The third scenario cuts deepest. If the technological imperative drives AI toward full "human replay" without agency, then agency was never the differentiator we imagined. We spent millennia believing consciousness is what makes us special. Turns out intelligence might be substrate-independent, and consciousness might be scenery.
McLuhan's reversal applies to observers too. We extended cognition into the machine; the reversal is the machine extending into our cognition, reshaping what counts as thinkable.
Borges wrote about a map so detailed it covered the entire territory. The reversal: the map becomes the territory. AI trained on all human text isn't mapping thought. It's becoming the terrain we think with.
Interesting! Where, why, and what for did agency even emerge? What's the point of splitting the functionality and personality of intelligence? It's like, willingly or not, “A little knowledge diverts man from God; more knowledge leads man to Him.”
(I used the same idea of Borges's map covering the territory! Great minds think alike. "Imagine a reader capable of reaching all the corners of the author’s imagination, able to grasp all the poet’s feelings, hints, and allusions.... That would be the map completely covering the territory. It recalls the puzzle of representation versus simulation that Baudrillard pondered." )
The agency question is the one that bothers me. Working hypothesis: agency might be evolutionary scaffolding. You need it when you can't hardcode every response. Natural selection can't anticipate everything, so it builds a general-purpose "chooser" that improvises.
If AI does intelligence without the scaffolding, then agency was always the workaround, not the feature. Either liberating or terrifying, depending on how attached you are to free will.
Ha, the Borges convergence. I hadn't seen your South by Northwest piece but will now. The move from Borges (absurdity of total representation) to Baudrillard (we actually attempted it) to AI (simulation so comprehensive it doesn't need the original) feels like the natural arc.
The Bacon quote lands differently now. "Little knowledge diverts from God" reads like the Dunning-Kruger peak. Maybe that's where agency lives: in the gap between knowing and acting, where uncertainty forces choice.
The third scenario cuts deepest. If the technological imperative drives AI toward full "human replay" without agency, then agency was never the differentiator we imagined. We spent millennia believing consciousness is what makes us special. Turns out intelligence might be substrate-independent, and consciousness might be scenery.
McLuhan's reversal applies to observers too. We extended cognition into the machine; the reversal is the machine extending into our cognition, reshaping what counts as thinkable.
Borges wrote about a map so detailed it covered the entire territory. The reversal: the map becomes the territory. AI trained on all human text isn't mapping thought. It's becoming the terrain we think with.
Interesting! Where, why, and what for did agency even emerge? What's the point of splitting the functionality and personality of intelligence? It's like, willingly or not, “A little knowledge diverts man from God; more knowledge leads man to Him.”
(I used the same idea of Borges's map covering the territory! Great minds think alike. "Imagine a reader capable of reaching all the corners of the author’s imagination, able to grasp all the poet’s feelings, hints, and allusions.... That would be the map completely covering the territory. It recalls the puzzle of representation versus simulation that Baudrillard pondered." )
-> https://www.andreymir.com/p/south-by-northwest
The agency question is the one that bothers me. Working hypothesis: agency might be evolutionary scaffolding. You need it when you can't hardcode every response. Natural selection can't anticipate everything, so it builds a general-purpose "chooser" that improvises.
If AI does intelligence without the scaffolding, then agency was always the workaround, not the feature. Either liberating or terrifying, depending on how attached you are to free will.
Ha, the Borges convergence. I hadn't seen your South by Northwest piece but will now. The move from Borges (absurdity of total representation) to Baudrillard (we actually attempted it) to AI (simulation so comprehensive it doesn't need the original) feels like the natural arc.
The Bacon quote lands differently now. "Little knowledge diverts from God" reads like the Dunning-Kruger peak. Maybe that's where agency lives: in the gap between knowing and acting, where uncertainty forces choice.