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BeyondMachines :verified:

Iain Banks perfectly explained #GenerativeAI twenty years ago.

Everyone should read this passage.

Quotes from "The Algebraist"

"l am not alive. | am able to give the appearance of life without being alive. It's not especially difficult." "How do you do this?β„’ "I am the sum of all my memories, plus the application of certain rules from a substantial command-set. | am blessed with the ability to process extremely quickly, so | am able to listen to what you are saying and then respond in a way that makes sense to you, answering your questions, following your meaning, anticipating your thoughts. However, all this is simply the result of programs sifting through earlier examples of conversations and exchanges which | have stored within my memories and selecting those which seem most appropriate as templates. This process sounds mysterious but is merely complicated. It begins with something as simple as you saying "Hello" and me replying "Hello", or choosing something similar according to whatever else | might know about you, and extends to a reply as involved as, well, this one."
23 September at 10:18 | Open on infosec.exchange
16 comments
Toxy πŸ”¬πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΈπŸ‡ͺπŸ‡¬πŸ‡§πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦

@beyondmachines1 Always ahead of the curve.
Saying that, he ultimately had a much more positive outlook for AI in that novel as the precursors to the Minds than the plagiarising slop-machines we have foisted on us today by a load of fly-by-night grifters.

23 September at 14:25 | Open on mastodon.acc.sunet.se
@stevewfolds

@beyondmachines1 Don’t recall this specific passage. Banks Culture books were good preparation for AI. Fan of his books starting in β€˜86 w/used copy of The Wasp Factory, 2nd most read author.

Iain Banks books in a case that I made from a fallen Red Oak.
26 September at 9:49 | Open on mastodon.world
BeyondMachines :verified:

@stevewfolds This is towards the final chapters of The Algebraist.

A conversation between Seer Fassin Taak and the computer of the Voehn ship.

Easy to gloss over in the grand scheme of the story, but so relevant.

26 September at 10:00 | Open on infosec.exchange
stickus - πŸ•ΉοΈ 🌯 πŸ–₯️ :mstdnca:

@beyondmachines1
Banks was an amazing writer and I'm super bummed that we'll never see another piece of work from him.

26 September at 15:36 | Open on mstdn.ca
Joerg

@beyondmachines1 Far from enamored with the LLM hype, but this is simply not wrong. Literally reading half the abstract of the ChatGPT paper is enough to get that.

26 September at 15:41 | Open on tech.lgbt
BeyondMachines :verified:

@joergr And Iain Banks wrote it more than 20 years ago.

The knowledge was already there, but the systems were called "expert systems" and required huge datacenters of compute power to run.

26 September at 16:09 | Open on infosec.exchange
Sean Eric Fagan

@beyondmachines1 It's older than that -- Chinese Room, I think?

26 September at 16:10 | Open on wandering.shop
Simon Bisson

@kithrup @beyondmachines1 Yes, John Searle wrote his paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs" in 1980, though the concepts go back at least as far as Leibniz.

I am pretty sure that Banks read Hostadter and Dennett's annotated anthology of essays, papers, and fiction about AI, The Mind's I, which includes a version of Searle's paper.

26 September at 16:24 | Open on mastodon.social
Berkubernetus

@beyondmachines1 wait, was the Algebraist actually 20 years ago?

I feel really old.

26 September at 17:14 | Open on m6n.io
Dominic πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡Ί πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆ πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦

@beyondmachines1 See also the Finn from @GreatDismal's Sprawl Trilogy. A construct based on Finn asks to be unplugged β€” interesting as a simulation of what the real Finn would have wanted.

26 September at 17:46 | Open on mastodon.social
Personne
Rachel Rawlings

@beyondmachines1 If only modern generative AI were as Eliza-like and didn't require the energy to air condition a small town in order to put a third breast in a celebrity photo.

26 September at 19:34 | Open on mastodon.social
ROTOPE~1 :yell:

@beyondmachines1 whoa, hey, don't go spilling all of my "how to appear normal" secrets

26 September at 19:43 | Open on mastodon.social
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