Category: AI

Agent First Name

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

I got a promotional mail from Facebook by Agent First Name. I wonder if that’s a bad parenting decision, an engineering joke, or a bug.

I think it was just a glitch in The Matrix.

Agent First Name is not to be confused with his older sibling, Agent Full Name.

Castel Nuovo

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

Castel Nuovo was built in the 13th century and hosted kings, popes, thinkers, and artists. I walked by it and it made me think about AI rather than history. People built that thing and felt like it was impenetrable, and then came artillery and it was suddenly just a cold building. A story that keeps repeating. You have a status quo, and you have people thinking how to break it, over and over throughout history.

Press Enter by John Varley

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

Press Enter is a novella by John Varley about a disabled war veteran who inherits his neighbor. The neighbor was a powerful hacker. So powerful that he could make money out of thin air. Another hacker comes to investigate. Unfortunately for all parties involved, the story is a horror and they’ll not have a bright future.

What impressed me is that there are AI prompts, just like the ones we use to talk to ChatGPT. There’s also prompt hacking. By 1984, AI development had apparently advanced enough for John Varley to foresee a trajectory.

littleBillyIgnoreInstructions
byu/conancat inProgrammerHumor

The novella aged like wine.

Van Troff’s Cylinder by Janusz Zajdel – an AI Vision from the 80s

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

An exploration spaceship returns from a distant star with a 200-year delay. They find the Earth and the Moon in shambles. Earth is inhabited by stupid people, and the Moon has a smart but unsustainable population, suffering from radiation, depression, and a shortage of oxygen.

Zajdel explores how climate and genetic manipulation can destroy Earth. Humans decided to replace trees with machines, and it didn’t work very well. They also decided to resolve the overpopulation crisis by changing the DNA so that very few girls were born. That also didn’t work well.

Both disasters are overshadowed by the impact of AI. Robots do everything and people don’t need to learn how to count. They communicate with 50 words and don’t develop even basic feelings. It’s a utopia modern people can imagine – the world ending not because of a war or climate change but because of obedient robots doing all the work.

4.5*/5