The artificial and the organic

In the sci-fi novel The Mote in God’s Eye, on making first contact with the Motie species, human experts are baffled at the behaviour of their engineer caste111. Motie castes are more like biological subspecies than human social classes. It’s practically unthinkable for an engineer to be anything else.. They’re savants. Everything they build is bespoke. In place of centralized production lines that spam the Motie masses with millions of the same office chair, they sculpt each seat in the form of its user. When there’s a shift in local needs, the engineers simply decompose and repurpose. The result is an organic infrastructure in which objects are ephemeral but eminently suitable to their niche, and the logistic focus is on the distribution of raw materials rather than finished goods.

Even more extreme are Star Trek replicators: you simply describe what you want, then it’s instantly conjured into thinghood in a flurry of sparkles. All that’s needed is a supply of raw, template matter.

LLMs have been compared to replicators. It may kind of seem that way, the first few times you use one: you tell it approximately what you want, then sparkles! Products!

Use them a few more times, and the dazzle calms down a little. They remain impressive and useful, but you start to notice they’re also idolatrous.222. I’ve only used publicly-available models. I assume that the in-house models of the major labs are somewhat better, but have not yet made this problem irrelevant. They make idols out of context, worship them, and sometimes try to convince you that you should, too. They need coaxing away from the pretty lights they too easily sit and stare at. Perhaps they aren’t in bad company, then, when their user is so ready to believe they’ve obtained what they feel they wanted.

Well, in principle a frontier model might one-shot all sorts of products for you… if you supply exactly the right prompt. This is a Library of Babel sort of situation, where everything is reachable, if you could only pick out the thread that would lead you there. That’s the opposite of bespoke ease, as far as one-shot replication is concerned. Though as you might expect, reality is less extreme than Borges’ story: often the first prompt at least brings us closer to where we want to end up, and to the discerning user, suggests what path to follow next.

So the current centaur pairing of user with LLM doesn’t exactly make a replicator, but instead a kind of high-dimensional sculptor. The LLM does the chiseling. The user stands back and says, “Why haven’t you drawn the rest of the owl yet? I asked you to draw an entire owl. And why does it look like it has fur instead of feathers?”.

I don’t imagine things will stay like this. Clearly, today’s models can better read between the lines, and make choices more autonomously, than last season’s. But how far do we want to go, inferring wishes and immediately fulfilling them? If some future, all-inferring AI concludes that I’d love the experience machine more than anything, should it just transport me there, sparkling?333. I have some friends who would say yes.

No, I don’t think so. I don’t want to short-circuit to the ending. I want the process.444. What would you think if I bought a new novel to read, to enjoy, and started by flipping to the last chapter? I want to experience, to learn more about myself, and about all of you, and everything. I’d like to see what it’s like to live in an organic civilization, where technology everywhere is eminently suitable to human agency, and doesn’t render it simply irrelevant.

Though, of course, could the AI please make an end to the dying and torture and subjugation? Bound us out of the extremes of harm we might bring ourselves to. Then let us get on being our own sculptors for a while.

The lotus thrones aren’t going anywhere.

Although the experience of a separate self is illusory, it seems to be a natural stage in the development of consciousness, just like adolescence, or being an infant. You don't look back and go "why was I ever an infant, that was silly, I should have just skipped over that stage".

• Adyashanti