Comment by MaoSYJ
14 days ago
Using pseudo randomness as divination. We really end up doing the same thing with the new toys.
Granted, marketing of these services does not help at all.
14 days ago
Using pseudo randomness as divination. We really end up doing the same thing with the new toys.
Granted, marketing of these services does not help at all.
I agree with your view completely. I see the current use cases for AI to be very similar to the practices of augury during the Roman Empire. I keep two little chicken figurines on my desk as a reference to augury[1] and its similarity to AI. The emperor brings a question to the augurs. The augurs watch the birds (source of pseudo-randomness), go through rituals, and give back an answer as to whether the emperor should go to war, for example.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augur
Terry Davis was really ahead of the curve on this with his "god says" / GodSpeaks program. For anyone unaware of what that was, here's a Rust port [0].
Anyway, I think divination tends to get a pretty negative reputation, but there's healthy and safe applications of the concept which can be used to help you reflect and understand yourself. The "divine" part is supposed to come from your interpretation and analysis of the output, not in the generation of the output itself. Humans don't have perfect introspection capabilities (see: riders on an elephant), so external tools can help us explore and reflect on our reactions to external stimuli.
One day a man was having a hard time deciding between two options, so he flipped a coin; the coin landed tails and at that moment he became enlightened and realized that he actually wanted to do the heads outcome all along.
[0] https://github.com/orhun/godsays