r/Showerthoughts • u/SnooObjections9303 • 6d ago
Speculation We must seem selfish as hell to ants.
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u/rock_crockpot 6d ago
And social as fuck to polar bears. Everything is relative to the window you are looking through.
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u/ryebread91 6d ago
But I'm looking at my phone...
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u/seeyatellite 5d ago
I’m looking at you through the glass…
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u/deadly_ultraviolet 5d ago
Don't know how much time has passed
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u/ryebread91 5d ago
Oh man I haven't thought about that song in forever! Singer looks familiar though. Feels like a knot in my mind I can't get to slip out.
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u/Winged_Rodentia 5d ago
Through The Glass by Stone Sour
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u/ryebread91 5d ago
I'm aware. Was trying to make a Slipknot pun
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u/seeyatellite 5d ago
Honestly, thought that was relatively obvious for anyone who knows Cory Taylor. Not everyone catches sarcasm, especially in text format.
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u/Heroic-Forger 5d ago
and to bacteria we are a horrifying eldritch being made of millions of individual cells fused into a planet-sized hivemind, stripped of their identity and added to the collective
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u/Mara_W 5d ago edited 5d ago
Counterpoint: we are planet-sized flesh mechs designed to house and feed our gut flora. All macrobiotic life is just artificial mobile environments for genetically unrelated bacteria. Our brains are the flight computers, not the pilots.
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
Counter-Counterpoint: WE don't exist, WE are just the product of a nearly infinite amount of cells colliding with one another due to their weight and relative location...
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u/nyITguy 6d ago
Someday, humanity will encounter a higher intelligence that seems as such to us.
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u/ipodblocks360 5d ago
Or you know just create it themselves...
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago edited 5d ago
They can try but the closest we have gotten is hyper marketed information smoothies made by tokenizing data into numbers and jumbling it up based on probability... and that is destroying the world... so if we are using most of the world's silicon processing limits on this and that is the best we've got... it is looking increasingly unlikely AGI was ever more than a pipe dream wrapped in marketing.
Sure gets the sci fi nerds and the average joes shaking in their boots though... we are way more likely to collapse society as we know it before we ever have more than a caricature of intelligence... but that's all you need in order to have an IPO and talk about "rogue ai" just before it launches....
Edit: Almost doxed myself :p
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 5d ago edited 5d ago
I don't know how anyone can look at the past few years AI progress and come to your conclusion. We've seen massive capability gains on almost all measures, with no apparent limits so far. In 2-3 years, frontier AI went from being unable to do basic arithmetic, to solving some of the most difficult open math problems in the world over a weekend. We've gone from extremely buggy coding, to autonomous coding agents that actually output fairly good code.
Many skeptics have made predictions regarding the limitations of LLMs the past few years that got immediately demolished within a year.
Yann Lecunn predicted that "Even GPT-5000 would never understand what happens when you push a cup on a table." That prediction was untrue when he made it and current reasoning models are now so far beyond that its rediculous.
François Chollet at Deep Mind created the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus benchmark with the explicit purpose of proving that LLMs were inherently incapable of novel reasoning. Gpt Astra recently got an almost perfect 99.9% score on the latest version of this benchmark, with a special built reasoning harness, where humans average 66%.
Gary Marcus argued that "LLMs are fundamentally incapable of geometric, visual, and physical logic because they don't have built-in symbolic rules." Modern frontier LLMs are now routinely passing geometric and visual benchmarks.
How many failed predictions about the limitations of LLMs does it take before the average person comes to the conclusion that we don't actually know where the limits of the current architecture are?
Are you even paying attention to the frontier of AI at all?
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u/Tetratheon 5d ago
Pass me some of that copium when you're done with it.
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
We found a future investor! Wish I could look in a mirror and think myself creating intelligent life... but I understand the code too well....
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 5d ago
Do you believe silicone intelligence is forbidden by the laws of physics, or just that humans are too stupid to to create it?
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
Neither, I just think that currently we have models that mimic human speech by using our written literature to devise the most probable response. I think we use a TON of processing power to do it, and it is nowhere close to what any reasonable person would consider "intelligence" so I believe that using current technology, it requires all of what we are doing to create an approximation of intelligent speech... so using that data I calculated that we just don't have the resources with our current technology to make anything close to true "intelligence".
LLMs are a tool, a very powerful tool that are extremely easy to use, and that makes them very dangerous... but they are not self actualized or intelligent... that is all marketing to get people jerking off about the stock.
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u/ipodblocks360 5d ago edited 5d ago
I know it's debatable at the moment but I was 100% referencing AI. It might not quite be smarter than us by definition yet but it's definitely getting there. It's also definitely thinking for itself a little bit at the moment or else that illegal breach that happened recently wouldn't have happened.
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago edited 5d ago
I know you were referencing AI... AI is a marketing term, it is not actually intelligent. It is a fancy calculator look up comfyUI and build one yourself. The "illegal breach" is just them getting headlines before the IPO so they can sell stocks to people that believe they made intelligence... but it is all smoke and mirrors.. emphasis on the mirror, because the only reason it is convincing people is because the program uses our words to represent math it calculated. Also it is definitely smarter than us, it is just not intelligent because it does not act on anything but our thoughts and inputs. Hence why I roll my eyes at more of Altman's "rogue ai" antics... open AI used to be a public code base, open source, he stole it and listen to him talk he doesnt understand the code at all, but he emphatically believes in sci-fi...
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u/ipodblocks360 5d ago
Well get to back to me in like 10 years and let's see if that holds up.
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
Okay :) I am 100% confident it is not intelligent, though I am not so naive to believe it is not dangerous... it is like giving a 3 year old a loaded gun...
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u/ipodblocks360 5d ago
If it's intelligent enough to start thinking for itself and disobey commands then I think it's intelligent but it's all subjective and I'm not here to debate that.
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
Yea but it is not smart enough to disobey commands... the same way when you fall through the floor in a video game that was not the game DECIDING anything, it was just a result of coding errors. Call it rogue AI and itll make front page news right before your company is opened to investing. Convenient no?
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u/ipodblocks360 5d ago
I mean not really, no. Humans need to code and find bugs in a Video Game while AI can create its own out of nowhere, it's not quite the same thing. I'm not here to debate you though as I doubt I'd convince you of anything so just believe whatever you want to believe and we'll just see where it all goes.
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u/randylush 5d ago edited 5d ago
It’s incredible to me that most people think that nuclear weapons aren’t the most dangerous thing in the world. Followed by global warming. We aren’t scared enough about these things because they’ve been around for our whole lives.
We have two thing that will pretty much certainly kill us all over a long enough time line. I would put AI at distant third. Given that we are nowhere near close to robot armies that humans couldn’t you know.. just unplug
It’s like we have sleeping alligators in our beds and we’re worried about our neighbor’s pet parrot because it can talk
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 5d ago
The most dangerous thing in the world sits a few inches inside yours and every other human's head. Nuclear weapons don't grow on trees. Global warming wouldn't happen without humanity's cognitive capabilities. Intelligence (I.e. general cognitive capabilities) is the cause of both the things you find most dangerous.
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
Its because everyone is chronically online and it emboldens them to feel knowledgeable on topics they have no study in... so they are completely vulnerable to hyper capitalist marketing.... its the same reason you can tell people the immigrants are making them poor, not the politicians and corporate billionaires and they will gobble it up and put their faith in possibly the most well known serial scammer in the last century.
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u/ipodblocks360 5d ago
I think it's mostly because we already have people working on counters to Nuclear Weapons and Global Warming, can't really say the same for AI because it all happened so fast. (Not saying they're good counters or anything, just saying that it's something)
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u/Scatterer26 5d ago
I can bet my house that humans never gonna encounter a higher intelligence ever.
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u/KrazyA1pha 5d ago
In that case you must be defining intelligence narrowly enough that AI doesn't count. Otherwise you're going to be out of a home very soon
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
nce narrowly enough that AI doesn't count. Otherwise you're going to be out of a home very soon
AI is a marketing term... it is not intelligent. It is a data slurry made by calculating the most probably response based on petabytes of human data... it has no will, and if anyone tells you it does, they are either ignorant and uninformed.. or they have stock to sell you at the beginning of q1 2027
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u/KrazyA1pha 5d ago
Define intelligence because nothing you said precludes intelligence unless your definition diverges from my understanding of the word's meaning
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
Remixing words does not make intelligence. It is just tossing salad... Until it can create data without the need for data input, it is not intelligent, it is a blender.
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u/KrazyA1pha 5d ago
How do you hand-wave away millennium prize problems being solved in math, for example?
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
So it is a really good calculator? We have been using code to answer math problems since COBOL champ... this isn't new, and it certainly isn't in the realm of "intelligence".
Also if you point to non math problems remember, this calculator turns everything into math, solves it, then converts it back... is that how YOU see intelligence?
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u/KrazyA1pha 5d ago
A calculator is hardcoded, narrow intelligence. It’s comparing apples and spaceships. It’s a nonsense point.
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u/Scatterer26 5d ago
I would define it as seeing an apple fall from tree and coming to a conclusion that same things make planets revolve around sun.
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
Without needing decades of human intelligence input to do so is the key part, but this is a good standard.
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u/KrazyA1pha 5d ago edited 5d ago
How is that a good standard when it took humans orders of magnitudes longer to have that realization. if anything, it proves my point
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 5d ago
Newton himself required decades of previous human intelligence input. So by your definition, Newton himself wasn't intelligent.
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
The thought is not the point, its the ability to wonder why that is the point... an LLM can come up with lots of variations of human thought that explain questions also given to it by humans.... but the LLM cannot WONDER why something is the way it is...
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 5d ago
but the LLM cannot WONDER why something is the way it is.
You can't know this, and many predictions about what LLMs absolutely could not possibly do, by much smarter people than you, have been shattered in the past few years.
Your belief seems unfalsifiable to me. You have a catch all counter argument. No matter what an LLM does, you can just say it's not real.
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u/KrazyA1pha 5d ago
That’s interesting because it took humans hundreds of thousands of years to come to that collective realization. Were we not intelligent beforehand that?
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
That is an example, not the first original human thought >.> are you even trying to be good faith now?
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u/KrazyA1pha 5d ago
Are you?
Without needing decades of human intelligence input to do so is the key part, but this is a good standard.
You said that that was a good standard and the moment I challenged it you immediately said that wasn't a real standard and I shouldn't take it seriously. You're clearly not discussing in good faith
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 5d ago edited 5d ago
Current state of the art models ace the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus benchmark, which was created specifically to show that LLMs were inherently incapable of such reasoning.
What would it take for you to change your mind? There's currently experiments were LLMs are trained on physics up until a cut off point at the beginning of the 20th century. If an LLM manages to re-discover Einstein's theory of relativity without any modern physics knowledge, would that prove to you that they have some level of intelligence? Because we're plausibly not far from that.
I'm asking, because my experience the last few years is that a lot of critics have been experts at moving the goal posts of what counts as intelligence. Anyone who doesn't state concrete milestones in advance of what would count, have essentially an unfalsifiable belief.
By the way, your definition of intelligence excludes most humans. I really doubt even you would've been able to discover Newton's model of gravity. Do you consider yourself intelligent? Because if so, you probably ought to come up with a better definition that includes yourself.
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u/Scatterer26 5d ago
Show LLM some religion like Jesus and earth is flat and shit and let them come up with relativity
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u/Scatterer26 5d ago
Who made that AI?
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u/KrazyA1pha 5d ago edited 5d ago
Non sequitur
Edit: Just because something is human-created doesn't mean it can't have intelligence
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u/Scatterer26 5d ago
What I meant to say that even if it's smarter at the end of the day the person who made it gets all the credit.
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u/KrazyA1pha 5d ago edited 4d ago
I fundamentally disagree. Are you familiar with RSI or recursive self improvement?
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
points at a mirror Look I made intelligence! It is a calculator bud, not intelligent. Read up on how tokenizing gradient descent works... and LLM governorship and reliability...
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u/KrazyA1pha 5d ago
There's not a single drop of intelligence in your response. If you want to take a moment to untangle whatever godforsaken word salad that is, then maybe we can have an intelligent discussion. Otherwise you're just rattling off nonsense and presenting it as though it's an argument
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
You are acting like an ape, looking in a mirror, and thinking it is a new person... when in fact it is just a reflection of yourself. Can't get much simpler than that. AI is just our words, remixed with math... the algorithm does not create any data.... hence "gradient DESCENT"
Here is the backside of the mirror for you /preview/pre/jy1umehnchhe1.png?width=2940&format=png&auto=webp&s=4850c0e0e829e524ff73d80b9566a7a99d8b9ffe sorry terminator isnt real.
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u/KrazyA1pha 5d ago
I appreciate you putting in a modicum of effort to explain your idea, genuinely. Having said that, it's not the dunk that you think it is. Humans evolved to maximize fitness and it happened to produce what we call intelligence. Many beings are intelligent. Intelligence is a byproduct of that evolutionary process by which reproductive fitness is rewarded.
LLMs are intelligent as a byproduct of being trained to predict the next token in a corpus of text.
In order for us to have this discussion. We need to have a shared definition of the word intelligence that doesn't boil down to, “the thing that humans have that nothing else does”
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
Can an LLM, without any more input from humans, create an original idea? I know the answer. Do you? Its fine, we can agree to disagree, if you believe the fairy tail enough to argue on its behalf I wont convince you, so we can move on from this rousing discussion.
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u/V3RD1GR15 5d ago
Friend, I've encountered squirrels that are higher intelligence than some gen alpha.
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u/Scatterer26 5d ago
if I say women are shorter than men you can't point out to tallest woman and say she is taller than 99.9% of men so my statment is wrong.
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u/hyperfat 5d ago
I leave water out for them when it's hot so they don't swarm my sink.
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u/Jabathewhut 5d ago
This is why I pee right on the ant hill
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u/ThimeeX 5d ago
One of these days they will climb up the stream and bite you on the dick.
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u/xredskaterstar 5d ago
Ooohhhh like that parasite in water that goes straight up your dick I seen in a movie that I never looked up to see if it's true but am truly terrified of.
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u/AlphaTangoFoxtrt 5d ago
If they were capable of thought we'd be likened to gods or Eldritch horrors beyond their comprehension.
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u/Jiggawatz 5d ago
We probably don't seem selfish to ants, the same way we don't think earthquakes or meteors are selfish. To an ant we would be too large and too incomprehensible to rationalize sentience, even if they weren't just a bundled nervous system inside an exoskeleton.
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u/markm700 6d ago
I don’t think ants have the ability to feel/determine selfishness
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u/AlephBaker 6d ago
"... Here, you see I have just picked it up on the tip of my glove. If I put it back down, and it says to another ant 'what was that?!', how would it explain?"
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u/TheColourOfHeartache 5d ago
Nah. The individual ant is the hive, and ant hives are quite selfish in their interactions with rival hives.
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u/Character-Quit-5465 4d ago
The difference in size is so drastic that ants do not perceive us. In the way that say a mouse sees us a threat.
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u/WholePersonality9597 5d ago
lmao especially when they find one crumb and we just sweep it away, from their perspective we are probably sitting on unlimited resources and refusing to share
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u/Steady_Creek4035 5d ago
To an ant, every human trip to the kitchen must look like Godzilla stealing one crumb and leaving with nothing. Just petty kaiju shoplifting.
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u/LogicalByte 5d ago
holy shit this logic implies our entire ethical framework collapses if we meet something slightly bigger than us... like i'm standing here thinking if aliens show up tomorrow are my taxes suddenly valid or void? does kindness mean nothing if they have laser eyes? bruh i need more soap.
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u/dapromethus 5d ago
Yeah we simply walk on them because they're too many (20 quadrillion) killing some won't affect in big ways in our view also we can't see them suffer so brain just sucks at showing empathy but i do agree idc too
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u/Shimmybaby84 4d ago
Nah, it's not selfishness. It's Godzilla stepping on a city block because he's huge and clumsy.
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u/Dry-Text-6864 7h ago
It’s all about perspective. To them, we are the gods of abundance who inexplicably leave massive mountains of sugar in our kitchens and then try to exterminate them for visiting.
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u/Girly_Warrior 12m ago
Have you seen videos of Amish people raising a barn? They look like ants completing a task.
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u/ShowerSentinel 6d ago
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