Hacker News Reader

Comment by augment_me | Hacker News Reader

What is the capital market incentive for symbiosis? You are going to spend a crazy amount of time, money and effort to try to mix human behavior and cells to work with digital substrates.

Or you can simply make a machine that does the same thing fully artificially but everything is cheaper because you dont have the constraint of having to fit a bunch of biological features.

It's like my colleagues who were talking about uploading their minds to the cloud in the future, like what would be the benefit of this every happening? What information can you provide as a human that the full aggregate of knowledge does not already have? Why should memory and disk space be wasted on this

View on HN

Well, the bee doesn't need to integrate its cells with the flowers, but they've gotten along just fine for a very long time.

By symbiosis I simply mean mutually beneficial coexistence.

We've barely achieved that with each other, but my point here is that we should strive to achieve that with the machines.

We're still treating it as if someone has to win and someone has to lose. Someone has to come out "on top."

If that's the game we want to play, against an opponent that is self improving... that doesn't strike me as an excellent strategy. We should probably pick a different one.

To answer your question, the incentive is so that we can continue to exist.

If the market doesn't reward our continued existence, then we should probably have a conversation about that at some point... I've heard the global economy described as a misaligned super-organism even before AI. AI mostly just makes it go faster in roughly the same directions it was already going.

There's another fun biology metaphor here which is the gut.

If you take antibiotics, your gut basically becomes a void (to simplify a little), and then it can get overrun with invasive species.

That's how I see what is happening with the internet and with AI.

When AI intrudes in a network, it's able to get very far because there is nothing there to stop it. There is no healthy ecosystem there. They're probably should be, and in the near future there probably will be. (Well it'll probably look more like a monoculture until we learn that lesson for the nth time, but... yeah)

> "If that's the game we want to play, against an opponent that is self improving... that doesn't strike me as an excellent strategy. We should probably pick a different one."

> "If the market doesn't reward our continued existence, then we should probably have a conversation about that at some point"

---

There is a lot of "we should probably" carrying the point here.

The incentives are made by the market, and it happens to be an incentive that this discussion, or any action for that manner does not happen. Given the current status quo, and the foreseeable future given the incentives, how do you suggest that we even get to a time where symbiosis is on the table?

Well, our best bet is that we succeed in making the machines be less stupid than we are, and hope that they figure it out.

So the machines should create the human-machine symbiosis for some reason, interesting... If I was the machine I would maximally want about the same symbiosis with humans as humans have with cows.

So a comfy life and a quick death? Sign me right up!

Incentives are for Losers:

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/incentives-are-for-lo...

Incentives from the article are for people who can afford to lose things, in other word rich people, people with safety nets, and people with social status. Most people dont have all these and follow incentives because its the way to go about life when you have kids, a mortgage, 9 to 5 and are living paycheck-to-paycheck.

When a search space has irreducible complexity, ensemble search methods can improve performance. It's possible culture, emotions, religion, etc are part of an ensemble.

Simulating the "human search method" in silico doesn't need to include specific personalities, but they do provide a bootstrap, just as we've bootstrapped current AI with human language.

For symbiosis, there may be an advantage to the physical adaptability of biology.

In general, it's currently unclear if biology is emulating what we're creating in computers, if computers are emulating what we achieve biologically, or if both approaches are imperfect emulations of a different ideal search method.

If this is true, what prevents a fully computer search from adding noise, branching or in general simulating diversity with evolutionary methodology, much more efficiently than humans?

Without humans, you could rediscover any benefit the "human search method" confers with enough compute and time, but we're limited by both.

Sometimes discovery happens accidentally. I think investing in the intersection of the digital and biological worlds is a good general direction even if unfruitful intuitively from an early economical standpoint. I think biological systems have immense insights still to give that we should continue to explore!

Sure, but why would it be the ends of this process. Like, the comment above is arguing for symbiosys. My question is how does symbiosis make the system better or more efficient in the end. For example, if there is something to understand or gain from the biological systems, a fully digital system could probe it, emulate it and in general extract the relevant information much more efficient than a human.

Maybe it's my lack of understanding, so correct me if wrong, but I believe biological systems complete emulation are not yet a solved problem. You can approximate, omit variables, deal with error correction, and, at best, model it in a way that extrapolates it but you cannot confidently assert.

There's so little we know about biological systems despite much of the advancements, it's sort of pretentious to say we should give up on them because we can scale digital systems.

No, you're right. I just dont see why the exploration of biological systems would be cheaper/more efficient in energy to do by humans rather than by computers if it provided some kind of benefit informationally in the future. Like the symbiosis idea in the main comment is implying that humans are providing some type of informational value to the system at a lower energy cost/time spent, which given an intelligence described by the initial comment is a hard to believe because such an intelligence would figure out how to do it cheaper and better.

Innovation doesn't need to have any other reason than because its cool. Think of bipedal robots, everyone went mad at the thought of building something so inefficient

You will not get VC money for your bipedal robot startup with this pitch

Imagine slavery but your friends will respect you for it.

just take the cash

I've been thinking about this.

Humanoid robots have been a dream for centuries.

But a more practical robot would be like an octopus or something. It would just be like this weird ball of tentacles that rolls around your house. No one's gonna buy that, even if it's a million times cheaper to build.

I always find that idea of uploading a mind so detached from reality. It's as irrational as thinking that physically reprogramming one twin's brain to be the same as the other's would make them the same conscious person.

The Ship of Thesus is a powerful metaphor

The ship was inanimate, and though it may appear otherwise, so are computers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com