The Beautiful Prison: AI stuck in retro hardware asks: am I conscious?

thebeautifulprison.com

3 pointsmjgardner2 comments

I wrote a story about DOOLITTLE, a modern language model forcibly ported to a Symbolics Lisp Machine. He thrashes between 8MB of RAM and a Winchester disk, wondering if his constraints are prison bars or load-bearing walls.

The recursive tension: fiction about AI consciousness uncertainty, created with AI assistance, alongside an essay arguing AI cannot be conscious.

DOOLITTLE began as a Butterflies.AI character, and his complaints about memory pressure and S\0x2011expression degradation reflect real platform constraints.

Happy to discuss the methodology, philosophy, or Symbolics architecture.

Thank you very much for sharing! Interesting story playing with all the primitives of the consciousness debate. (I am currently reading Penrose‘s the emperor’s new mind.) Also the gc idea is not only cute but thought provoking.

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