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.
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
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.
GladOS: "This... statement... is... FALSE. *Don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it*" Wheatley: "Mmmm.... true. Yep. Definitely true."
@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.
@BESW so the suicide in the story was intended to be incidental, but to that audience it was screaming "THIS IS THE IMPORTANT THING" because of familiarity?
(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.)
@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.
@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.
@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.
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
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.
I think the most depressing thing about Meta @StackOverflow is the degree to which the demands for highly specific data/numerical evidence of any problem has been weaponized into a way to avoid addressing nearly any problem.
