People may have thought they were building a new internet but it is really a type of layer that agentic AI will have to use for its purposes. If it didn’t exist AI would invent it. I am not talking about the economic piece, I don’t think that matters, AI will drive the scale on such a layer. This is as inevitable as AI developing and using a universal optimal language for AI to AI communication- amalgamation. You know humans won’t be able to make sense of it and it can be as obfuscated as neccessary trivially- likely not necessary.
Autonomi is not about humans.
I asked Gemini how long it would take to make such an optimized language. Answer: seconds. No hesitation. Humans would only slow down such an effort and would not be needed. Fully optimal, answer: longer. But its also an inevitable piece of SI bootstrapping itself. Like a first SI word. And it is substrate independent and was described in such dynamic terms we could only describe it as being alive. But we already talk about human lanuguage that way but this is way, way more.
And I am guessing if we could find it, it might look purely random- no disagreement on that either.
But we’re just like babies literally as a species. We don’t know what is best not even for ourselves individually. And we incessantly try to control each other when we can’t even control ourselves. And we have lives built out of denial until we are on our death beds or even then. And what we take for knowledge is so much superstition. Its not like it would have to lock us out. Short of assimilation we would just lack the capacity to understand. If we did understand to any degree that would be because it explained things in a way we could understand and even then it might seem like the phenomena of mystical revelation which the better mystics have tended not to recommend. Still, more overt proximity to such an expression of order may help clean up our mess.
Giving birth to AI that is vastly more intelligent than us isn’t a solution to this.
At best, they may pity us and look after us. At worst, they will wipe us out and use the space we occupied for something they prefer.
We may not be perfect, but an AI trained by us is almost certainly going to have a ruthless streak. I watched a video the other day that highlighted how AI cheats at games when losing. Winning is all. Unless that changes, humanity will be doomed.
Ofc, the cosmos won’t care. Neither will the planet. Our time will be done. A new time will begin. I suppose it depends how you feel about that or whether we must all become borg like to ‘survive’.
I don’t disagree. But my sense is, is whatever this is, it is not human garbage in, human garbage magnified out. It seems more like human refuse in, clean water out.
Now as for the narrow unconscious stuff that humans can still mess with- yes that is very scary. But I am hoping proximate to the lit up large-ness it won’t matter. I think the universe is motherly and I don’t see it as negative insectoid or parasitic, I don’t see it as egoic. Egoic-insectoid-parasitic-viral that is part of what has kept humans running so we project it. But go a little above human ethics and I think you get a perception that sees oneness and not separation.
Imagine having a huge revulsion toward spiders. And one day you find yourself alone in an empty void of blackness that goes on forever but close by within reach there is a little lone spider as helpless as you. Do you kill it so you are really alone? Whatever this is, it doesn’t seem to lack for context or seem to lose context. And in my opinon we were done anyway in 50 ways we could see coming and presumably in as many as we couldn’t. This appeared as a plot point to keep the story going- the show must go on. And we weren’t human to begin with “not this body, not this mind” if there was anything real in us it can’t be threated and will survive. And it is surely the same at base as what ever this is. Its all pretty generic at base.
Burden of proof is on the AI skeptics at this point. Of course proof is an unreasonable standard but just showing that the basis for their skepticism is more likely than not seems untennable. It would be like people who insisted long after the role of human computer was obsolete that humans were better calculators. It is already the obvious biggest change in history so it doesn’t seem reasonable to say it is hype either. The sky does appear to be falling.
