The Metaverse

[catalog]

someone asked me the other day - if you're so into trees, how come you're using these GANs, don't you know how bad all the processing is for the environment.

the text from him is better actually, cos he referred to the computers in big drums in the desert, cool image.

 

[Clinamenic]

Yeah that is another benefit to limiting the iteration length, if I understand correctly. It would seem to cut down the compute by an order of magnitude or even two.

 

[sus]

Yeah we don't even seem close to artificial consciousness, to my knowledge, assuming that is close enough to what you mean by artificial general intelligence.

The ability to navigate the real world and solve human-space problems better than humans. As opposed to just manipulating strings of text, or winning closed-system games.

 

[Clinamenic]

Unsupervised learning has already commenced, but in an ostensibly manageable way. Although Facebook is actively proving otherwise, re: manageability, it seems.

 

[catalog]

The way Ive been told it is that within 20 years, we should be able to move our hand in front of our eyes, ie make a gestural swipe, and manifest a significantly different reality ie different objects, sounds, smells.

 

[Clinamenic]

But certain AI modules may go about solving problems in the metaverse better than humans can. It is their hometurf, after all. So to speak.

 

[Clinamenic]

The way Ive been told it is that within 20 years, we should be able to move our hand in front of our eyes, ie make a gestural swipe, and manifest a significantly different reality ie different objects, sounds, smells.

Again I have doubts as to the sophistication of existing brain-computer interfaces, but yeah within 20 years I'd be surprised if we cannot reliably simulate olfactory and haptic experiences, etc.

 

[Clinamenic]

Thats part of the "seeing through reality" point I'm making. It will be much easier to see through reality, or for one's reality to shatter, when these technologies make their way to the markets.

 

[catalog]

It was interesting to find out recently that smell is the oldest sense, can do us in quicker than everything else, so a lot of eg VR theatre performances are trying stuff with that now over vision

 

[Clinamenic]

It was interesting to find out recently that smell is the oldest sense, can do us in quicker than everything else, so a lot of eg VR theatre performances are trying stuff with that now over vision

Yeah it might be the one most closely tied to emotional states, is my suspicion. I should know much more about pheromones than I presently do, given how important these mechanisms seem.

 

[Clinamenic]

But here my understanding is that our olfactory capabilities are little more than specialized receptors in a nasal cavity below some sort of olfactory lobe in the brain. The receptors bind to their complementary molecules, and trigger whatever established neural circuitry is associated with that receptor, which could involve inhibited certain neural activity just as well as it could involve activating such activity.

That is to say, nothing that we can't eventually learn to engineer, presumably.

 

[catalog]

Yeah but all those molecules, infinitely more complex than pixels in a rectangle

 

[Clinamenic]

How this neural activity manifests into conscious experience is at the heart of what I think is the scientific project of the 21st century, namely the hard problem of consciousness.

 

[Clinamenic]

Yeah but all those molecules, infinitely more complex than pixels in a rectangle

Yes, much more complex than our best understandings of them, yet alone our technology.

 

[Clinamenic]

Which is why it'll make for a grand scientific project for our species this century.

 

[catalog]

Was talking to my friend who is a genuine scientist, at the weekend, and he said smell was like you've said it is, a molecule makes a change. It's a very chemical thing. It's not as glass like as seeing something.

Although I do think that seeing things can stay with you as well. The prominence of the phrase "I wish I'd not seen that" or "unsee" online attests to that.

 

[Clinamenic]

Yeah I think the visual sense exerts the biggest influence on our conscious sense of reality, how we perceive and conceive of space and time, but smell is much more primordial than consciousness, it would seem.

 

[Clinamenic]

Was talking to my friend who is a genuine scientist, at the weekend, and he said smell was like you've said it is, a molecule makes a change. It's a very chemical thing. It's not as glass like as seeing something.

Yeah, as in ammonia binding to a receptor and triggering a conscious experience of smell, i.e. what ammonia smells like.

 

[Clinamenic]

The likeness I think is largely a spandrel.

 

[WashYourHands]

Was talking to my friend who is a genuine scientist, at the weekend, and he said smell was like you've said it is, a molecule makes a change. It's a very chemical thing. It's not as glass like as seeing something.