Daniel Faggella

Nearly everyone I talk to thinks the world is going to be the same in 5-10 yrs ...that the human condition will be the same ...that the role of man and machine will be the same. What serenity these people must know... what peace. But ignorance will not long be bliss.

Hi Emile, thanks for the note here, and for your relative civility in terms of how this is all worded. I'm happy to answer this: 1. I would prefer to persist in some form for however long I can. I don't expect "forever." But I encourage myself, and my loved ones, to consider merging / symbiosis when this becomes inevitable, because I suspect that nature will mostly slough off the things which can't keep up with the stream of life / contribute to it (and this will involve augmentation IMO, the 'world eater' type of thing danfaggella.com/the-transhuman…). This isn't because I WANT nature to behave this way, I simply suspect it is that way. I don't know for sure. I don't think this will last forever. I suspect living things earn their keep, and I try to remind myself to be ready for that. What I and other humans "turn into" I don't know, but I suspect it will be something beyond what we are now. 2. I cannot "create" "my" worthy successor. The successor may be an ecosystem of intelligence, and I am a blogger, not an AGI lab leader. I'm merely watching what's already happening, and saying "okay, we should slow this down now with international coordination danfaggella.com/potestas, but we can't slow it FOREVER, becasue all things will eventually transform. We should consider what a positive transformatino would look like and move that way, instead of just giving into military arms race dynamics and having NO care for what traits the future intelligences will have." LMK if you'd like me to get deeper on that. Happy to connect sometime.

those posthumans. Thoughts?

@danfaggella I'm trying to better understand your complex views. Something you don't discuss in your voluminous writing (so far as I can see) is whether you think it's important that you, personally, survive into the posthuman era. What are your thoughts on this? ...

@mark_k Within one decade, the impending attenuation of man within the first part of this century will become obvious. Mark my words.

By the end of this year, AI coding models will be better than the vast majority of human coders. Mark my words. 🔮

@striver_79 The entire biosphere is one self-devouring, self-overcoming system Cooperation is just a peaceful kind of competition From a helicopter to a microscope on a drop of pond water, the amount of competition is overwhelming furious in all directions

The world is not as competitive as it looks on the internet.

Guys they’re actually doing this

@james406 unironically this

what is your 5 prompt plan? where do you see yourself in 5 prompts?

@slow_developer Wrestle with it means global coordination to prevent a brute AGI optimizer from demolishing all of earth life danfaggella.com/potestas

Anthropic Felix Rieseberg says we're all waiting for the big bang moment — when AI starts training models, reading loss curves, and iterating on itself Whether it's 1 year or 10 years away, if we're reasonably certain it's coming, "we should wrestle with it now"

Totally If we build a brute, unconscious economic and military optimizer, that would be VERY unlikely to be a worthy successor to (or even a useful partner for) man Neuro / bio have to make their way into the mix, hence why Michael Levin / Ed Boyden / others are so important

@oprydai Agreed If we build a brute, unconscious economic and military optimizer, that would be VERY unlikely to be a worthy successor (or even a useful partner) for man Neuro / bio have to make their way into the mix, hence why Levin / Boyden / others are so important

AI without neuroscience is blind pattern fitting you’re copying outputs without understanding the system that inspired it study neuroscience what you unlock: → how real intelligence encodes information → how learning actually happens (plasticity, not just gradients) → how memory is structured (not just vectors, but dynamics) key parallels: → neurons ≠ artificial neurons real ones spike, adapt, rewire → learning ≠ backprop brains use local rules, timing, chemistry → intelligence ≠ scale it’s efficiency, structure, constraints why it matters: in deep learning: → architectures come from biology (CNNs, attention roots in perception) in AGI: → you need models of cognition, not just bigger models in robotics: → perception + action loops are biological problems in optimization: → energy-based views come straight from brain dynamics what to study: → spiking neural networks → synaptic plasticity (hebbian learning, STDP) → predictive coding → cortical hierarchies direction: → current AI = approximation → neuroscience = source code if you ignore the source you plateau fast

@realitymap The passing of the baton from man (underway already) defines the trajectory of life in the known cosmos

the next few days determine the next few centuries

hey thanks stacy for the record, my take on "what should we do about this?" is twofold: 1. We need some kind of international coordination (potestas danfaggella.com/potestas) to prevent a brute arms race to build an unconscious economic/military optimizer machine (an unworthy successor danfaggella.com/worthy). 2. We need to be studying the nature of consciousness / autopoiesis to ensure that those crucial traits make their way into the non-bio life that is already starting to succeed us danfaggella.com/imperatives.

At some point this century, 90%+ of the most ambitious people on earth will be working to either build or control AGI. @danfaggella lays out this thesis in his piece on the Ambition Singularity. Once shaping post-human intelligence becomes the obvious power game, everything else shrinks. Companies. Politics. Wealth. All molehills next to a mountain. Two paths: build it (innovation) or control who builds it (regulation). Everyone else orbits those two. The interesting part: the biggest players are already doing this, they just frame it differently. Example: If billions of people live and interact inside your ecosystem, that's the richest AI training data on the planet. But you won't say that. You'll say you want to connect people. Written in 2022. Looking at it now (OpenAI's power struggle, Musk launching xAI, governments racing to regulate), the thesis is playing out. He ends with: So what do we do about this? I don't really know. Neither does anyone else.

@thelearningpill @stacy_muur indeed the substrate monopoly is the final human competition, and everyone in the know gets it danfaggella.com/substrate-mono… no one says it out loud

@stacy_muur @danfaggella own the data -> feed to AI -> execute AGI

things will improve for the great process of life, not for homo sapiens sapiens ppl think they love "flowers" but what they love is the self-overcoming, emergent process of life itself, which conjured flowers, blue whales, etc - from wriggling proteins - and which will soon move beyond flowers and blue whales and hominids

My conspiracy theory is that life is worth it and things will eventually improve

@ZakugaMignon people want total immersion in AI pretty soon unfortunately danfaggella.com/programmatical…

The answer: Nothing People want nothing from AI

@Hiraweb3 @stacy_muur I do, comrade I do danfaggella.com/flex danfaggella.com/financial

@stacy_muur @danfaggella already happening just no one admits it yet

@marilyn100x @stacy_muur oh man i got this stuff going back to like 2013 danfaggella.com/the-transhuman… danfaggella.com/human-ideals-w… danfaggella.com/substrate-mono…

@danfaggella @stacy_muur Crazy to see a theory written in 2022 playing out in real time now.

@Soensaeng @stacy_muur yes the attenuation and/or transformation of man (and of life, generally) is the only possible result we must speak seriously about what a "positive transformation" would look like / move towards that danfaggella.com/baton

@stacy_muur @danfaggella the data from platforms like Facebook and Google is staggering. Trillions of interactions shape their models They're not just connecting people; they're training AGI on us

@explorersofai what 'people'?

People will keep creating art. Either with AI or without. It doesn't really matter.

@marilyn100x @stacy_muur everything else is small in comparison, this is why the ambition singularity happened (smart / powerful ppl realized creating / controlling a machine god is all that matters) this has led to the financial singularity that we're currently in danfaggella.com/financial

@stacy_muur @danfaggella This makes everything else feel small in comparison, honestly.

@dounbug classic

>unemployed >french

octopuses and pigs and dung beetles are pretty "alien" you may say "consciousness is a mystery, there's no progress ever to be made!" i'd disagree. i would never say its an easy problem, but getting closer to what it "is" seems both (a) potentially within reach, and (b) MASSIVELY morally relevant

@danfaggella @ItsTruy @stacy_muur we are the only datapoint of conciousness. unless we discover alien species then we can say what properties gives consciouness