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
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 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?
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)
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.
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.
That you replied to this post, indicates you may be familiar with Lilly?
Anyway, if you have any published writing on even vaguely related subjects, eg your comment, perhaps post a link. I will read it. If you weren't aware, he spent a fair amount of time with Feynman, who if I remember correctly, was fond of the isolation tanks. Some very interesting content from that era, especially before Sandoz cut them off.
And he was not an Ayrab (Salmon in his intro CS book claims Al-Khuarezmi was an Arabic scholar--which is false and made me lose all respect for Salmon as an educator. If he got such an elementary fact wrong, what else is there that could be incomplete?)
PS: Yes Alkhuarezmi wrote in Arabic, but he was not an Arab. All classical Persian scholars at the time were fluent in Arabic as it was the lingua franca of science, medicine, philosophy and theology.
That's funny about Feynman, I didn't know that.
I've read bits and pieces of Lilly. The most interesting thing I remember is that he was trying to establish two-way communication between humans and dolphins. I recall he was building some kind of computer system for the purpose, but I guess he was about half a century too early.
I guess in our age the more pressing question would be learning to figure out how to communicate with the machines. That's probably going to turn out to be more important in the long run.
[0] The bit that stayed with me is the one that he repeated in interviews. The physical body imposes definite limits. That always seemed a little arbitrary to me, from the point of view of pure consciousness, it's not clear to me why it should be that way. Or to flip it around, you can transcend the limits of the mind, but then what effect does that have on "external" reality? Does it just make you less bad at decision-making, or is there a deeper effect?
(And while I'm at it... Something that bugged me about simulation theory, if the outside is probably simulated, why wouldn't the inside be too? Sounds a lot cleaner than having a bunch of brains floating around in a data center.)
As to the dolphin communication -- it seems like LLMs would be the perfect tool to study that now. A search came up with these active projects (courtesy of Gemini):
Scientists are actually using LLM architectures to decode animal communication right now. Here are the three main projects to explore:
* DolphinGemma -- https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/dolphingemma/): Google and the Wild Dolphin Project are training AI to predict dolphin sounds and attempt two-way communication using an underwater device.
* Project CETI -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_CETI: An initiative using machine learning to decode sperm whale clicks, recently discovering a phonetic alphabet and rudimentary syntax.
* Earth Species Project -- https://cloud.google.com/blog/transform/can-generative-ai-he...: A non-profit using generative AI to map the communication of multiple non-human species, searching for universal language structures.
On the simulation question... Not much, but we have a long way to go before any answers arise there. I could offer my insight on the subject, but aside from being sicker than usual today, it's a tough subject to speculate on and the environment here is not necessarily hospitable, so I'll just say fair question.