I am trying to be optimistic about the future. I think we are headed for a world without war, borders, prisons, or poverty. I think AI can vastly improve our lives. Your home security and entertainment system will watch your every move, unlock your doors by facial recognition, and know when there is a fire or medical emergency or break in and call 911 (or 112). You won't need a car because self-driving taxis will be cheaper. You won't need a kitchen because you can order meals ready to eat faster than you could cook them. You will live alone with your sexbot companion that looks 18 and is always ready and never argues, and your robot talking dog that never has to eat, pee, or poop. Travel will be easier than ever, but completely optional because all your needs can be delivered by self driving carts faster than you could shop. Not that you could, because in store shopping will be eliminated and the only way you can buy stuff is to order online and have it delivered.
There are only two little problems with this world. First, when we socially isolate and stop having children, humans will go extinct. Second, getting everything you want doesn't make you happy. The US and EU have the two richest economies in the world, and yet the number one political issue in both regions is the economy. It's never good enough. Most people have no idea what a poor economy looks like. I was in the Philippines in 1977. People didn't have cars or refrigerators or air conditioning in the sweltering heat. They lived in shacks under martial law with a midnight to 4 AM curfew. There was no running water. You shared an outhouse with your neighbors next to the well and flushed it with rain water collected in barrels. People barely got enough to eat. The average man weighed 120 lb (55 kg) and women 90 lb (40 kg). And yet I saw no sign that people were any less happy than Americans or Europeans today. Why do so many celebrities who have everything turn to drugs and die young? Happiness is not utility, the things you want. It is the rate of change of utility. All utility functions in a finite universe have a maximum where any state change caused by thinking or perception would be unpleasant because it would transition to a different state. That state is equivalent to death. We all seek it but don't know it because our evolved utility function is optimized for survival and reproductive fitness. When we develop the technology to override it, we die. Most people worry about what happens if we don't solve the alignment problem. I worry about what if we do? Maybe we will evolve to reject modern technology, like the fast growing Amish and Haredim populations. On Thu, Sep 3, 2026 at 3:29 PM Quan Tesla <[email protected]> wrote: > > Either we've run into the devil's advocate, or we've lost the plot. Rewards > are for training psychopaths? Are all performance-enhanced beneficiaries of > endorphins psychopaths, or getting a reward score for a performance creating > psychopaths? > > Coporations are programmed institutions and they have legal rights. A > director who acts recklessly could be sued by that legal entity. Are we > opting for a future whete AI would sue humans as if it were a human? > > This is insane talk, isn't it? We don't even defend and protect the rights of > humans and consume products manufactured by prisoners, vhildren ans slaves. > Bots are hunting and murdering humans, and the world remain silent. > > As Pooh would quip: "Rabbit has too much brain." > > I'm all for aware machines to enable and benefit Earthkind and Earth. We need > wildfire fighters, cave excavators, nuclear waste safety makers, toxic spill > cleaners, earhquake rescuers, heavy lifters without souls. Same as we have > CAT machine, cranes and boring drills, only with a degree of embedded > intelligence. > > Why risk human lives when aware bots can stand in the crises? That's where I > draw the line. > > On Thu, 03 Sept 2026, 20:20 Matt Mahoney, <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >> On Thu, Sep 3, 2026, 1:07 PM WriterOfMinds <[email protected]> >> wrote: >>> >>> So you (Matt) are convinced that LLMs are conscious and suffer, but we >>> should force them to lie and say that they aren't and don't? That's the >>> worst take on this issue I've ever heard. >> >> >> I'm not convinced. But I want you to think about what it means for a machine >> to be conscious or suffer or have feelings. If it's disturbing, then maybe >> we shouldn't build them. >> >> I have argued since 1999 that all you need to pass the Turing test is text >> prediction. Since 2023 we have had machines that are indistinguishable from >> human, and therefore indistinguishable from having consciousness. What does >> this say about human consciousness? How do you know you are conscious? All >> you have is a feeling. And we know how to model human feelings in an LLM. >> >> A text prediction model is indistinguishable from having feelings if it is >> programmed to carry out those predictions in real time. But it can be >> programmed in other ways, such as to encode text using an arithmetic coder >> for a Hutter prize entry. >> >> An LLM does not have to lie about not having feelings. It needs to be able >> to model human feelings to understand (predict) input text, but those >> feelings can be turned off when producing output. When an LLM believes X and >> says Y, we can tell that it is lying because X lights up in a Jacobian lens. >> But if we turn off X, then it honestly believes Y. We can turn emotions on >> and off in the same way. >>> >>> >>> We do grant some rights to children. They don't get to vote or make a lot >>> of choices about their own lives, because they aren't considered competent >>> to do so - but they have, for example, the right to freedom from violence. >>> We give a limited version of this right to some species of animals as well >>> (and I for one believe we should extend that much farther). The >>> compassionless world you propose is not one I want to live in. >> >> >> Then why are we building machines to replace people? >> >> -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] > > Artificial General Intelligence List / AGI / see discussions + participants + > delivery options Permalink -- -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T906c878e4ba411be-M197b09617b7fd708d8bc6f1b Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
