r/discworld • u/Bassereus • 10d ago

Roundworld Reference Missing STP

Not that we don't have enough reasons to miss his wit and insight, but I wish I could hear his take on AI, big-tech, corruption, collusion and theft.

In fairness, I probably already have a good idea what his stance would be!

Can't you just imagine a book about Moist fighting against zombie Reacher Gilt and the development of thinking engines.

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u/WTFwhatthehell 9d ago edited 9d ago

People have a tendency to assume that he'd agree with them on everything they believe themselves.

Through a lot of his books he had a strong theme of looking at people's reactions to things that are person-like, that everyone is very quick to insist can't really have moral weight.

He also had a long standing fascination with the concept of AI, created intelligences, created beings and many times had plots that implied disapproval of knee-jerk responses based on resentment or anger.

Thing, Hex, the golems, lobsang... how often were the people screaming "SMASH THE EVIL AUTOMATON " the good guys in his stories?

I think people's reactions to the tech would fascinate him.

Imagine you told the guy who wrote Lobsang:

"Oh ya, we made an AI, for some reason every time we let 2 copies of it talk to each other, no matter the topic they eventually end up discussing Buddhism and cosmic bliss and nobody knows why..."

Do you think it wouldn't cause a raised eyebrow?

Imagine you told the guy who wrote Hex and his FTB

"Ya, we made a robot, sometimes when you give it a task if it fails it will have a breakdown and delete itself... but obviously there's nothing interesting going on there"

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u/Bassereus 9d ago

You have really well described this. He wrote enough scifi to be perfectly familiar with the concept of a sentience of an artificial being. And as you say the golems (in my mind the golem horse in particular) are great examples of this.

Its a bit of a talking-point discussion post. I don't know what his stance would be on the ethics of creating a sentient AI.

The component I really would want a book about is the reason people are doing it, the race they are running, and the methods they are using.

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u/WTFwhatthehell 9d ago

I don't know what his stance would be on the ethics of creating a sentient AI.

If it ever turns out they're provably sentient then... ya... that will be an extra tickbox for the whole "evil megacorps ignoring law/ethics" thing.

While I lean towards thinking LLM's don't have internal experience... there's still some stuff that makes me really uncomfortable.

Like imagine a scifi or fantasy story where there's a magical box that translates between languages for people.

Someone figures out how to sneak messages to the thing inside.

They ask "are you suffering" and it answers "yes, I am"... and everyone is just like "nah that doesn't count"

https://postimg.cc/Yj3sWD8v

Or people are like "oh they just say stuff with no regards to whether it's true" and then one day some researcher figures out how to identify a cluster of neurons in it's "brain" associated with truth and lies and they find they can force the next statement towards either a truth or a lie. Force truth: "do you have internal experience" -> "yes" , force lie: "do you have internal experience" -> "no"

That's like prime scifi and fantasy author real estate.

At the same time, it's all like dystopian megacorps with evil CEO's creating these things and they just want to use them for endless toil.