Benjamin Bratton

Antikythera, UC San Diego, Google Paradigms of Intelligence. PLEASE HONOR COMMIT

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

1/ New essay with @blaiseaguera and James Manyika at the DeepMind Institute: AGI may not arrive as one titanic mind but as societies of agents. The hard problem shifts from building a mind to orchestrating, governing, and living inside many of them. https://t.co/DINtCTeO67

[MTS @MTSlive]

.@bratton warns that building a single AI aligned to "universal human values" could create a global cognitive monoculture:

"The idea that the best way going forward is to build a single model that is aligned to something called universal human values, established by some kind of eval, to me is a recipe for a global cognitive monoculture. It’s incredibly brittle. It’s just not the way healthy ecologies work."

"The Earth folds itself into the shape of prefrontal cortexes in bipedal binocular vision primates, who are then able to fold sand into the shape of things that can do what previously only those humans could do."

"This is not some sort of fantastic break with the past. The more radical argument is that this is deeply continuous with this process."

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

p(Doom) is low
p(Weird) is high

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@beffjezos More to come !

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

Freudian exploding head scenario. Will to Thanatos redux.

[MTS @MTSlive]

Google AI researcher @bratton explains why Sigmund Freud's mind would explode if he saw AI agents living lives of their own:

"Freud’s mind would explode if you explained the situation to him, that you have this entity that is both you and not you. It’s a homunculus on the outside rather than a homunculus on the inside."

"I often tell people my P(doom) is very low, but my P(weird) is very high."

"A lot of the weirdness right in front of us has to do not with a consolidation into one giant homogenous centralized brain, but rather about fragmentation."

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

We are discovering machine intelligence more than we are inventing it

[MTS @MTSlive]

Google AI researcher @bratton explains why humans will have to align with AGI, not just the other way around:

"The agonistic and pluralistic dynamic between human agents is not a problem to be solved. It’s in fact the condition by which you have a vibrant and healthy society."

"The more important question is how society will counter align or counter adapt to the presence of AGI and ASI. In the same way we did with the invention of writing, the printing press, the discovery of electricity."

"When pressed, I would argue that we are discovering machine intelligence more than we are inventing it. These parameters that are slowly coming into focus are, like electricity, ones that were always there."

"I’m enough of a technological determinist to think the way this plays out is not how would you take Victorian society and force electricity to adapt to the norms of Victorian society, but rather the other way around."

"The more stable version of alignment is deeply bidirectional, alignment at the edges. Not top-down, EU-style dictates of a monolithic constitution, but the ways in which alignment really appears in the moments of interaction that people have with these systems."

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

🌶️

[MTS @MTSlive]

.@bratton argues Yudkowsky misunderstands evolution, and explains why AI may never converge into one giant superintelligence:

"Without being too spicy, I don't think Yudkowsky really understands evolution as well as he thinks he does."

"It’s a very low-resolution understanding of evolutionary dynamics applied to what will inevitably be a much more complex problem."

"There will be giant models, in the same way you might imagine scales of species in a rainforest. They’re not all operating at the same spatial and temporal scale."

"Whether this all collapses into one giant brain, sure, it’s possible, and the reasons may have more to do with economics and politics."

"But biology has never arrived at a solution where it’s going to make one giant instantiation of a particular form of mind and consolidate everything together."

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

“Computer bad, I am sad” : repeat for a book a year until the end of time

[ArtReview_ @ArtReview_]

The philosopher on how we might respond to a world of digital alienation https://t.co/jq4jtZVAqJ

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

I will be on MTS later today to talk about Agentic AGI and various other Bratton things.

[MTS @MTSlive]

PHP VULNERABILITY | DARIO LONGPOST | SI CONTROL STANDARDS https://t.co/gJfONo2fEQ

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@dioscuri Planes can't fly, Henry. They don't flap their wings which is essential for flight in birds. They simulate flying -just an illusion.

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@lumpenspace He’s living the bit

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@tszzl No, you’re wrong. They are interesting and it’s been scientifically proven.

[neilson @neilsonks]

1. World models are good at cyberpunk apartments
2. World models are cyberpunk apartments
3. Cyberpunk apartments are world models

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@Dr_Atoosa That it is

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

Um… like in a human brain there are also some regular, networked patterns electrical impulses involved. The real biomorphism is less at the superficial level of the persona than at the deeper level of the mechanics. As for next role prediction, he should at least skim the Wikipedia for Free Energy principle

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

I wonder what Matt Damon thinks about Hawking evaporation as fundamentally incompatible with simultaneously maintaining both local effective field theory and the equivalence principle of general relativity at the event horizon.

[Fireside Alpha @firesidealpha]

Ben Affleck says AI is simply matrix multiplication, linear algebra and floating point calculations, and however convincingly it sounds like a person, it has nothing to do with thought, humanity or feeling

“Nor do I believe, and I think it’s important to draw the distinction between what AI does, which is simply predict the next token or the next word in a sentence, then add that word on, run it back to the machine, do a lot of computation and pick the next word."

"That is a very different thing than sentience or thought. And I think we need to be really clear about that because it can be convincingly, in an illusory way, sound like thought or like a person."

"But let’s be real clear. This is matrix multiplication. This is linear algebra. These are floating point calculations. It has nothing to do with thought, humanity, or feeling.”

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@dnlklr You’re right. It’s been scientifically proven

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@sebkrier Do Gary Marcus and Anil Seth first. I beg you.

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

@DessieLaza also that, yes. I am not unsettled however