Comment by augment_me
19 hours ago
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
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.
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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.
> "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"
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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?
Incentives are for Losers:
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/incentives-are-for-lo...
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.
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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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
You will not get VC money for your bipedal robot startup with this pitch
Imagine slavery but your friends will respect you for it.
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