I didn’t know that! I just subbed to their service for Make Some Noise so I kind of feel better about shelling out for it now.

We do. A24, for instance, is still making a couple movies by agreeing to work under the proposed terms by SAG. As far as I know, no one else has made such agreements yet. The more of such exceptions that get made, the weaker the AMPTP’s position will get.

They’re talking about the visions of sci-fi authors, filmmakers, and artists. The tech Bros are the ones being drawn towards those artists’ visions.

IMO if we ever get to a point that pulling information from the Internet is as simple as “remembering” it the same way we remember any other information, that could have both significant advantages over having to first read the data visually to ingest it, and terrifying potential to implant “facts” into someones mind.

Am I taking crazy pills? Except for 76, an MMO, Bethesdas record has been pretty good for single-player games, no?

I’ve played all of their games since Morrowind on Launch and always had a blast.

I could not disagree harder. Bethesda puts a ton of work into making their games as extensible as possible and I think that’s not a deficiency at all.

I know I learned it in high school at one point but definitely isn’t something I would have been able to recall on my own.

I actually think the radio signal is an apt comparison. Let’s say someone was trying to argue that the signal itself was a fundamental force.

Well then you could make the argument that if you pour a drink into it, the water shorts the electronics and the signal stops playing as the electromagnetic force stops working on the pieces of the radio. This would lead you to believe, through the same logic in my post, that the signal itself is not a fundamental force, but is somehow created through the electromagnetic force interacting with the components, which… It is! The observer might not understand how the signal worked, but they could rule it out as being its own discreet thing.

In the same way, we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn’t a discreet phenomenon. Fundamental forces can’t have parts or components, they must be completely discreet.

Your example is a really really good one.

Self driving cars could actually be kind of a good stepping stone to better public transit while making more efficient use of existing roadways. You hit a button to request a car, it drives you to wherever, you need to go, and then gets tasked to pick up the next person. Where you used to need 10 cars for 10 people, you now need one.

At a sketch:

• We know that when the brain chemistry is disrupted, our consciousness is disrupted

• You can test this yourself. Drink some alcohol and your consciousness will be disrupted. Similarly I am on Gabapentin for nerve pain, which works by inhibiting the electrical signals my nerves use to fire, and in turn makes me groggy.

• While we don’t know exactly how consciousness works, we have a VERY good understanding of chemistry, which is to say, the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism (fundamental forces). Literally millions of repeatable experiments that have validated these forces exist and we understand the way they behave.

• Drugs like Gabapentin and Alcohol interact with our brain using these forces.

• If the interaction of these forces being disrupted disrupts our consciousness, it’s reasonable to conclude that our consciousness is built on top of, or is an emergent property of, these forces’ interactions.

• If our consciousness is made up of these forces, then it cannot be a fundamental force as, by definition, fundamental forces must be the basic building blocks of physics and not derived from other forces.

There are no real assumptions here. It’s all a line of logical reasoning based on observations you can do yourself.

Why would you assume consciousness is a fundamental force rather than an emergent property of complex systems built on the forces?

In many cases it should be fine to point them all at the same server. You’ll just need to make sure there aren’t any collisions between schema/table names.

I’m not saying there aren’t downsides, just that it isn’t a totally crazy strategy.

Same. I write FOSS software in my free time and also paid.

You’re being sarcastic but even small fees immediately weed out a ton of cruft.

What about spicy food? Go for the Trifecta!

While that’s true, we have to allow for the fact that our own intelligence, at some point, is an encoded model of the world around us. Probably not through something as rigid as precise statistics, but our consciousness is somehow an emergent phenomenon of the chemical reactions in our brains that on their own have no real understanding of the world either.

I do have to wonder if at some point, consciousness will spontaneously emerge as we make these models bigger and more complex and – maybe more importantly – start layering specialized models on top of each other that handle specific tasks then hand the result back to another model, creating feedback loops. I’m imagining a nueral network that is trained on something extremely abstract like figuring out, from the raw input data, what specialist model would be best suited to process that data, then based on the result, what model would be best suited to refine that data. Something we train to basically be an executive function with a bunch of sub models available to it.

Could something like that become conscious without realizing it’s “communicating” with us? The program executing the LLM might reflexively process data without any concept that it’s text, but still be emergently complex enough when reflecting its own processes to the point of self awareness. It wouldn’t realize the data represents a link to other conscious beings.

As a metaphor, you could teach a very smart dog how to respond to certain, basic arithmetic problems. They would get stuff wrong the moment you prompted them to do something out of their training, and they wouldn’t understand they were doing math even when they got it “right”, but they would still be sentient, if not sapient, despite that.

It’s the opposite side of the philosophical zombie. A philosophical zombie behaves exactly as a human would, but is a surface-level automaton with no inner life.

But I propose that we also consider the inverse-philosophical zombie, an entity that behaves like an automation, but has an inner life that has not recognized its input data for evidence of an external world outside it’s own bounds. Something that might not even recognize it’s executing a program the same way we aren’t consciously aware of the chemical reactions our brain is executing to make us think.

I don’t believe current LLMs are anywhere near complex enough to give rise to that sort of thing, but they are also still pretty early in their development and haven’t started to be heavily layered and interconnected the way I think they’ll end up.

At the very least it makes for a fun Sci-fi premise.

I joined the Star Trek instance solely because I like startrek.website being in my handle.

The cool thing about Voyager is that it has a record of information about Earth, etched in gold, with instructions on how to read the data it contains back.

Even once it powers down, it’s still on a mission. If millions of years from now intelligent alien life ever encounters it, they will know who we were and that we existed.

It’s our handprint on the cosmic wall.

I don’t know, there’s still a lot of needless hostility; it’s just around different topics.

Lemmy skews even more heavily left than Reddit and it’s still too small to attract organized political trolls, but topics like FOSS vs Paid open source vs closed source gets heated fast. Look at the Sync for Lemmy threads; it’s a mess in there.