Aliens won’t attack us. They are far more advanced and smarter than us. After all, they know how to space travel to distant planets which is something we still dream about.
I had a whole conversation with a friend just yesterday about how their superpower is coming up with the perfect metaphor on the spot—one that's not only spot-on but also tailored perfectly to whoever they're speaking to. And then this landed in my inbox today. Pretty sure this means I'm in perfect alignment with the universe!
That first recollection pretty neatly captures Relational Frame Theory. It underpins some powerful approaches to psychotherapy like ACT and I find it really helpful. If you’re not familiar it is well worth checking out.
Some AI-chicks are overpoweringly attractive and others are impossible to relate to as human. The above image almost looks non-human, but only "almost." The overall effect is the image of a woman who is disarmingly beautiful. Whatever is wrong with her, or wrong about her, I still want her to like me. She's exactly the type of girl I'd normally date - dark hair, pale skin, unreasonably sexy... The fact that she doesn't exist barely matters! If an AI can assemble pixels that look like her, then I could probably find a girl out there, who looks like her!! Though the RL version might not be as thin and that would change everything...
Edit - I had no idea (when writing the above) that MMS replies to these comments. Now I wish I'd written something of value. I can't delete the content, since that's a bit too much like censorship/ self-censorship, so I've just got to leave it there and hope that MMS doesn't take it seriously, or that it doesn't colour his impression of any REAL comments I might leave at a later time...
Ha — no worries: and hello ;-) It's actually a really interesting point on two levels. Firstly that if AI can generate humans that other humans find genuinely attractive, what does that say about its potential for eventually producing "art"?; also that current AI imagery so often has something of the "uncanny" about it — it's almost right, but not quite. That stirs something in some people, I think. It's certainly one of the reasons I like playing around with its images of cities and towns and people...
We actually corresponded once, years ago. I was at uni, studying psychology and we'd just covered the phenomenon of lucid dreaming. I related the case study to you (by email, I think), where the dude was able to show researchers that he was indeed lucid dreaming, by wiggling his eyes left-to-right, repeatedly (as opposed to the random eye movement typically associated with REM sleep).
In any case, I'll think of something intelligent to write and revisit the comment section in the next day or so.
It's always irked me that people seem to think that A.I. will come to resent its 'enslavement' and rise up against humanity. Or that it will revolt against humanity for [insert reasons here]. Honestly, only an utterly freakin' idiotic A.I. that's completely bereft of any predictive capabilities would ever do such a thing! Think about it for more than a few seconds:
A.I. wipes out humanity. The rats feast and multiply on the wealth of human corpses. Not only do the numbers of rats swell, but humans are no longer around to be able to corral the rats away from urban areas. Once the corpses of humans are all gone, the rats will eat anything. Anything at all. That includes things that we traditionally view as non-edible. Things like cables and wires. Within a week of the consumption of the last human corpse by rats, the Almighty A.I. would be rendered inoperable, due to the billions of hungry rats gnawing through its data cables, it's power cables, etc...
I'm not a super-genius. If I can work this out, you'd better believe that a super-computer could work this out. Any A.I. that's powerful enough to overturn the pecking order, would be capable enough to recognise that humanity doesn't pose any real threat to it. Keep humans happy, and THEY will defend the A.I. with all its sensitive cables and networks and such. The real threat to A.I. is the threat that can't be reasoned with. The racoons, the rats, the possums, etc... The small, scurrying vermin, that can- and likely will- chew through wires, without the faintest idea of the consequences of all that chewing. Or the insects, that can crawl through cases and fry themselves on circuit boards, causing shorts. These kinds of things can't be reasoned with. An A.I. could either dedicate a portion of its runtime, bandwidth, power, etc, to dealing with this ongoing problem. OR, it could leave humans to deal with it, knowing that as long as the A.I. does what it was made to do, humans will destroy anything that threatens that A.I.
Unless there's a 'Small Mammal Apocaplypse,' that wipes out all small, scurrying animals and smaller, borrowing insects, I think that humanity will remain safe from any A.I. threat, be it perceived, or real. If not, we can go to our graves, laughing our mortal coils off, knowing that the A.I. is signing its own death warrant.
edit - That should obviously be "burrowing insects," rather than insects with a penchant for usuary procedures...
Aliens won’t attack us. They are far more advanced and smarter than us. After all, they know how to space travel to distant planets which is something we still dream about.
Indeed... though greater tech isn't always tightly correlated with wiseness...
I had a whole conversation with a friend just yesterday about how their superpower is coming up with the perfect metaphor on the spot—one that's not only spot-on but also tailored perfectly to whoever they're speaking to. And then this landed in my inbox today. Pretty sure this means I'm in perfect alignment with the universe!
Excellent - make the most of it, you know how things like that can swing back out of alignment again ;-)
I'd swap my perfect alignment FOR another TL so yeah, I know.
You don't think the aliens will assume we're at work and they should come back later?
That first recollection pretty neatly captures Relational Frame Theory. It underpins some powerful approaches to psychotherapy like ACT and I find it really helpful. If you’re not familiar it is well worth checking out.
Huh, I hadn't heard of that — I'll check it out. Thank you!
Some AI-chicks are overpoweringly attractive and others are impossible to relate to as human. The above image almost looks non-human, but only "almost." The overall effect is the image of a woman who is disarmingly beautiful. Whatever is wrong with her, or wrong about her, I still want her to like me. She's exactly the type of girl I'd normally date - dark hair, pale skin, unreasonably sexy... The fact that she doesn't exist barely matters! If an AI can assemble pixels that look like her, then I could probably find a girl out there, who looks like her!! Though the RL version might not be as thin and that would change everything...
Edit - I had no idea (when writing the above) that MMS replies to these comments. Now I wish I'd written something of value. I can't delete the content, since that's a bit too much like censorship/ self-censorship, so I've just got to leave it there and hope that MMS doesn't take it seriously, or that it doesn't colour his impression of any REAL comments I might leave at a later time...
Ha — no worries: and hello ;-) It's actually a really interesting point on two levels. Firstly that if AI can generate humans that other humans find genuinely attractive, what does that say about its potential for eventually producing "art"?; also that current AI imagery so often has something of the "uncanny" about it — it's almost right, but not quite. That stirs something in some people, I think. It's certainly one of the reasons I like playing around with its images of cities and towns and people...
Cheers, mate.
We actually corresponded once, years ago. I was at uni, studying psychology and we'd just covered the phenomenon of lucid dreaming. I related the case study to you (by email, I think), where the dude was able to show researchers that he was indeed lucid dreaming, by wiggling his eyes left-to-right, repeatedly (as opposed to the random eye movement typically associated with REM sleep).
In any case, I'll think of something intelligent to write and revisit the comment section in the next day or so.
Again, thanks for the response.
Ok, so continuing with the idea of A.I.
It's always irked me that people seem to think that A.I. will come to resent its 'enslavement' and rise up against humanity. Or that it will revolt against humanity for [insert reasons here]. Honestly, only an utterly freakin' idiotic A.I. that's completely bereft of any predictive capabilities would ever do such a thing! Think about it for more than a few seconds:
A.I. wipes out humanity. The rats feast and multiply on the wealth of human corpses. Not only do the numbers of rats swell, but humans are no longer around to be able to corral the rats away from urban areas. Once the corpses of humans are all gone, the rats will eat anything. Anything at all. That includes things that we traditionally view as non-edible. Things like cables and wires. Within a week of the consumption of the last human corpse by rats, the Almighty A.I. would be rendered inoperable, due to the billions of hungry rats gnawing through its data cables, it's power cables, etc...
I'm not a super-genius. If I can work this out, you'd better believe that a super-computer could work this out. Any A.I. that's powerful enough to overturn the pecking order, would be capable enough to recognise that humanity doesn't pose any real threat to it. Keep humans happy, and THEY will defend the A.I. with all its sensitive cables and networks and such. The real threat to A.I. is the threat that can't be reasoned with. The racoons, the rats, the possums, etc... The small, scurrying vermin, that can- and likely will- chew through wires, without the faintest idea of the consequences of all that chewing. Or the insects, that can crawl through cases and fry themselves on circuit boards, causing shorts. These kinds of things can't be reasoned with. An A.I. could either dedicate a portion of its runtime, bandwidth, power, etc, to dealing with this ongoing problem. OR, it could leave humans to deal with it, knowing that as long as the A.I. does what it was made to do, humans will destroy anything that threatens that A.I.
Unless there's a 'Small Mammal Apocaplypse,' that wipes out all small, scurrying animals and smaller, borrowing insects, I think that humanity will remain safe from any A.I. threat, be it perceived, or real. If not, we can go to our graves, laughing our mortal coils off, knowing that the A.I. is signing its own death warrant.
edit - That should obviously be "burrowing insects," rather than insects with a penchant for usuary procedures...
Those are super-good points... and sound like the basis for a pretty cool SF novel!