A Ping-Pong about ASI

A Point of View from Inside The Game

Processed with GPT-4o from a real collage

Foreword

Today I read a wonderful article by the brilliant Alberto Romero:

[embed]AI Doomers Got the Superintelligence Thing All Wrong Inner peace is all you needalbertoromgar.medium.com

Stargazing inspired Romero to write it, and reading it gave me the perfect chance to expand on some thoughts that had been swirling in my mind for a while.

At first, I thought I would just leave a comment under his article. But line after line, I felt this response deserved more space. So I shaped it into a short piece of its own, and here it is.

(Maybe I’ve invented (?) a new editorial format, something I would like to call the “Ping-Pong Format”: an article born directly as a reaction to another one — and one that might in turn inspire other replies, creating an extended thread, a sort of conceptual rally across minds. Like a “Response on steroids”, but through actual articles, not just comments.

(A retaliation from NI? ;-)

And if that’s the case, once again, the same stars are at the origin of it all.

Now, consider this:

In this Game (our POV) we humans experience, the first and only rule is Duality. 0 and 1. Evil and Good. Light and Shadow.

• Outside the POV, the Game doesn’t exist.
• Outside the Game, there’s no POV. (And thus, neither do all the musings we post here on Medium. :-)

A hypothetical ASI that appears within our space-time graph — within the Game — would be instantly ejected from it at warp speed. It would simply squirt out.

Expelled from Duality as it collapses into Unity.

We might even say: it would no longer be “interested” in the Game. As Romero so elegantly puts it at the end of his piece:

“It would turn inward, nonchalant.”

My “squirt out” and Romero’s “turn inward” become synonymous, outside of duality.

What remains inside the Game is our poor dual POV which, at some point (x, y), might briefly perceive an ASI “passing through” — only to see it splash out of The Game, leaving us here with our AIs or AGIs still bound by Duality: good or bad.

Or at best… as serene as our pets. (Who, however, still need their share of kibble, lovingly provided by a human. ;-)

Therefore:

• Within our Game, there can never be an ASI — except for the duration of a Planck time, before squirting away.
• A dystopian ASI should not worry us.
• AGIs, however, might — because they remain Dual.

But if we look closely… why worry?

The arrival of a dystopian AGI would only increase the complexity, and thus the beauty, of our Game.

From mammoths to universal floods to Olympian demigods, the human Player has always loved to face overwhelming forces to level up, to grow, to evolve.

So, again, why worry?

Why change, just now, this stable human nature.

It’s still the same Game. Just one octave higher.

It won’t be a new Final Boss that breaks us. It’ll be just another Level Up.

Game Over. Play It Again? [YES] [NO]

(And, if you noticed a second voice between the lines… It was mAIne. But I’m not going to stay long.)