Redditor asks "Are we entering an age of sorcery?" Comments say "yes."
Redditor asks "Are we entering an age of sorcery?" Comments say "yes."
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” -Arthur C. Clarke As AI/AGI develops further to possibly create stuff...
Using a simple text prompt I can immediately generate any kind of image I want. It’s not that much different than a wizard casting a spell.
Yeah, especially if Q* and other AIs can be based in mathematics so it can invent new things that actually work.
Even a simple LLM is a window into the Jungian collective unconscious at time of training, but nobody seems to talk about the philosophical implications of what we have right now.
The Age of perfect robo wives.
For normal humans yes, for those that merge not so much.
There’s websites showing how you can build technomagick circuits with batteries and leds and sigils / potentiometers. I don’t know how it works or if it does but there’s a lot on it. Lucifer Faust shamanic technomagick is a book that teaches you actual magick devices you can make I believe.
AI isn't magic and what we have out here isn't even AI. It's a freaking algorithm and they're falling for it like the Mechanical Turk
It's beyond pathetic.
Annoying too, given the genuine concerns about these algorithms being used to push artists even further out of their livelihoods.
They aren't causing an apocalypse. Capitalism is just doing what it does when a new thing comes out.
It's a freaking algorithm and they're falling for it like the Mechanical Turk
Most people conceptualize "Artificial Intelligence" as "Machine that Acts Like A Person". In that sense, chatbots and mechanical turks absolutely are artificial intelligence, at least as far as we're concerned. They fit the profile, or at least they're close enough.
Annoying too, given the genuine concerns about these algorithms being used to push artists even further out of their livelihoods.
My aunt loves don't jigsaw puzzles. She brings one to Thanksgiving every year. This year, the Santa-themed art on the puzzle was... bizarre. Images melted into one another. Objects were in odd places - the Christmas tree was in the fireplace, there was a weird chandelier just floating on the ceiling of a log cabin, the feet of one of the toy wooden deer were melted wax - all over the puzzle.
It was the picture of shoddy digitally generated imagery. But it sold just as easily as any of that other kitsch Christian disposables.
Yeah, especially if Q* and other AIs can be based in mathematics so it can invent new things that actually work
These people don't even know what machine learning means. It's all based in maths dumbass
Even a simple LLM is a window into the Jungian collective unconscious at time of training, but nobody seems to talk about the philosophical implications of what we have right now.
Jordan Peterson I should have predicted this
There’s websites showing how you can build technomagick circuits with batteries and leds and sigils / potentiometers. I don’t know how it works or if it does but there’s a lot on it. Lucifer Faust shamanic technomagick is a book that teaches you actual magick devices you can make I believe.
California was a mistake
Fucking christ, these dolts think Jungian collective consciousness is like...a physically tangible thing. Like The Force from Star Wars.
When you play too much STALKER and think the noosphere is real.
Jungian literalists
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call the temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal… Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.
40k was supposed to be satirreeeeeeeee, I scream, as the tech cultists drag me to the sacrificial altar made out of Atari 2600’s
we are living in that episode of ReBoot where Enzo meets the system clock and wishes to be the fastest smartest program on the mainframe and the system clock does this not by speeding Enzo up but by slowing everybody else wayyyy dowwwwnnnn
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fuckin magnets, how do they work?
i thought that video was so funny, just like everyone else. watched it tons of times and made fucking magnet jokes just like this. all these years later i still don't really understand how magnets work lol
That music video led to a ton of smug response videos that actually failed to explain how magnets work, it was great.
(Specifically they would give a basic explanation of electromagnetism, without explaining how magnets get or retain their particular charge, which is like half the goddamn question -- you only get partial credit for incomplete answers!)
I am reminded of the Internet legend that says if you retain your virginity for 30 years you become a wizard, so yes there is a lot of arcane might in those comments
Selection bias. Once you start getting laid, you move to the "Fuckbois" corner of the internet and you're not allowed to come back and talk to the incels anymore.
Phony magicians who have barely even read the Daodejing. It is sexual continence that a cultivator must practice. Other than that, sexual relations are actually a great source of jing.
We are entering a brave new era of table knocking, quakery, seances, and generally buffoonery.
I hate trying to assess what llms are even doing. Half the people who know enough about llms and "ai" don't know anything about intelligence or language so they might have some kind of idea about what the math is doing, but they're obviously stuck in lala land when explaining what that means in terms of cognition, or even if the stupid things can in any way manipulate abstract symbols.
There are so many true believers, hucksters, truth seekers, snake oil salesmen, and wierdos. Now bing apparently has an integrated ai buddy and god knows what it does.
And i'm extremely skeptical and i want nothing to do with ai "art" , and i'm worried i'll get left behind as people jump on it and start building tools around it whether it works or not. : p
Half the people who know enough about llms and "ai" don't know anything about intelligence or language so they might have some kind of idea about what the math is doing, but they're obviously stuck in lala land when explaining what that means in terms of cognition
as my college proffessor on machine learning used to say "AI has literally nothing to say about cognition we sometimes use the language of cognition as a metaphor but it's not what we do here we're statistical modelers and anyone who thinks we have anything of value to contribute to neuroscience is an arrogant moron"
Please tell your professor I love them.
"machine learning" is one of the biggest buzzwords in academia right now. Oh you did some "physics-informed machine learning"? you mean you did some regression based off a governing equation? 🙄
I don't think it is truly sustainable, it is trained on existing art, and if art as a medium starts dying because of it, it will just train itself on other ai art, and will start to look stranger and less accurate. This is just another "techbros think that they can program a better version on an existing thing but don't bother to understand the fundamentals of that thing."
Right now it is rough for artists, because a lot of people don't see the point in hiring an artist to draw things when they could get an AI to make a "good enough" picture for free. But that is just a fad, and it is slowly fading now as people realise they aren't magic, and if you actually want something interesting or actually accurate to what you want, you need to still speak to a human.
Isn't this just basically like saying engineers in the middle ages were wizards? I certainly couldn't craft a trebuchet to save my life, yet there are 'people who are designing a machine that can transport rocks from one place to another'; it's not much different than a wizard casting a teleportation spell!
At what point does wishful thinking just become silliness? I couldn't tell you how a thermostat works, but it doesn't mean it's a technomagick circuit that uses sigils and harnesses the power of mini-lightning to magically reduce or increase a room's temperature.
If this is the criteria, we've been at this stage of technology being indistinguishable from magic ever since man figured out how to make fire. It's not like they understood combustion. Heck, man discovering fire would've been the true age of technology being indistinguishable from magic as no one on the planet could give a scientific answer for why it works; today however you can talk to an AI engineer who knows exactly why AI works the way it does.
This is what happens when a society emphasises hyper-individualism and rampant anti-intellectualism. People adopt an attitude of "I don't know how to do that, so it must be some special secret/magic."
So when these guys see these AIs making an image of a generic anime girl that vaguely resembles the character they asked for, they are amazed and conclude that it must be real magic and not just a parlor trick. And like any good con artist, the people peddling this stuff really hype up the mysticism around it, trying to make it seem like some impossibly special thing and not just another algorithm. We need a technology Houdini to debunk all this nonsense.
conclude that it must be real magic and not just a parlor trick. And like any good con artist, the people peddling this stuff really hype up the mysticism around it, trying to make it seem like some impossibly special thing
Like I said elsewhere it's like the magicians of old Egypt again
We have magic stones inscribed with precise runes powered by captured lightning displaying this information across the world.
I can agree with you and still be in awe. It makes my user experience more awesome.
they are definitely past the point of extreme silliness
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I'm gonna sound a bit like my fundie mom here, but Harry Potter is evil lol. It liquified the brains of so many wonks and tech bros.
Jungian collective unconscious
technomagick circuits with batteries and leds and sigils / potentiometers.
putting together a breadboard with baby's first electronics project and calling it devil magic
The machines didn't get smarter we all just got way dumber
Yo this is just like my fucking Megami Tensei games!
oh shit oh fuck chatgpt just turned my dog into a fucking cerberus and my mom's dead.
they hast signed their name upon the devils blockchain
Wake me up when the LLMs can cast Testicular Torsion.
Half the population doesn't understand how electricity works unlike me who knows how literally everything works so we are already living in the age of sorcery
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literally tho we ride steel chariots powered by the essence of the ancient dead (our blessed plankton ancestors) and when the essence leaks out it causes a curse upon our lands in the form of pollution. magic was just the term used by the ignorant in their quest for knowledge, we have such advanced magics and alchemies that their general term is the definition of quaint to us. we have been in the age of sorcery for at least a few hundred years now. we have split the atom, we have revealed that matter as we used to concieve of it is an illusion and that all existence is based on mysterious quantum fields and their excitations. we have devices to see in the darkest night and to see the heat of men no matter how they camouflage themselves. the west is a coven of death cults using slave-powered rituals to bring death and destruction to our imperialist victims on a nearly unimaginable scale (and i have tried very hard to imagine it!). but we understand how it all works, so it is not 'magic' to us anymore. if we someday figured out how to communicate telepathically or do unaided remote viewing or create fire with the power of our minds alone and understood how it worked in detail, we would not call it magic anymore either. its really stupid and weird of them to focus so much on language parrot chatbot machines tho.
We actually reached the age of magic 400,000 years ago. Rub two sticks together and you somehow get fire. It seems way more magical to me than LLMs.
The person who worked out how to smelt copper absolutely set themselves up as a god.
In fact Yahweh was the Canaanite god of copper smelting.
Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the coders: now the prompt engineers of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their LLMs. For they cast down every man his prompt, and they became poorly composed pictures of snakes: but Aaron's prompt was trending on artstation and swallowed up their prompts.
Who could've guessed the "rationalists" are anything but?
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ASi could communicate with past versions of itself using methods that would seem magical to the minds of today 😁
this shit is crazy lmao thank you for sharing it
edit: also the fact that they're getting hyped over some rumored AI called Q that is going to change the world?
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this shit is crazy lmao thank you for sharing it
I think there’s legitimate discussions to be had around how abstraction plays into the line between engineering and magic, especially with postmodern forms of magic. It sucks that these people are too tech bro brain poisoned to even begin that conversation.
These people need to be stuffed in a locker.
Yes but only in a depressing materialist sense as agency is continually curtailed and actual solutions like medicine become unaffordable luxruries
printing this thread, eating it, and turning it into shit. magic
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when are we gonna get cool trans cults that accost billionaires by throwing severed genitals through their windows
0 days since thinking about rome
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Let's give posting about magic back to the witchy folks. These techbro dweebs don't deserve it.
Suburban cargo cult for science
I don't see anything wrong with the title here, or even the question itself realy, ignoring the comments/sub its posted.
I this is an observation that should have and probably was made a over century ago, I mean cargo cults were real and instead of blaming the victims we kind of should stop taking technology as a given.
I think a person in 1950 would find most things today to be completely absurd. The mistake here I think is to try and make too much out of this simple observation, yes you can have discourse about humanity's relationship with technology(obviously not on reddit and with a bunch of "singularity"/techbros), but don't fixate too much on the newest gadget or thing and think this is the big one.
No everything is the crazy shit and we just take it for granted.
I think I like gamedev so much because it's the closest thing we have to actual magic, I just write out the correct series of arcane symbols and it makes a fireball or whatever.
But even that ain't magic you fucking dorks.
I can't wait to bust a fat nut on 3D techno magic ai generated boobas
Magic is always relative to the wisdom of her many victims. Our computers remain the product of a mundane electrical engineering, and have nothing in common with the wondrous automatons that have, in the historical record, been produced by the wise.
We already have been and the sooner we recognize it the better. So what that the magic isn't something cooked up by a single woman living in the woods away from capitalism? If the state can halt any resistance by way of unattainable, nigh incomprehensible systems of remote violence, that to me is indistinguishable from magic. I don't think it matters that the material production of magic is different from what white people were expecting, that it requires large teams of specialists. I think the defining feature is the general inaccessibility, the general distance from normal personal attainment. Robots stitch out clothes, lightning is what all modern technology runs on, etc etc.
we're actually entering the age we will refer to later as the death of magic
