This is one of my favorite books and it's fun to read for anyone interested in the AI consciousness debate. <a href="https://hpmorpodcast.com/blindsided-00-announcement/" rel="nofollow">https://hpmorpodcast.com/blindsided-00-announcement/ is a podcast that read the book last year. And <a href="https://blindsight.space/" rel="nofollow">https://blindsight.space/ is a Watts' approved website that has a short film/movie trailer for the book.
Blindsight is probably my favorite novel, and I liked echopraxia fine but it was definitely of a different class to me. The worst parts of blindsight are Watts' descriptives (where is everyone right know? What does this area look like? What actions are currently happening?) and Echopraxia suffers from this even more than Blindsight already did.
And the authors blog/website is:
<a href="https://www.rifters.com/crawl/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rifters.com/crawl/
Permutation City is not "far more interesting", it is a complementary exploration of consciousness and the nature of reality. Both are excellent (also both very relevant i-pumps). Permanence by Karl Schroeder is another really good complementary exploration of the idea of consciousness as transitory, a symptom of not being good at the thing that is being consciously cogitated. A cat is so good at being a cat, it does not need to waste resources on clumsy meta-aware calculations on how to cat.
The marginal / ancillary discussion of the usefulness of people in a post GAI world was really interesting. The best part of this discussion was that the protagonists entire job is to translate ideas that are too hard to understand into a tangible/actionalbe "surface area". Essentially - a policy-maker interface that treats superintelligence as a "black box".
I have an excerpt of the book explaining this here: <a href="https://jodavaho.io/posts/books-blindsight.html" rel="nofollow">https://jodavaho.io/posts/books-blindsight.html
The discussion about non-conscious intelligence was less so (I see ants every day!). But this is a new idea dense book to say the least - if you love worldbuilding, please pick it up.
I read Blindsight long before modern LLM AI came about and at the time I thought the aliens being intelligent without being conscious was fascinating and gave me a different perspective that those things could be separated but it didn't have and direct application.
Learning how modern AI's respond immediately made me think about how Rorschach was communicating with the crew and how current LLM AI's might be considered intelligent while not conscious.
I've just skimmed the Wikipedia entry you linked:
"Our cousins lie about the family tree," Sascha replied, "with nieces and nephews and Neanderthals. We do not like annoying cousins."
"Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? "It couldn't have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them."
So it turns out I'm not conscious either and incapable of semantic understanding, because I've ignored the ambiguities too. Though note that parsing ambiguous sentences used to be exactly what pre-LLM AIs could not do, and what we thought of as requiring real understanding.
sxp · · focus · HN ↗
zetsurin · · focus · HN ↗
niek_pas · · focus · HN ↗
BLKNSLVR · · focus · HN ↗
phasefactor · · focus · HN ↗
bobbiechen · · focus · HN ↗
Vetch · · focus · HN ↗
lynx97 · · focus · HN ↗
teekert · · focus · HN ↗
jvanderbot · · focus · HN ↗
I have an excerpt of the book explaining this here: <a href="https://jodavaho.io/posts/books-blindsight.html" rel="nofollow">https://jodavaho.io/posts/books-blindsight.html
The discussion about non-conscious intelligence was less so (I see ants every day!). But this is a new idea dense book to say the least - if you love worldbuilding, please pick it up.
SigmundA · · focus · HN ↗
Learning how modern AI's respond immediately made me think about how Rorschach was communicating with the crew and how current LLM AI's might be considered intelligent while not conscious.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)#Consciousness" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)#Consc...
throw310822 · · focus · HN ↗
I've just skimmed the Wikipedia entry you linked:
"Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? "It couldn't have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them."So it turns out I'm not conscious either and incapable of semantic understanding, because I've ignored the ambiguities too. Though note that parsing ambiguous sentences used to be exactly what pre-LLM AIs could not do, and what we thought of as requiring real understanding.
adastra22 · · focus · HN ↗