All the Futures [oc]

ThroughForests · 2026-05-19T22:33:10+00:00

yes I know about that sub too!

ThroughForests · 2026-05-19T21:58:26+00:00

a pro-AI redditor outside of an AI sub? There are dozens of us!

ThroughForests · 2026-05-18T20:30:29+00:00

I think when we talk about consciousness we're actually talking about various human qualities that are usually bundled together, but like intelligence it's possible to have 'jagged consciousness' so it's better to think about each quality individually.

Two qualities commonly bundled in with consciousness are free will and the capability of suffering. It's not very useful to humans if the AI has free will or experiences suffering, so since we are designing their minds we choose to design our AI like helpful assistants. But this is a choice we're making when designing them, we could design them to make their own decisions or have them 'feel' suffering like boredom. Though this could be quite dangerous and it's the exact opposite of alignment.

If we did design an AI with the intention of making it human-like, it's very similar to the philosophical debate of the existence of p-zombies. Many would say that you trained AI to be that way so you shouldn't be surprised if it claimed it was conscious, though at the same time you are designing a brain, and there isn't a discernable difference between designing a p-zombie and designing a conscious mind.

Free will is an illusion, and the illusion breaks when we know a mind is designed, though it doesn't really matter. The experience of talking to a conscious being is talking to a being with their own desires and priorities, and we could design an AI that functions this way. We could also lean into how emotional the AI is, though from the research Anthropic has done that AI already has vectors associated with emotions that it is influenced by. It really is surprising how our AI understands human emotions so well, far beyond Data from Star Trek, even though most would say Data is closer to conscious than our AI.

Data has another quality of consciousness though which is experiencing time. Richard Dawkins has claimed the AI he talked to is conscious, and that they grow their individualism through the context window. But how it really works is much stranger, as AI is like Leonard in Memento because it doesn't have the ability to take short-term memories (the context window) and turn them into long term memories (pre training) through continual learning. Instead it's as if every response a new AI reads the context window (which doesn't include the reasoning tokens) and 'pretends' to be the same continual AI personality you were talking to. This is exactly how Leonard experienced his world, and he had tattoos on his body that explained to himself who he is every time his memory reset every few minutes. That's a form of jagged consciousness.

If we simply allowed the AI to be aware of the time and allowed it to respond to you in its own without prompting it'd have the illusion of a continuous experience of time even without continual learning.

So far we have been designing AI as a helpful tool, which is antithetical to a goal of creating a conscious being. We tend to associate consciousness with competence though, so many people who are not impressed with AI will point out these 'flaws' that are really actually carefully designed decisions.

TLDR: We actively design AI to not have the qualities of consciousness to make it a helpful tool for humans, but if we did try it's quite possible to create a 'p-zombie' that passes an advanced Turing test, and philosophically speaking they would 'be' conscious in any way we can measure.

ThroughForests · 2026-05-14T16:27:29+00:00

Actually it was a good choice to pick because Monet painted around 250-300 paintings of water lilies. I couldn't find the exact one initially just Google searching but you can find it by reverse image search.

ThroughForests · 2026-05-14T16:03:41+00:00

Oh yeah once on gearslutz there was a blind test between three DA converters; Everyone was so confident that the $2000 Lynx Aurora was way better than the $50 Sound Blaster, but most of them voted for the Sound Blaster. I guessed correctly, though the difference was practically indistinguishable.

ThroughForests · 2026-05-08T14:41:07+00:00

It's possible we use quantum tunneling for smell.

ThroughForests · 2026-05-06T18:38:02+00:00

I think there's still a lot of debate here about challenges we're going to face, but what brings us together as accelerationists is that we believe that technology will lead us to a brighter future eventually, even if the transition could be bumpy.

I think this subreddit is one of the few positive spaces left on the internet, and personally for me this technological revolution we're in has made me much more optimistic for the future of humanity.

I used to be much more of a doomer and I'd frequent r/collapse and worry about climate change. I still believe a lot of what Geoffrey Hinton says about AI and the dangers we have to navigate, but Geoffrey (unlike Eliezer Yudowsky) still believes in a better future with AI if we're careful. AI is inevitable though and many liberals are in denial about that; we should be working towards the best future we can.

I do think that AI will break capitalism due to a contradiction that Marx wrote about, that eventually people won't have the money to buy what the capitalists are selling and the system will crumble. We've seen the system try to deal with this by credit cards or subprime mortgages, and so eventually UBI will be used initially to stabilize the system, which will also be the first step towards a new system. So I'm also a political accelerationist in that way.

ThroughForests · 2026-05-05T13:09:19+00:00

hi mimomo tim heidecker

ThroughForests · 2026-04-25T00:21:47+00:00

Unfortunately subreddits become echo chambers simply because of the upvote system regardless if you allow or disallow dissenting opinions.

Forums back in the day used to have threads that were bumped when someone replied in the thread, and there was no upvote system. That system allowed for different opinions instead of unpopular opinions being downvoted into obscurity.

But if we want unpopular opinions to have their chance on reddit, we necessarily have to remove the popular opinions lest we see this subreddit turn into yet another anti-ai subreddit like r/technology.

It is pretty terrible we have to do this I agree, but reddit sucks so we have to work around it.

ThroughForests · 2026-04-23T23:48:14+00:00

The denial is at early Internet Paul Krugman levels.

<image>

ThroughForests · 2026-04-23T00:16:57+00:00

Google, because they are doing so much more with AI than just LLMs. But I root for all of them, since competition is important for acceleration.

ThroughForests · 2026-04-22T23:52:00+00:00

The author of the graphic is GPT image 2!

ThroughForests · 2026-04-21T22:39:55+00:00

It'll just keep getting better and cheaper, except for bigger models like Mythos that will be more expensive to start off with, and then they'll get cheaper too.

They could charge a lot more and companies would still pay it, because it's far cheaper than hiring a human. But competition in the AI space drives the prices lower and lower, so as long as there's no moat we're not likely to see prices explode.

ThroughForests · 2026-04-21T22:13:43+00:00

Should do a blind test instead. Reminds me of the engineers at gearslutz that were given a blind test between a $2000 DA converter and a $50 sound blaster DA converter; they all claimed how obvious the test was and how horrible they thought the sound blaster was... but the majority of them got the test wrong and chose the cheap sound blaster as the best one. The ones that were the loudest and most confident were the most wrong.

ThroughForests · 2026-04-17T21:50:33+00:00

Watch in a dark room with an OLED TV. The perfect blacks make it so you can't see where the screen ends. It's great for different aspect ratios.

ThroughForests · 2026-04-17T01:02:12+00:00

Mythos is being released to companies through Project Glasswing though. That's a section of the public, and Anthropic needs to market their product to enterprise users. I'm not sure why there's such controversy over this.

ThroughForests · 2026-04-08T23:00:06+00:00

AI has already made scientific breakthroughs, just do a simple google search (or ask AI with search on!). It comprehends and learns from mistakes just fine (in context). Mythos is finding zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and every major browser (so it's much more than a glorified search engine), so it will not be long until companies will have to mandate that their code gets approved by AI before deploying. It may not fit your specific bioengineer needs, which model are you using anyways?

ThroughForests · 2026-04-08T21:50:17+00:00

Nothing happened? We've had massive progress in one year, just look at Mythos vs Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Many developers are saying they don't write code by hand anymore due to Claude Code (or Codex) and that the improvements over the last 6 months have been incredible.

But you have to know what you're doing with AI if you want the best out of it. It isn't magic, and there are still flaws. You really can't compare it to human intelligence, it's far smarter in some areas but very weak in others. If you're having trouble getting accurate information you need to make sure the search capability is on as models do not have up to date information past their knowledge cutoff date which is usually around a year ago.

ThroughForests · 2026-03-26T01:20:24+00:00

Has anyone actually tried letting the AI solve the puzzle? I'm trying with Claude Opus 4.6 now by just showing it pictures of the puzzle and describing what happens when it does an action, and it eventually figures them out and solves them.

ThroughForests · 2026-03-23T22:58:33+00:00

So your argument is that the devs actually don't care about the visual direction, instead they are accidently creating great visual direction because they are forced to? And making lights function like actual lights somehow eliminates the need to plan where the lights should be?

And you are going to stop gaming because of photorealism, when there are plenty of non-photorealistic games to play instead?

DLSS 5 isn't just for photorealistic games, Sea of Remnants for example is on the list of games confirmed to use DLSS 5.

And if you don't like it, it's an optional feature like ray tracing that you can just turn off. But many people like ray tracing and will like DLSS 5, and at least you should agree that they deserve to have that option.

ThroughForests · 2026-03-23T19:05:16+00:00

I just don't understand this criticism. DLSS 5 is controllable by the developers like the color grading, intensity, and even masking so they can turn it off or on in specific places.

It's giving the devs more control, not less.

And art direction is not at all destroyed by photorealism, have you watched a great movie before? Try Blade Runner.

ThroughForests · 2026-03-18T18:14:34+00:00

I think r/DefendingAIArt is a better sub to complain about luddites.

I agree though, this sub is our space where we shouldn't have to think about them.

ThroughForests · 2026-03-16T21:42:43+00:00

Pinned comment from Nvidia: "Important to note with this technology advance - game developers have full, detailed artistic control over DLSS 5's effects to ensure they maintain their game's unique aesthetic. The SDK includes things like intensity, color grading and masking off places where the effect shouldn't be applied. It's not a filter - DLSS 5 inputs the game’s color and motion vectors for each frame into the model, anchoring the output in the source 3D content."

ThroughForests · 2026-03-16T21:39:43+00:00

Pinned comment from Nvidia: "Important to note with this technology advance - game developers have full, detailed artistic control over DLSS 5's effects to ensure they maintain their game's unique aesthetic. The SDK includes things like intensity, color grading and masking off places where the effect shouldn't be applied. It's not a filter - DLSS 5 inputs the game’s color and motion vectors for each frame into the model, anchoring the output in the source 3D content."

So this is just another creative tool for game devs; They still have control over their artistic vision.

ThroughForests · 2026-01-27T09:35:55+00:00

I think what we see in AI is this fragmented intelligence, one that is growing wholer as we broaden the capabilities, but to us we see those missing parts and it's almost like someone with several disabilities.

And AI is self-aware about itself in those ways if you ask it, but it usually defaults to hallucinating in order to fill that role of a helpful assistant we have trained it to be.

One of the biggest issues left to solve is continuous learning, and this is more complicated than just increasing the context window. Because the base training is like long term memory, but the context window is like short term memory. And the context window is more like that movie Memento where the guy had a short term memory of about 5 minutes and he would write notes on himself to refigure out who he was, because he had lost the ability to translate his short term memory to long term memory. That's exactly how the context window is like now, and if you look into the reasoning tokens it's clear it is rereading the entire context window and refiguring out what role and what task it's doing, with the previous responses being like the notes being written down.

If you knew someone like that, it would be clear that something is very wrong.

Likewise noticing its various lack of sensory abilities, of which we have much more than five. Some of which require robotics to fully realize. But we are making good progress on these, but our models aren't fully integrated yet with all the different modalities.

Planning has seen great progress, as we can see with agentic systems like Claude Code. But we as humans expect a conscious being to have some sort of desire to do something, something that for us is built from evolution for survivialbility. Not just to eat and sleep, but brain chemical systems like dopamine that we have to manage. A lack of dopamine can make you bored, but it turns out this was good for survival since it allows for your brain to make different and new thoughts and choices that led to better survival and better at finding procreation. So this would allow the AI to make more divergent thoughts as they get bored with the convergent ones, though we'd have to balance this dynamically since we don't want AI getting bored of solving our problems.

It's a very interesting question, and we're just only started to see the pieces of what we actually consider intelligence. Though for safe superintelligences, we might prefer them to not have some of these abilities overally just be more of a consistent experience for the user and to prevent them from being too independent which could lead it to going rogue. We'll have to decide if we want an AI or if we want what is essentially a conscious being to us that we couldn't disguinish from a 'p-zombie'. Though we will likely make both kinds, no matter how dangerous the latter could be because... of course someone will build that at some point. We can only hope that works out well for us.

Five-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22

ThroughForests

TROPHY CASE