I'm trying to find the case study, or at least a reference to it, but there was a case where someone left a game with apparent "Smart AI" to run over an extended period of time.

As in, they left the game on, unattended for like, several months, or even a couple years. Not quite sure on that.

But anyway, when they returned, the player ran around the game, and none of the AI were doing anything. They were just standing there, not doing anything.

They confirmed the game was still working, as it should... the AI were simply not doing anything.

Until the player killed an AI.

@Ben You can cure mortality, but you can't cure laziness. :<

At that point, all of the AI players ganged up on the player, since they saw it as a threat to the environment they lived in.

Apparently, the AI had "learned" that here was no point to killing each other, so they just simply stopped, and as soon as the new element was introduced (i.e. the player) they saw it as a threat to the environment, and sought to remove it

This is an actual true story.

I doubt that AI would do anything without reason to

@SimonH. Emphasis is important there "that AI", or "that AI"

We have emotional urges to keep us working, but AI don't.

@Ben yeah, but my AI isn't like that AI :<

Yeah. In that situation the reason was the redundancy of the activity. The object of the game was pointless, because it led to nothing. So why continue?

Then the rogue element (the player) was introduced, and it disrupted the environment - so it needed to be taught the same lesson - I.e. the pointlessness of the activity

Right. Most life doesn't think like that, so we don't have existential crises quite as much as AI most likely would. I've always had the feeling the singularity would be underwhelming.

@SimonH. I dunno man. To be brutally blunt: for suicide to be a leading cause of death screams to me that existential crisis is much more common than we generally like to talk about.

(Heck, suicide is much more common than we generally like to talk about.)

And, in fact, given that ^^ if anyone wants to talk more on the topic we should probably move that to the Not A Bar.

@nitsua60 that's a great idea. the singularity fascinates me.

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I feel like we're wired to view certain circumstances as rewarding, and we work to attain those circumstances in the most efficient way possible.

We think something like that AI game is unrewarding because that's not what we are biased towards.

@nitsua60 I had a mainland professor dock me points for faulty conclusions in an essay about a high school teacher on Guam who changed the curriculum because her students couldn't get the intended discussion out of a story with an incidental suicide; the professor just couldn't imagine that it was actually that prevalent in the kids' lives, and insisted it must just be the teacher failing to teach the story properly.

That makes people sound a lot like robots

@BESW choice words were had with this individual yes?

I tried, but he just couldn't think outside his own box.

Fair enough

Guess it's the gulags for him

XD

Based on some of his own teaching techniques and other things about him, I got the impression he hadn't really stretched his paradigm since the 70s.

Wow

Gulags it is

@nitsua60 Yeah. It was Richard Cory, and the curriculum placed it in a unit about literature exploring class inequality.

So the teacher ripped it out and put in something else that could open space to talk about class inequality.

To be fair, I don't feel like suicies should be incidental in any stories we put any value in

Aye.

(What's really interesting is how Simon & Garfunkel re-interpreted the poem.)

(I used their song as an example, actually, in the paper, about how content shifts meaning over time based on the values and experience of the audience.)

This guy sounds like an idiot honestly

I just don't understand how someone like that could be depressed.

@SimonH. who?

@trogdor Er, sorry, I meant Richard Cory.

@trogdor Mmm. This is the professor who kept giving me un-deserved-ly good grades on my papers because he liked my prose style, regardless of content. The Richard Cory paper was part of my attempt to figure out what it'd take get him to actually grade the papers based on merit.

Depression doesn't always spring from circumstances

@SimonH. That's the point of the poem: that our society has come to associate material indulgence with mental well-being, and that this is not a healthy conflation to make.

My mother had depression, for example, and it's a condition for her

It isn't dependant on how her life has gone or how her day has been

It's brain chemestry stuff

@trogdor Forgive my ignorance, but what is depression, really? Most people seem to use the word live it means a sort of extreme sadness, but that clearly isn't true.

That is definitely a weak shorthand

To be honest, I can only give you my experience of it as someone who doesn't suffer from it themselves

I suggest reading "Hyperbole and a Half" on the subject.

This is a good post about it, but far from complete.

From my perspective, it's something that starts getting her to worry about things that aren't likely to happen, or to lash out at someone for no apparent reason

@BESW Thank you.

But that's all , again, not enough to explain what it is

So yeah maybe look at that stuff

This post talks more about the sadness element of depression.

But you know, you don't need to have depression to feel unfulfilled by material indulgence. Despite what consumerism tells us, humans aren't wired to get long-term fulfillment from self-indulgence.

Oh, and I wasn't arguing you need to have depression, I just thought that was what we were talking about

The word depressed was used which led me to believe the subject was specific to that