Mastodawn

BREAKING: Scientists at Angelus Silesius University have discovered that under certain conditions, humans are capable of writing and thinking unaided, without the help of standard prompt-driven AI software bots.

"It sounds counterintuitive, but it almost looks as if our subjects wanted to do these things on their own", texts Professor Melanchton, the project lead. "We don't fully understand the mechanisms yet, but our study suggests that humans may have some sort of in-built agentic capabilities."

#StopTheAICorruption
#LiveThePromptfreeLife

Moreover, we can do this for hours and hours, powered only by a few cups of espresso and a croissant.

the roamer 1d ago

Only a few cups? Ahem. An unlimited number!

Let’s not confuse minimum requirements with maximum capacity 🙂 ☕️

John Abbe (aka Slow)1d ago

@airwhale @the_roamer Projecting forward from our progress so far, we expect to achieve Natural General Intelligence (NGI) by 2034 if we're able to source enough coffee beans so that we can increase espresso fed into humans during their training by a factor of 100 million.

the roamer 1d ago

@slowenough @airwhale

:-)

You have identified the ultimate bottleneck for NGI.

HighlandLawyer 20h ago

@slowenough @airwhale @the_roamer
"It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of coffee that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning. It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion."

Albert ARIBAUD ✎1d ago

@airwhale @the_roamer Make that a pain aux raisins for me.

@the_roamer the humans may seem uncannily sentient, but in fact they're just stochastically regurgitating text fragments that chatbots have trained them on. See:

https://posts.rat.pictures/@hannah/116733275752439635

highly praised and little read (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image Great news, the bicameral mind is back

rat pictures

the roamer 1d ago

Ouch. The post that us quoted in that thread sounds uncomfortably genuine. It may be just someone trolling, but very likely not. Very likely someone has blurred the boundaries between themselves and their bot. I've had discussions with some of my students that gave me the same fear.

PhilSalkie 1d ago

@the_roamer
There's an Asimov short where scientists reverse-engineer how to do math by hand on paper rather than using machines - the ultimate goal is to remove the vulnerable, expensive computer guidance systems from missiles and replace them with a human who will make the calculations on-the-fly, as it were...

@PhilSalkie @the_roamer "The Feeling Of Power".

https://dn710709.ca.archive.org/0/items/TheFeelingOfPower/The%20Feeling%20of%20Power.pdf

Ben Curthoys 1d ago

@PhilSalkie @the_roamer I remember that one. They called it "graphitics" - writing numbers by hand

the roamer 1d ago

Asimov is one of my few literary blind spots. Haven't read any of his books, for no reason except inertia. Your post tells me that I can't continue not reading Asimov! Thank you!

Level 98 🇺🇦1d ago

@the_roamer @PhilSalkie I would highly second that. If anyone can be said to have... he "saw into the future" (IMO more in a philosophical sense, rather than specifically practical, ways) - and his short stories more than his longform.

the roamer 1d ago

@level98 @PhilSalkie

Noted, with thanks. Will read!

PhilSalkie 1d ago

@level98 @the_roamer

As much as he tried to predict the shape of the future, (with quite some success) there were some odd omissions and misses.

Little things like a gigantic computer which prints out its answers, or manually programming robot brains by entering data as punched holes on paper tape.

An interesting thing about his writing was that he kept a large library in his home, and tried whenever possible to use it exclusively as his reference source. Also, he rarely revised anything - thought it up, sat down and typed it out, and that was that.

HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴1d ago

#SciFi
(1/2)

The Complete Robot

and

The Foundation Saga

...should be manadory reading* for all high school seniors, as well as anyone working on #AI in the widest sense of the meaning, IMHO.

*And before I get the usual replies, yes, there are several others, including:

Large Format Projectionist 1d ago

@PhilSalkie @the_roamer

Iirc they were on board a starship whose computer failed. They
had to do the calculations by hand.

@Benhm3
That one might be "Into the Comet" by Arthur C. Clarke, where they saved themselves by using abacuses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Comet ). I was thinking of it too before I remembered Asimov's "The Feeling of Power".

I loved "Into the Comet" when I was young. The line describing Jupiter's moons as orbiting "like beads on a wire" has stayed with me.

@PhilSalkie @the_roamer

Into the Comet - Wikipedia

Large Format Projectionist 1d ago

@lady_alys @PhilSalkie @the_roamer

OOOOOHHHHHH THANK YOU! Now I remember the abacuses too!
Thanks so much for the correction.

@PhilSalkie @the_roamer

I've been trying to remember where this came from! I thought it was just a random Analog story I'd read forty years ago...

official_verified

@PhilSalkie @the_roamer I think about this short story a lot these days.

Virginicus 1d ago

@the_roamer A human only draws 100 watts and runs on eight glasses of water a day. This could be revolutionary.

the roamer 1d ago

Plus a suitably large number of cups of coffee. We must be upfront about the true costs of humans! :-)

Virginicus 1d ago

@the_roamer Ok; coffee is analogous to rare-earth metals.

@Virginicus @the_roamer Don't give them any ideas!!!

Virginicus 1d ago

@varx That guy could use a drink.

@the_roamer Wow. Maybe we can also somehow wire them together so that they can exchange data and do work together like AI-Agents. Possibly we don't even need wires for communication...

the roamer 1d ago

Golly, the opportunities would be endless.

John Abbe (aka Slow)1d ago

@the_roamer @t3tr4 Isaac Asimov has explored some of the implications, in a short story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

The Feeling of Power - Wikipedia

@t3tr4 turns out they come equipped with a version of gibberlink, a form of acoustic data transfer. They can exchange data even when airgapped

Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud 1d ago

@the_roamer Has this been peer reviewed? Seems sketchy.

the roamer 1d ago

@WildEyedBoyFromFreecloud

I did have a sentence in there at first, "The study has not yet been fed through the Peer Review Bot", but then left it out! :-)

Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud 23h ago

@the_roamer Peer review bot would be perfect!!!

@iveyline 1d ago

@the_roamer That's it in a nutshell. Most of us who have a brain don't need and don't want AI. It has been infused into just about every platform we use but the companies who own them never asked if we wanted it. Just about every day we see AI disasters - like lawyers using it to prepare for court cases and getting punished by judges. Like KPMG sending out a post about AI that was written by AI and which contained non-existent reference sources. Like AI that graded Indian students exams incorrectly. AI is being used as a lazy way out by people who don't use their own brains. AI is creating a zombie world for humanity.

Noam writes 1d ago

@the_roamer Brilliant little story there. Which AI did you use in writing it?

the roamer 1d ago

:-)

Count Holdem 23h ago

@the_roamer What Charlton Heston didn't know:

The last #permaculture civilization, was camped in Lady Liberty's torch.