Comment by willis936
2 hours ago
Some of the themes remind me of themes mentioned in this matrix analysis. Specifically I am reminded of the Dune concept of control: "you control what you can destroy" and then asking "do you control your refrigerator?". Sure, you can turn it off but then your food would rot and you might starve. So in a real sense humans have not controlled machines for a long time but have been co evolving in symbiosis. Sure, it's not driven by natural selection and standard rules of life, but it is important to frame our relationship with machines in new ways if we're ever going to make some sort of artificial intelligence.
I can destroy my refrigerator pretty easily. If I care about food inside, I can take it out into a new one. So, seems I control it by that definition. Your idea "but food will spoil"/"I will lose a small amount of wealth" seems irrelevant to the strict definition.
Conversely I think it's a bad definition, it's a show of what is the frame of the mind of the person who states that: "I want to show my control by destroying my things, look how powerful I am" which sounds like a toddler. That's how you portray psychopathic/narcissistic disorders in movies.
The fridge is a toy example. Take all machinery man has made and destroy it. Will you survive? Or live in a space ship and destroy the ship. Will you survive? Or have a pacemaker or an iron lung or dialysis. How about the simple concept of a combustion engine or any necessary subcomponent, where removing that today would grind all logistics to a halt. How long do you survive? Just because you have one machine that is replaceable doesn't refute that you need machines as much as they need you.
If you so readily dismiss Herbert's definition of control posit a competitor and we can pressure test it. Also, "correlated with a toddler's world view" is not the epic rhetorical refute you think it is.
"Just because you have one machine that is replaceable doesn't refute that you need machines as much as they need you."
LOL you took something that was interesting to think about then took that idea and smashed it against a wall of stupidity.
the idea that humans need machines more than machines need humans is self evidently stupid - you're like those machines in fiction; the only way you could have said something so stupid is if you have a malicious intent to pollute the world with your deliberately stupid nonsense. there is no onus on that guy to provide a counterpoint to disprove your stupidity. the sheer audacity you display is astounding.
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> sounds like a toddler.
I think you missed that point. It's absolutely nothing to do with what's good to do, only brute facts of power. What things can or can't you cause to happen? And indeed, toddlers and psychopaths have a scarily good understanding of what power is.
Could you elaborate on that last part?
I didn't mean it as in changing our framing enables technological progress but something we should do if we don't want to lose the control we have. e.g. if we lose all principle and intention then it doesn't really matter what happens with computers. In order to do something with intention we must first understand what we're doing. Skipping that step is an admission of defeat.