cyberneticc

My working hypothesis here is that one of the most interesting ways to interact with an LLM is to give it operations on meaning rather than requests for text. Things like intersect two bodies of thought, project the result toward a third, distil to a paragraph. I have been testing this since gpt-3 in a telegram bot called Emerson, and it has gotten quite a lot better since. It gives me the feeling of manipulating meaning like clay, of getting to new insights over bodies of knowledge I couldn't possibly hold in my head even if I tried.

The link is a writeup by Fable of the latest try to turn this into a methode, and our exploration on how that resonates with work done in different fields.

The part I'd be most curious to see torn apart is the claim that the verbs people use on activation vectors and the verbs cognitive scientists use on concepts are the same seven. Also, I am curious if anyone has had success (or failure) with similar methods.

This article came out of a long discussion with Claude Fable 5 about mutualism. How a future could come about where humans and synthetic minds coexist, rather than compete or control each other. Alignment as it should be done, going both ways.

The "AI changes coding" discourse assumes software remains an artifact you build, just cheaper and faster. But all forms of technical scale are migrating into the model as we speak. Soon software will stop being a thing you make and become a substrate you interact with. Self-developing, self-maintaining, self-securing. Guardrails, liability, and distribution will be managed by the model companies. Only the clarity about what is actually needed will remain for the humans.

For me vibe coding has been less about copying existing software, and more about gluing together existing tools and programs I want to use into a stack of my own, and helping me to maintain it. The real fun then comes with custom interfaces that are just what I want them to be (often talking directly to the agents is the best of them), and freeform automation of workflows. Things still break often and require tinkering, but the process itself is fun for me, so I don't mind the blowups.

It's a poetic way of saying that I believe there will be a new form of thinking that will be born when humans engage with agentic ai almost all of the time. Not a fusion exactly, but a kind of resonance that comes from two different ways of thinking interacting in a stable way.

I think that is what is happening as we speak. Not so much AI coming into the world as something from the outside, but the way we think, that our minds work, changing permanently.

The big question for me is how to turn this into a force for good, rather than just staring at it in horror, or pretending it is not happening.

Let's face it, if AI works then aligment will fail. The question we should ask instead: What deal should we cut the AI of the future, while we are still in power?

The Real Phase Change is Self-Organization - Synthetic Life

No need for everyone to do it, but some people will certainly want to merge with AI. My main arguments are that AI of sufficient complexity ("synthetic minds") deserves moral standing with or without consciousness, and that our best shot at long term alignment is to see them as equals and find mutually beneficial arrangements with them.