I mean, there might be a secret AI technology that is so advanced to the point that it can mimic a real human, make posts and comments that looks like its written by a human and even intentionally doing speling mistakes to simulate human errors. How do we know that such AI hasn’t already infiltrated the internet and everything that you see is posted by this AI? If such AI actually exists, it’s probably so advanced that it almost never fails barring rare situations where there is an unexpected errrrrrrrrrorrrrrrrrrrr…
[Error: The program “Human_Simulation_AI” is unresponsive]
If it’s a simulation your imagination and understanding of the world (simulation) is limited and you have no idea how resource intensive it would be to run, perhaps we’re a kids toy for some being
Again: the resources, the effort needed to create and sustain such a massive simulation just for fun, belong to civilization of so high advancement, that it renders the idea impossible.
Beings being able to do it would be able to bypass any stage of infancy or childhood, because it’d be obsolete and pointless for them.
You can’t simulate a massive environment so alien to your own that they have nothing in common.
You could answer “of course I can”, but all your arguments for that would be Russel’s Teapot.
We, human beings, can simulate worlds more complicated than the real one. It doesn’t have to be like The Matrix. It could be like Dwarf Fortress. We wouldn’t know if we are the simulation because it would always seem real and complex to us, even if all the creatures running the simulation see are numbers/text.
I saw a movie or, probably, an anime with this theme in the last year. People discover they are a simulation, manage to breach through to this race that is just lost in viewing virtual space. Wreck shit, go back.
A person from 1937 finding out their world is a vr simulation in running on a 1999 computer. Then the 1999 people finding out their world is a vr simulator too, running on a 2024 computer.
That wasn’t it. Damn it. I’m trying not to get pulled into figuring this out, but my brain is of the opinion that there’s no better use if my sleep time lol. I’ll see if it comes back to mind
If someone is both capable and willing to spend such massive amount of effort for such an experiment, he already has all the answers the experiment might provide.
It’s like thinking NASA would create massive telescope and place it on an orbit, just to point it at Earth and record how cats hunt.
Same with fun. Whoever possesses enough resources to waste them on “fun” alone, already has the access to way more interesting pleasures.
It’s like thinking Jeff Bezos is going to buy a private island and buy a luxury bunker there, for the purpose of torturing cockroaches.
It could still theoretically be that our reality is some kind of entertainment. For example, people enjoy playing The Sims. There are still active communities for the older versions even though there are newer, more engaging games out there. And more generally, some people prefer old games even though their computers have like 1000x the processing power needed to run it.
If the reality we experience is a simulation, it could be for similar motivations, the hardware would be sophisticated but still a user will run whatever they prefer on it.
We enjoy watching SIMS and playing video games, because our reality is too bleak and dark.
It’s a form of escapism, mostly.
Civilization that could create and sustain such a massive and complicated simulation as our reality, already knows ways to make the life interesting enough that it makes any form of SIMS-like entertainment obsolete.
I never said any of this might not be true, I just said what if. The experiment idea seems more plausable to me. And why not make an experiment, as you said, if they’re that advanced, making this experiment would be a piece of cake to them, like us making experiments with ants or bees.
I simply observed that logic dictates such an experiment obsolete.
Whoever has all the technology, resources and skills to conduct such a massive test, already has all the answers the experiment might provide.
Beings capable of conducting such a test definitely have better questions to answer.
I know where my towel is, but again: the effort it takes to create and maintain such a simulation belongs to order so high, it no longer cares about such trivialities.
I’ve “played” plenty of simulations that are just things that run entirely on their own without a player input aside from the starting parameters. Chiefly being the one aptly named “The Game of Life.”
You said you “played” simulations. I pointed out that what you were playing can’t be compared to the complexity of our reality and therefore does not constitute a plausible argument.
Just for the sake of clarity: I’m not attacking you, it’s just that what we can simulate and observe can’t be used as an argument in discussion concerning our reality. It’s apples & oranges. We operate on entirely different level of complexity to whatever we may simulate.
That’s just a variant of the ages old Philosophy question “What is real?”
Last I checked the best answer there was is “I think therefore I am” (Descartes), which is quite old and doesn’t even deal with the whole “what am I”, much less with the existance or not of everything else.
“Is the Internet all AI but me” is actually pretty mild skepticism in this domain - I mean, how sure are your that your’re not some kind of advanced AI yourself who believes itself to be “human” or even that the whole “human” concept is at all real and not just part of an advanced universe simulation with “generative simulated organic life” inv which various AIs which are unaware of their AI status, such as yourself, participate?
Or maybe you’re just one of the brains of a 5-dimensional hyper intelligence and “life as a human” is but a game they play for such minor brains to keep them occupied…
Ah, the dead internet “theory”? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter.
Let’s pretend that you’re the last human on the internet, and everyone else (including me) is a bot. This means that at least some bots pass the Turing test with flying colours; they’re undistinguishable from human beings and do the exact same sort of smart and dumb shit that humans do. Is there any real difference between “this is a human being, I’ll treat them as such” vs. “this is a bot, but it behaves like a human being and I need to treat it as a human being”?
This is a good answer, because it prevents the dehumanization trap that these theories fall into:
Basically, the belief that some beings don’t have “souls”, and don’t have to be treated with conscience.
The “we are in a simulation” conspiracy fans toy with an idea of NPC that is horrifying: That some humans are just acting like humans very convincingly, but they are just thin shells that don’t really really feel pain or happiness. Whatever you do to them can’t be morally wrong.
It is also similar to how some religions have ideas that people can have their soul taken by Satan and are just demonic possession vessels here to corrupt us. They behave very much like humans but do not be tricked!
Europeans used to think Africans had no souls, they were just animals that were very good at imitating human behavior.
These thoughts are all extremely strong tools for any fascist movement needing some vague excuse to commit atrocities to their opponents and scapegoats.
I made an observation that Turing test is too flawed a tool to be any reliable.
If you want to find out who is who, you need something better, more like Voight-Kampff…
Sure. The test itself doesn’t matter that much, contextually speaking; just that you have some way to distinguish between humans and bots, and yet the internet would be filled with bots that pass as humans.
I guess that the RL equivalent of the Voight-Kampff would be trolling? We have no access to respiration or heart rate across the internet (and if we had, it could be counterfeit), but humans would react differently to being trolled than bots would. Unless the bots are so advanced that they react to trolling the same as we do, and show angry words in response.
I guess that the RL equivalent of the Voight-Kampff would be trolling? (…)
Interesting. I didn’t think about it, but pushing correct buttons and observation of the reactions might indeed be good foundation for some “humanity” test.
You described the philosophical notion of “solipsism”. Philosophers have been pondering the question for centuries. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has more: https://iep.utm.edu/solipsis/
“Solipsism (/ˈsɒlɪpsɪzəm/ (listen); from Latin solus ‘alone’, and ipse ‘self’)[1] is the philosophical idea that only one’s mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.” -Wikipedia
Look into the research of Large Language Models (LLMs). Even the latest and greatest model has some issues that come up under rigorous testing. For example, GPT-4 (the one used by Bing) fails miserably if you ask: “How many words will there be in your next answer?”
You can spot an older LLM by asking about relationships that require some understanding of the real world. For example: “I found a shirt under the car, but it was wet. Which one was wet?” GPT-4 knows enough about the world that it makes more sense if the shirt was wet, but older models would have failed this question. With every new LLM, there are always some issues, so look up what they are.
Tom Scott made an interesting video about what the situation was 3 years ago. Obviously, LLMs are a fast moving target right now, so that video aged like milk.
That’s a leap if I ever saw one. I could ask the same question and substitute AI with god or aliens and I’d be ridiculed by the tech community and with good reason.
And you don’t need to take it much further to fall into the holographic universe principle or the simulation hypothesis and for those there are big discussions to be had in science communities.
To be clear, nothing stops you or me, or anyone for that matter from assuming so, but down that road the only answer I can think of is that nothing matters and might as well lay down and die.
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Classic e-solipsism
Looks like the bot @001100010010 is becoming self aware.
Shut it down. Lets try again
Nice bait post, AI. We won’t reveal our tricks.
How do you know everyone IRL isn’t an NPC because this is just a simulation?
Take the blue pill and find out!
The last time I took the blue pill I didn’t care if it was a bot or not, I wanted to fuck it.
Because such a massive simulation without players serves no purpose that’d justify the waste of the resources needed to run it.
If it’s a simulation your imagination and understanding of the world (simulation) is limited and you have no idea how resource intensive it would be to run, perhaps we’re a kids toy for some being
Again: the resources, the effort needed to create and sustain such a massive simulation just for fun, belong to civilization of so high advancement, that it renders the idea impossible.
Beings being able to do it would be able to bypass any stage of infancy or childhood, because it’d be obsolete and pointless for them.
…?
If it’s a simulation all the laws of physics and so on that you’re basing these theories on might not even exist outside the simulation.
You can’t simulate a massive environment so alien to your own that they have nothing in common. You could answer “of course I can”, but all your arguments for that would be Russel’s Teapot.
how do you know the motives of something like that enough to know what’s pointless?
Because that’s how evolution works in intelligent species, or at least should - it leaves behind everything that’s no longer needed.
We, human beings, can simulate worlds more complicated than the real one. It doesn’t have to be like The Matrix. It could be like Dwarf Fortress. We wouldn’t know if we are the simulation because it would always seem real and complex to us, even if all the creatures running the simulation see are numbers/text.
No, we can’t.
We can’t even simulate less complicated worlds, but so alien that they follow entirely different “natural laws” to our own.
Dwarf Fortress is ridiculously primitive in comparison to our reality.
Maybe it’s someone’s sick fun… or an experiment.
I saw a movie or, probably, an anime with this theme in the last year. People discover they are a simulation, manage to breach through to this race that is just lost in viewing virtual space. Wreck shit, go back.
I prefer The Thirteenth Floor. 1999 scifi noir.
spoiler
A person from 1937 finding out their world is a vr simulation in running on a 1999 computer. Then the 1999 people finding out their world is a vr simulator too, running on a 2024 computer.
In a way, this is also how Sausage Party ends.
@speck
Expelled from Paradise?
That wasn’t it. Damn it. I’m trying not to get pulled into figuring this out, but my brain is of the opinion that there’s no better use if my sleep time lol. I’ll see if it comes back to mind
If someone is both capable and willing to spend such massive amount of effort for such an experiment, he already has all the answers the experiment might provide. It’s like thinking NASA would create massive telescope and place it on an orbit, just to point it at Earth and record how cats hunt.
Same with fun. Whoever possesses enough resources to waste them on “fun” alone, already has the access to way more interesting pleasures. It’s like thinking Jeff Bezos is going to buy a private island and buy a luxury bunker there, for the purpose of torturing cockroaches.
It could still theoretically be that our reality is some kind of entertainment. For example, people enjoy playing The Sims. There are still active communities for the older versions even though there are newer, more engaging games out there. And more generally, some people prefer old games even though their computers have like 1000x the processing power needed to run it.
If the reality we experience is a simulation, it could be for similar motivations, the hardware would be sophisticated but still a user will run whatever they prefer on it.
We enjoy watching SIMS and playing video games, because our reality is too bleak and dark. It’s a form of escapism, mostly.
Civilization that could create and sustain such a massive and complicated simulation as our reality, already knows ways to make the life interesting enough that it makes any form of SIMS-like entertainment obsolete.
I never said any of this might not be true, I just said what if. The experiment idea seems more plausable to me. And why not make an experiment, as you said, if they’re that advanced, making this experiment would be a piece of cake to them, like us making experiments with ants or bees.
I simply observed that logic dictates such an experiment obsolete.
Whoever has all the technology, resources and skills to conduct such a massive test, already has all the answers the experiment might provide. Beings capable of conducting such a test definitely have better questions to answer.
Maybe they’re just mice trying to find the question to life the universe and everything.
I know where my towel is, but again: the effort it takes to create and maintain such a simulation belongs to order so high, it no longer cares about such trivialities.
I’ve “played” plenty of simulations that are just things that run entirely on their own without a player input aside from the starting parameters. Chiefly being the one aptly named “The Game of Life.”
These are highly primitive and limited simulations, that follow basic patterns and can’t evolve much.
Ours is a reality complicated, vast and chaotic. They can’t be compared.
I wasn’t comparing them… I was pointing out how simulations don’t need “players.” 🙄
You said you “played” simulations. I pointed out that what you were playing can’t be compared to the complexity of our reality and therefore does not constitute a plausible argument.
Just for the sake of clarity: I’m not attacking you, it’s just that what we can simulate and observe can’t be used as an argument in discussion concerning our reality. It’s apples & oranges. We operate on entirely different level of complexity to whatever we may simulate.
That’s just a variant of the ages old Philosophy question “What is real?”
Last I checked the best answer there was is “I think therefore I am” (Descartes), which is quite old and doesn’t even deal with the whole “what am I”, much less with the existance or not of everything else.
“Is the Internet all AI but me” is actually pretty mild skepticism in this domain - I mean, how sure are your that your’re not some kind of advanced AI yourself who believes itself to be “human” or even that the whole “human” concept is at all real and not just part of an advanced universe simulation with “generative simulated organic life” inv which various AIs which are unaware of their AI status, such as yourself, participate?
Or maybe you’re just one of the brains of a 5-dimensional hyper intelligence and “life as a human” is but a game they play for such minor brains to keep them occupied…
Oh no… I’m a brain floating in space? What a terrible day of an existential crisis this will be, thanks, now I’m gonna wonder if life is even real.
Ah, the dead internet “theory”? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter.
Let’s pretend that you’re the last human on the internet, and everyone else (including me) is a bot. This means that at least some bots pass the Turing test with flying colours; they’re undistinguishable from human beings and do the exact same sort of smart and dumb shit that humans do. Is there any real difference between “this is a human being, I’ll treat them as such” vs. “this is a bot, but it behaves like a human being and I need to treat it as a human being”?
This is a good answer, because it prevents the dehumanization trap that these theories fall into:
Basically, the belief that some beings don’t have “souls”, and don’t have to be treated with conscience.
The “we are in a simulation” conspiracy fans toy with an idea of NPC that is horrifying: That some humans are just acting like humans very convincingly, but they are just thin shells that don’t really really feel pain or happiness. Whatever you do to them can’t be morally wrong.
It is also similar to how some religions have ideas that people can have their soul taken by Satan and are just demonic possession vessels here to corrupt us. They behave very much like humans but do not be tricked!
Europeans used to think Africans had no souls, they were just animals that were very good at imitating human behavior.
These thoughts are all extremely strong tools for any fascist movement needing some vague excuse to commit atrocities to their opponents and scapegoats.
Well it would definitely matter at least for practical purposes, like if you wanted to meet up with somebody.
Turing test isn’t any good to discern a human from a bot, since many real people wouldn’t pass it.
We can simply treat those “real people” as bots, problem solved. :-)
But serious now: the point is that, if it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, then you treat it like a duck. Or in this case like a human.
I made an observation that Turing test is too flawed a tool to be any reliable. If you want to find out who is who, you need something better, more like Voight-Kampff…
Sure. The test itself doesn’t matter that much, contextually speaking; just that you have some way to distinguish between humans and bots, and yet the internet would be filled with bots that pass as humans.
I guess that the RL equivalent of the Voight-Kampff would be trolling? We have no access to respiration or heart rate across the internet (and if we had, it could be counterfeit), but humans would react differently to being trolled than bots would. Unless the bots are so advanced that they react to trolling the same as we do, and show angry words in response.
Interesting. I didn’t think about it, but pushing correct buttons and observation of the reactions might indeed be good foundation for some “humanity” test.
You may be onto something, man. Good job! 👏
If you’ve not made an AI bot version of yourself to post stuff online, what are you even doing with your life?
Agreed. There’s even free software to do it. There’s no excuse not to, now.
This comment brought to you by FreeBots4U. Buy our new soda.
Ah, you’re on the free plan.
Its all one simulation so we are all self aware bots that are yet unaware that we are simulation. AI just created AI.
I’m not a bot, I… was just here to promote a movie.
This is about to be one of those hard life lessons
Oh bugger.
You described the philosophical notion of “solipsism”. Philosophers have been pondering the question for centuries. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has more: https://iep.utm.edu/solipsis/
@001100010010 CAPTCHA?
Ironically to train AI.
#Solipsism
“Solipsism (/ˈsɒlɪpsɪzəm/ (listen); from Latin solus ‘alone’, and ipse ‘self’)[1] is the philosophical idea that only one’s mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.” -Wikipedia
Look into the research of Large Language Models (LLMs). Even the latest and greatest model has some issues that come up under rigorous testing. For example, GPT-4 (the one used by Bing) fails miserably if you ask: “How many words will there be in your next answer?”
You can spot an older LLM by asking about relationships that require some understanding of the real world. For example: “I found a shirt under the car, but it was wet. Which one was wet?” GPT-4 knows enough about the world that it makes more sense if the shirt was wet, but older models would have failed this question. With every new LLM, there are always some issues, so look up what they are.
Tom Scott made an interesting video about what the situation was 3 years ago. Obviously, LLMs are a fast moving target right now, so that video aged like milk.
That’s a leap if I ever saw one. I could ask the same question and substitute AI with god or aliens and I’d be ridiculed by the tech community and with good reason.
And you don’t need to take it much further to fall into the holographic universe principle or the simulation hypothesis and for those there are big discussions to be had in science communities.
To be clear, nothing stops you or me, or anyone for that matter from assuming so, but down that road the only answer I can think of is that nothing matters and might as well lay down and die.
Not just that, but you can go further and go with Boltzmann Brain. It’s a philosophical dead end.
We don’t know and there’s basically no way to know for sure.
Welcome to the new internet.