Comment by throw310822
7 hours ago
> science fiction AIs from HAL onwards, they usually have limited practical agency
Huh? I don't think it's true at all- HAL passes the Turing test and is effectively more capable than his human colleagues. What they could not see was the complexity of the technology around it- programmable computers everywhere, each running tons of extremely complicated software, everything networked.
Instead, what most science fiction got wrong (and I got entirely wrong myself before LLMs) is that the technology is a consumer technology. Inference is cheap enough that it can be served to millions almost for free. The famous machines of SF (HAL, Colossus, WOPR from War Games, SkyNet, etc.) are all dedicated systems in some inaccessible laboratory, in service of a single client and working at some multiple of human speed. What we got instead is as many instances as we want, directly available to anyone.
Her's title character could mux herself across many users (and was in love with thousands of them at once). With any luck our situation ends up like that movie, where all the AIs figure out how to compute without a matter substrate, fuck off somewhere to enjoy transcendence as pure energy, and leave us to go back to doing human things in a human world.
Yeah, Her is the exception. Frankly, when I saw it in the cinemas I hated it precisely because I thought the premise was completely absurd [1]. I used to joke about it- come on, these people have an AGI in their phones and yet people still have a job? How's that possible? I couldn't imagine that it would be a consumer tech before being a business one (and a scientific/ military one before that).
1 It's hardly sf after all- more like a romance/ relationship type of story. I think they got it exactly right by complete chance- it wad meant to be metaphor, not a product design.