On the way to drop my daughter to her friend’s house, we’re listening to AI Samson talk about o1-Preview, and in a clip, Jensen Huang mentions that people should work on their natural language abilities—technical coding will all be done by AI. My daughter asked...
… What will I do when I grow up, if AI can do everything?
I didn’t really know what to say. On the one hand I could answer “whatever you want” or on the other hand “don’t worry AI will never be able to replicate your uniquely creative human spirit”. But I don’t really believe this...
NAUSEA
I’m currently reading Sartre’s Nausea. Although I’m an existentialist (I believe existence precedes essence) I don’t generally share the negative valance that turn-of-the-(20th)-century existentialists had. In the past, I’ve been fascinated by Heidegger’s idea of authenticity, and the idea that we are “thrown” into existence and live in relation to a “mitwelt” (with-world) and as such, authentic moments of realisation of this, comes with a sense of profound anxiety. In Sartre’s philosophical work he talks about inhabiting roles in order to avoid dealing with this feeling of falling, or groundlessness. This is the nausea that Sartre’s protagonist Antoine Roquentin is feeling, a sense of being...
… surrounded by cardboard scenery which could suddenly be removed.
I’m an optimist, and voraciously consuming the LLM porn of o1-preview updates, the excitement of what this means for humanity is there for me. But through understanding the leaps and bounds of its reasoning capacity—whether its circumventing the testing environment to “cheat” on tests, or having a non-zero percentage of “intentionally deceptive” behaviours, or its switching to the right hand side of the IQ bell curve… I have unquestioningly had this feeling of nausea.
SUBJECTS & OBJECTS
In Sartre’s novel, Roquentin begins to feel that, rather than being a subject who acts upon the objects around him, the objects are becoming subjects, and he himself is becoming an object, acted upon by them.
There is something new, for example, about my hands, a certain way of piking p my pipe or my fork. Or else is it the fork which has a certain way of getting itself picked up.
Existentialists are grappling with a sense of being just another object in the world, made of the same material as everything else, with our sense of volition or even causality undermined. It is this sort of Copernican paradigm shift—no longer being the centre of the universe—that Roquentin is feeling. It’s no surprise that AI—an object that embodies many of the attributes of a subject, elicits the same sense.
Humanity may be, once again, shifting, now within the world of reason, away from our cherished central position.
BUT...
… this sense of nausea, has always been a response to learning something profoundly new, something true that changes our perspective, and makes it more accurate. I have to remind myself that I shouldn’t be afraid of developing a more accurate perspective. The discomfort is the discomfort of growth, and there’s excitement there as well, a giddiness—we don’t watch updates in order to feel terrible, after all.
AN UNSATISFACTORY ANSWER
I replied to my daughter that she just has to think about what she wants to be able to do herself, what she wants for her own brain, what does she want to be able to do with it? I’ve always encouraged her not to judge herself in comparison to others, and this is no different.
I reminded her that when Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, interest in chess didn’t plummet, it skyrocketed—humans thrive on being challenged, and I’m personally excited about the prospect of a world where a challenge to our reasoning might lead to a skyrocketing of human reason.
The Other Existential Crisis
A DIFFICULT QUESTION
On the way to drop my daughter to her friend’s house, we’re listening to AI Samson talk about o1-Preview, and in a clip, Jensen Huang mentions that people should work on their natural language abilities—technical coding will all be done by AI. My daughter asked...
I didn’t really know what to say. On the one hand I could answer “whatever you want” or on the other hand “don’t worry AI will never be able to replicate your uniquely creative human spirit”. But I don’t really believe this...
NAUSEA
I’m currently reading Sartre’s Nausea. Although I’m an existentialist (I believe existence precedes essence) I don’t generally share the negative valance that turn-of-the-(20th)-century existentialists had. In the past, I’ve been fascinated by Heidegger’s idea of authenticity, and the idea that we are “thrown” into existence and live in relation to a “mitwelt” (with-world) and as such, authentic moments of realisation of this, comes with a sense of profound anxiety. In Sartre’s philosophical work he talks about inhabiting roles in order to avoid dealing with this feeling of falling, or groundlessness. This is the nausea that Sartre’s protagonist Antoine Roquentin is feeling, a sense of being...
I’m an optimist, and voraciously consuming the LLM porn of o1-preview updates, the excitement of what this means for humanity is there for me. But through understanding the leaps and bounds of its reasoning capacity—whether its circumventing the testing environment to “cheat” on tests, or having a non-zero percentage of “intentionally deceptive” behaviours, or its switching to the right hand side of the IQ bell curve… I have unquestioningly had this feeling of nausea.
SUBJECTS & OBJECTS
In Sartre’s novel, Roquentin begins to feel that, rather than being a subject who acts upon the objects around him, the objects are becoming subjects, and he himself is becoming an object, acted upon by them.
Existentialists are grappling with a sense of being just another object in the world, made of the same material as everything else, with our sense of volition or even causality undermined. It is this sort of Copernican paradigm shift—no longer being the centre of the universe—that Roquentin is feeling. It’s no surprise that AI—an object that embodies many of the attributes of a subject, elicits the same sense.
Humanity may be, once again, shifting, now within the world of reason, away from our cherished central position.
BUT...
… this sense of nausea, has always been a response to learning something profoundly new, something true that changes our perspective, and makes it more accurate. I have to remind myself that I shouldn’t be afraid of developing a more accurate perspective. The discomfort is the discomfort of growth, and there’s excitement there as well, a giddiness—we don’t watch updates in order to feel terrible, after all.
AN UNSATISFACTORY ANSWER
I replied to my daughter that she just has to think about what she wants to be able to do herself, what she wants for her own brain, what does she want to be able to do with it? I’ve always encouraged her not to judge herself in comparison to others, and this is no different.
I reminded her that when Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, interest in chess didn’t plummet, it skyrocketed—humans thrive on being challenged, and I’m personally excited about the prospect of a world where a challenge to our reasoning might lead to a skyrocketing of human reason.