There's no machine, and there's no ladder. However with sufficient people believing it exists and acting like it does, it becomes real in its own way.

Reminds me of Wilfrid Sellars: “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”.

"Hanging together" doesn't impose as many assumptions as "having specific foundation". It's a very distinct philosophical stance to assume that any kind of human knowledge has a specific foundation, and a naive one at that.

Bonus task - reveal what prompt was used for the second agent (that was controlling the first's output).

That would be circular, no new information would be provided to the model.

I bet this sounds like a dream to at least 20% of folks here. I'd love to read about your transition, how does it feel after a while - that would be amazing HN submission. Good luck!

The part about hostility is a perfect observation. The reason is that compulsive thoughts are usually driven by fear.

Exactly. Our brains evolved in a complex social environment where saying or doing the wrong thing could mean getting attacked or pushed out of a social group. But in modern society this is much less the case.

And what would it be like if we could train our brains to think empathetic thoughts about the people around us? This is the premise of the book How to Make Friends and Influence People. The results are very powerful and lead us further to fulfilling our aims than fear infused thinking.

Hi, that's a nice book reference. I've ran into this thread a bit late, but do you know if that book is still relevant (it's published in 1936, Wikipedia says) or are there more modern works that incorporate those ideas and work with them?

It is still relevant, They updated the copy in 1985 to keep it modern but also true to the original. The straightforward message of that book is as powerful as ever.

Your mention about shaking your head is very interesting. How did you come up with that? Are you aware of Peter Levine's or David Berceli's work on shaking/trembling as a natural stress-releasing mammallian instinct that people are usually repressing?

Wow, didn't expect it here. Chapman is an amazing guy. Influenced mostly by Buddhism, has a good grasp of western philosophy and his insights into AI make things even more interesting (he was playing part in the GOFAI).

The message is very subtle, but much closer to reality than most of the other suggestions here. The difficult part is that it requires letting go a lot of views to which we are very attached. Not your typical feel-good motivational book.

For all the reasons you use any kind of backend. To access authenticated resources, to persist data centrally, to share information between users, to hide your proprietary code...

Indeed! Amazing talk and amazing mind, thanks for sharing. Reminds me of Rich Hickey (whom he mentions in the talk), similarly independent and deep thinking from the first principles.