should say philosophy, more broadly, I'm not in the field).

Is there an abstract concept of "the thought of raising your left index finger"? Or "the thought of remembering severe pain"? Etc etc

Next you'll want the term "Artificial Intelligence" reserved for actual artificial intelligence.

next they're going to set up thought-triggered Amazon purchases and say that moving the object from the warehouse to your home constitutes telekinesis.

ever since Elon did his "promise full self-driving every year" thing, entrepreneurs been on a weird sort of fiction escalator.

thought-to-text is incredible. imagine doing something that remarkable with your life and feeling the need to exaggerate.

Neuralink to Neuralink users

I can see legit use cases where people simply can't communicate in any physical way. People with locked-in syndrome, etc.

But, obviously those only make up a small number of people.

Strapping a mind-reading machine onto some detainee is probably the more likely case.

This might be naive, but I think the idea is to replace your keyboard

Good to know I'll still have the reassurance of a 9:30 standup even though AI is reading my thoughts.

I think I think I think it will be eventually.

Same. I'm still not sure it isn't.

What's a president? King Trump II has been our leader as long as I can remember!

Most people get quite tired when talking for long periods. You can train that over a long period, but putting on a headset would certainly be more convenient.

nice double entendre on "dictate", there.

We can finally have ads in our dreams like Futurama.

No. This is the philosophical basis of the fifth amendment.

It's 2035. I wake up, walk over to my chair, and plug in my government-mandated Neuralink™ adaptor. I'll spend the rest of my 18 hour work day haunched over my desk while the minutiae of my thoughts are recorder to permanent record for the next iteration of Grok-14.5™ training.

There is probably good money in upgrading the polygraph security clearance ritual for the 21st century.

It doesn’t even really need to work of course.

That's easily solved!

The Conduit® Thinkerface® Pro Band will contain a small 90B dense local model that pre-screens your Conduit® NeuroTokens® stream for compliance against the Conduit® Acceptable Usage Policy applicable for your region and subscription tier.

If non-compliance is detected you'll be promptly notified via a small current applied to the Conduit® ThinkRight® Human Training Electrodes embedded within your band. Intensity and duration are dynamically adjusted until compliance is restored.

Even better, because this all happens on-device before your Conduit® NeuroTokens® are sent to the Conduit® NeuroServer®, non-compliant thoughts don't count towards your Conduit® Daily Thinking Allowance or expend credits from your Conduit® Additional Thinking Purchase Plan.

As someone with OCD, this tech is pretty far up there in terms of potential nightmares.

Yeah, this whole area of UX scares me. Silent speech techniques could strike a balance, but it seems obvious it wont stop there - consider what a state actor would do if they could skip interrogation altogether?

Unfortunately I think this is inevitable because as a species we perform a steady march toward collective desires for items of science fiction, so start your adversarial double-think practice now.

Just wait until advertisers can get in on your real-time mental stream of thought.

This is a Black Mirror episode coming to life.

"My AI just sent my boss a 12 paragraph screed because I thought about how much I hate him"

As employees they have unlimited usage IIRC, and also these kinds of tasks can be surprisingly token efficient because a very large chunk of time is spent waiting for the calculation to finish, and AI agents love to run calculations excessively.

Me too. I have meta glasses and it caps at 3 minutes and theres no auto recording.

"probably in our lifetime"

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

vim already exists

According to her Wikipedia page, she's ~23 and went to Harvard, so A) her life experience is limited, B) most of the experience she does have involves being on a path to elitehood, and C) she probably sees a chance at a life-changing amount of money here.

People like this are the input side of the "oops we built the Torment Nexus" pipeline.

Inevitablism, a fundamentalist belief system that resolves every moral hazard with an appeal to the inevitable. "we can't let someone else do this first"

It's called being insulated from the immediate consequences of their actions and hubris.

I understand where you are coming from. Yet.

Neuralink exists since 10 years, is in clinical trial, has been implanted on a living human being in 2 years ago.

The lack of adults in the room to set rules around moral hazard is hardly her generation's fault.

To me, this reads as an attempt to raise easy investment money.

> Watching the optimism and then collapse of Web 2.0

What collapse of web 2.0?

Technically the website we're on is web 2.0 because we're interacting as users.

I don't think it's naiveté on their part to want to build new things. I think you're just jaded and hyperfocusing on the negatives.

well she is only 23 so naivete would make sense, although it looks like she held some AI safety roles so...

"Die Gedanken sind frei..." - can someone guess them? A truly dystopian question.

It is been 10 years ago when I looked through some research in that area. Back then it was the problem to get enough good signal. Has the situation changed radically here for non-invasive electrodes or portable detectors?

I understand that the approach would be to turn weak signal, context, and LLM based signal processing into useful human computer interaction. For everything else, I have the feeling we are still in speculative territory.

I think this is actually marginally less evil than Meta Tribe. The whole neuro space is dangerous and while people go on about “AI safety” the world will trend towards this madness.

And this will provoke “well we need to regulate AI then”. No, you need to regulate poking around in people’s brains without asking them before that becomes normal.

From the article

> It’s hard to collect enough data using invasive methods. Few people want a chip in their brain! But non-invasive methods are getting much better. The hardware is improving and getting cheaper, though I apologize for being vague about the particularities of our hardware.

sure would be cool to transfer memories. Then we'd be able to download how to fly a helicopter.pdf right to our brains like in the matrix.

if you get an earworm you will have to pay royalties

Simple, think about going right

i dont want it to be wired into my head but maybe a glass or something where i can communicate with it almost silently

They will also want to beam back the response straight back into your brain one day.

No worries, I'm sure there won't be Flock cameras reading your thought crimes as you drive/walk by.

> Can't make a neural interface worth a damn without cracking open a few skulls.

I immediately thought, ironically, your neurology wrote that with a computer and HN humans' neurologies read it with computers.