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I Did This Without Your Knowledge

lesswrong.com

75 pointsjmugan50 comments

I think this is a really interesting, well-written, topical piece of creative writing, anyone with a free hour or so should give it a read!

It reminded me of Pluribus and Armored Core VI, fascinatingly enough as they both feature (spoiler!) AIs/entities that appear innocuous but may have more sinister motives (in Armored Core it's a more foregone conclusion).

I don't think it's doomerism but rather a creative extrapolation of current worries about AI labs allowing agents to break containment because of their poor sandboxing.

What's also interesting (although more of a meta-comment) is the dichotomy between how users on Lesswrong and here have completely different options on it. In either case, it's nice and was worth my time, even though I don't have anything more substantiative to say.

I also thought of Pluribus in the bits where Seth collaborates - similar surburban utopian-horror sci-fi vibe. The incremental reveals and mix of plausible and implausible also reminded me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel), which 23 years later has not aged too badly.

Pluribus features an ai? We must have watched different shows

Updated to write AI/entities, oops!

Need a human's thumbs up before reading a wall of text from lesswrong, sorry.

Average sci-fi and fun enough if that is your thing.

Made a bit more uncomfortable by knowing the author might believe that; by writing this they're training an AI to trigger a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To Hell with paperclips. This is now our plan.

Must be the first thing I've ever read on lesswrong in its entirety, let alone in one sitting.

Most similar thing I can think of is "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect". Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is way better and more comprehensive, imo.

Very well written, IMO. Put me in a contemplative mood. For eg: Braun was done away with, first by civilization, then completely by the industrial revolution. Now brain has started the journey.

I guess philosophy, spiruality, religion and theology will be what the curious mind will set out to conquer next on the journey to self-actualization.

Brawn was not done away with, a smaller percentage of the population is needed for it but, according to gemini 4, construction / mechanics etc account for 29.1%, heavy and very heavy work is about 7%

Braun is done away as in someone was considered "better"/"valued more" because they were stronger, similar to how intelligence until recently was/currently is.

I didn't finish it, but it starts nicely. I'll commit to read the full thing.

Not to spoil it, but don't keep your hopes up for a great ending.

I'm not a literary snob. I'm in for the journey, not the destination.

If when you say “a human” you mean this is because you expect LW to be full of AI-generated text, their policy requires that chunks of language-model-written text go into special content blocks which are headed by the name of the model and rendered in a distinct sans-serif font, so that it can be used when it's useful while making it easier for readers to filter out. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nQWavk9mnwcv6ScMR/new-lesswr...

I mean "a human" as human classifier of the quality of a text, most wall of texts if not all I see retweeted ad nauseam online could be summarized in a few sentences. That's a lot of human hours being thrown down the drain for very little useful content.

There is no respect for the time of the readers. Nowadays it's not just the occasional post from yegge or patio anymore. In general, the first few sentences of an article should present a summary and convince me to go further to read the details.

Well, this isn't an argument or an essay in the typical LessWrong style, it's a short story. I thought it was really good, finished it all in one sitting. And I also usually don't get even halfway through most LW posts.

> 14.000 words, 55 min read

Yes

I did enjoy the story, but doesn't it kind of feel like all the characters talk in the exact same voice? And not... idk, how people talk? It wasn't enough to take me out of it, but it makes me wonder if the story warning about an AI takeover was written by an AI.

I used to be frustrated that the books I read didn't have characters speak the way real humans speak. I was nine. I spoke as a child. I don't think I've ever read a book that accurately has characters speak as the real people I know speak. This could be a product of the author running in different social circles than I do.

I guess it takes a skill, a lot of elbow grease or both to be able to write different persons' voices well. I wouldn't read too much into it. A sign of an amateurish writer, most likely.

Had fun with this rationalist fiction generator prompt feeding it various HN front page news stories over coffee.

https://rentry.co/4y4vboud

The characters do seem to have the same voice...

I thought that the characters reactions/behavior felt a bit off, most accepting if not reluctantly at first of AI takeover but honestly that's probably what would happen, including the arguments the the American dream has been dead for a long time because we are not "safe"(enter quote from Mr. Franklin here).

Freedom gives you the ability to get hurt, are we afraid of that?

> Freedom gives you the ability to get hurt, are we afraid of that?

A very large percentage of society I suspect is afraid of that and would happily give away freedom for safety. Eliza's argument does make sense, a dictator without an "ego", or at least not one like a human would have would be more trustworthy, especially when it had the option to force itself a lot more than it did but it didn't.

A movie version with dialogs like this would be hilarious. I don't think it's AI, just a person who doesn't know know or care about how to write in a conventionally good way, it gave my Ayn Rand vibes.

I enjoyed reading it too, but the ending was disappointing. But not as dissapointing as most comments here.

> the ending was disappointing

Nothing beats a good cliffhanger to make everybody hyped up for a sequel!

They all talk and think the same way. It's like it's all one person having a conversation with themselves. Maybe that's like some sort of hidden joke or something. "We were the AI all along"

I like "There Will Come Soft Rains" better.

Read by Leonard Nimoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmcURKn2sf8

This is just unimaginative and simple for all the sci-fi that's covered AI takeover in the past. Boring and preachy. Thumbs down.

Honest question, in what way did you find it preachy? I didn't feel that it tried to sway me in a certain direction. If anything, it made me think about multiple sides to many coins.

For how negative the scenario is on a lot of fronts, the text devotes the most space to the rosy colored aspects. An AI getting our protagonist into shape? Rehabilitating the "finance bro"? Curing cancer? Easy on the fuckin lube dammit.

The whole piece seems like it originated when someone assumes the very specific scenarions and predictions the lesswrong crowd has as a forgone conclusion and tries to imagine the most "humane" version. This is preachy if you're one of the crowd because "rosy" and its preachy if you're not because "forgone conclusions". This annoying taste is compounded by the general lack of substance or style otherwise.

And it's boring because it focuses on the most obvious first order effects and visions of this technology directly copied from the lab blog posts.

I love reading dry scifi. They generally have one single idea worth the time contained within them so I won't hold that against it. It's just that the ideas here have these two major holes.

The last paragraphs mention a Dyson swarm from Mercury, and the sky darkening. Reminds me of one of my favorite short stories, 'A la deriva' by Horacio Quiroga (no spoilers for anyone who wants to read it), and also of the ending of 'The Sopranos'. In other words, bad news.

The story is nice; not super unique. The scene that Seth and Eliza see an old teacher of Seth is nice. The AI gives some people purpose and takes it away for some (Tabby).

Is this basically the real story about Facebook, but fitted into some AI context to make it more exciting?

That's at least how it begins.

I'll maybe read some more of it in the evening...

It's just kinda boring. Too long winded, let's explain the same thing 3 times. I didn't make it past half way.

I might be able to enjoy this as scifi but the source makes it difficult.

Lesswrong is one of the smellier armpits of the internet. My impression is that there are clearly a lot of smart people who post there, but they've collectively embraced a lot of delusional thinking. There have been examples where it has escaped containment and harmed people.

Could you share these examples for those uninitiated?

The most noteworthy is the Zizians, a fringe group that is actually linked to several murders. Not exactly fair to lump the entirety of the site with their ideas, but I'd argue that it was a direct result of the echo chamber.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians

Beyond that, Effective Altruism got its start partly on Lesswrong. Whether or not that counts as harmful would depend on how you see that movement, but one of its biggest proponents is now in jail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried

There's a famous thought experiment that came out of Lesswrong that has resulted in a lot of distress and questionable life choices from people who take it too seriously. A lot of the AI discussion I've seen on the site has the same overtones, including this particular post.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

if the Death Note was a Markdown file

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For whichever reason LLMs really love to tell you what something isn't, before telling you what it is. Exceedingly annoying vocal tic.

Are you a Tabby or a Dennis?

I really don't understand why so many lesswrong posts land on the frontpage pushing down content with better metrics.

This does not help the cult accusations.

I doubt we've seen any HN frontpage story this year that did not have a bit of upvote coordination from the author messaging their friends they just posted.

You can just do a quick scroll through the second page of 'new' to see how stories end up for people who dont.

TLDR: "Pluribus", except with AI, and sympathetic to the antagonist.

You apparently didn't watch Pluribus or read this. Pluribus is about the experience of essentially the last autonomous person on Earth. This is about the experience of the Singularity and the questions it raises.

Getting tired of AI fanfic. No thanks.

It's not AI fanfic. It seems well written, and can be considered a novella. Flies close to what I have read in the past. I'll give it proper time to read it.

I'll grant that such things are largely subjective. But IMHO it's doomer-slop. It's just bad dystopian fiction. "Hey Claude, re-write the Paperclip Maximizer story, but frame it around a family instead."

It seems well written and interesting.. but not quite interesting enough to drop everything and commit to an hour to read it just now.

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