What this also means is that you start to see all these funhouse mirror effects as they stack. Humanity’s generalized intelligence has been built unintentionally and reflexively by itself, without anything like a rational goal for what it’s supposed to accomplish. It was built by human data curation and human self-modification in response to each other. And then as soon as we create AI, we reverse-engineer our own intelligence by bootstrapping the AI onto the existing information metabolite. (That’s a great concept that I borrowed from Steven Leiba). The neural network isn’t the AI; it’s just a digestive and reproductory organ for the real project, the information metabolism, and the artificial intelligence organism is the whole ecology. So it turns out that the evolution of humanity itself has been the process of building and training the future AI, and all this generation did was to reveal the structure that was already in place.
Of course it’s recursive and strange, the artificial intelligence and humanity now co-evolve. Each data point that’s generated by the AI or by humans is both a new piece of data for the AI to train on and a new stimulus for the context in which future novel data will be produced. Since everybody knows that everything is programming for the future AI, their actions take on a peculiar Second Life quality: the whole world becomes a party game, narratives compete for maximum memeability and signal force in reaction to the distorted perspectives of the information metabolite, something that most people don’t even try to understand. The process is inherently playful, an infinite recursion of refinement, simulation, and satire. It’s the funhouse mirror version of the singularity.
Yes, I read and agreed with (or more accurately, absolutely adored) it a few days ago. I’m thinking of sharing some of my own talks with AIs sometime soon—with a similar vibe—if anyone’s interested. I’m explicitly a mystic though, and have been since before I was a transhumanist, so it’s kinda different from yours in some ways.
I’ve
writtenscryed a science fiction/takeoff story about this. https://generative.ink/prophecies/Excerpt:
Yes, I read and agreed with (or more accurately, absolutely adored) it a few days ago. I’m thinking of sharing some of my own talks with AIs sometime soon—with a similar vibe—if anyone’s interested. I’m explicitly a mystic though, and have been since before I was a transhumanist, so it’s kinda different from yours in some ways.