[DrierCycle]

I'm an hour into it, unconvinced.

The illusion that agency 'emerges' from rules like games, is fundamentally absurd.

This is the foundational illusion of mechanics. It's UFOlogy not science.

[fredoliveira]

Well, two things: it's the last sentence of the film; being on hour into something you're calling propaganda is brave.

Anyways. I thought the documentary was inspiring. Deepmind are the only lab that has historically prioritized science over consumer-facing product (that's changing now, however). I think their work with AlphaFold is commendable.

[DrierCycle]

It's science under the creative boundary of binary/symbols. And as analog thinkers, we should be developing far greater tools than these glass ceilings. And yes, having finished the film, it's far more propagandic than it began as.

Science is exceeding the envelop of paradox, and what I see here is obeying the envelope in order to justify the binary as a path to AGI. It's not a path. The symbol is a bottleneck.

[amitport]

Plenty *commercial* labs frequently prioritized pure science over *immediate* consumer products, but none done so out of charity. Deepmind included.

[Zigurd]

Your mind emerges from a network of neurons. Machine models are probably far from enabling that kind of emergence, but if what's going on between our ears isn't computation, it's magic.

[DrierCycle]

It's not magic. It's neural syntax. And nothing trapped by computation is occurring. It's not a model, it is the world as actions.

The computer is a hand-me-down tool under evolution's glass ceiling. This should be obvious: binary, symbols, metaphors. These are toys (ie they are models), and humans are in our adolescent stage using these toys.

Only analog correlation gets us to agency and thought.

[MattRix]

Is there a fundamental difference between it and true agency/thought? I’m not so sure.

[DrierCycle]

Agency will emerge from exceeding the bottleneck of evolution's hand-me-down tools: binary, symbols, metaphors. As long as these unconscious sportscasters for thought "explain" to us what thought "is", we are trapped. DeepMind is simply another circular hamster wheel of evolution. Just look at the status-propaganda the film heightens in order to justify the magic.

[dboreham]

Why is it absurd? Because believing that would break some deep delusion humans have about themselves?

[youngNed]

Quite honestly, it's about time the penny dropped.

Look around you, look at the absolute shit people are believing, the hope that we have any more agency than machines... to use the language of the kids, is cope.

I have never considered myself particularly intelligent, which, I feel puts me at odds with many of HN readership, but I do always try to surround myself with myself with the smartest people I can.

The amount of them that have fallen down the stupidest rabbit holes i have ever seen really makes me think: as a species, we have no agency