Thanks for commenting.

If you were given the option to be hooked up IV to a drug that would give you the sensation of intense pleasure, x10 stronger than you'd ever experienced, and the effect was guaranteed to never wane. You'd be laying in bed like a vegetable, doing nothing, but experiencing this incredible pleasure. Nurses and staff would keep you alive until your body aged and died 100 years from today. Would you do it, and would you say that it was a great life?

If a life of pleasure is all you need, the above is pretty much as good a life could be, right?

Thinking through the thought experiment above is what made me conclude that I want more out of life than pleasure. But it would be interesting to hear if others see it differently, and perhaps feel that this would be a great life.

Great reference and amazing poem. There's a pretty powerful scene in Interstellar where someone reads the first parts of it as they set off...

Thank you for posting LeIamNeeson, your points resonate strongly with me. Love this passage towards the end, fantastic -

"We are not dust. We are the greatest creatures who have ever walked the earth and we are destined to bring about the singularity. And those of us who continue to dream big are the ones who truly embody what it means to be a human."

Very interesting points and perspective, thank you for commenting. I think this is spot on and would love to hear more if would be willing to expand on it: "It's the very limitations of our mind and the way that we frame the world that creates meaning for us, that necessarily separates us from superintelligent agents with faculties far exceeding our own--we find meaning in the human experience."

I'm quite sure at this point that you understand what I mean even if my examples weren't that great.

In your initial post you asserted that AIs will never surpass humans in what you called "subjectively meaningful tasks", citing their lack of i) will, ii) life and iii) ability to sense the world around them, as arguments.
I gave my argument for why I believe they may, which is that I think our brains can be perfectly modeled as computing machines.

Ultimately I hope you're right, that would make humans truly special. I replied in the hope of hearing more about your thoughts and arguments for your position.

Seeing how you fail to give any arguments to support your point and instead have resorted to ad hominem and trying to funny, it's pretty clear you don't have any.

Thanks anyway for commenting to my initial question.

I'm starting to suspect you're pulling my leg here. Not sure if I can describe it much clearer than the post you just replied to, but here's another try:

• On IMDB, all of the highest ranked movies will have been made by AIs, the only human-made movies that rank high are the ones that everybody knows the director used AI-input to create anyway.
• On Spotify, the songs with the most listens will all have been composed by AI, none of the songs made by humans garner nearly as many plays.
• The Nobel prizes continue to be awarded to humans, but everyone knows that the winners were helped by an AI that did the heavy lifting. Also, everyone knows that there were more important developments in the field in the last year but was not recognized with a prize because it was strictly AI, there was no human involved to give the prize to.
• A woman going on a date is at first disappointed and saddened when she realizes that the dude she is having dinner with seems to just want to get out of there and return home to his sex-bot. But on second thought she is relieved. She realizes that she'd like nothing more than to get back home to her own bot as well. Not only has her bot never failed to please her sexually, the conversation with the bot is 10x more interesting than talking to this dude and the bot knows what emotional buttons to push too.

You may not believe the above to be a possible future scenario (if so I'd love to hear your arguments). But I do believe you understand what I mean, no?

By the metric of human perception and grading. Meaning that humans would grade the AI-generated music as superior to anything created by humans, same for literature, same for political ideas, same for social interaction, same for - you name it.

You seem to disagree, and have the opinion that there are tasks that humans will always outperform AIs in? Do you have any arguments for that view to be true?

Yes, I mean more capable also in "subjective tasks" as you call it. I don't think there's anything 'magical' happening in our brains that couldn't be replicated in software and computer hardware. I wrote less than 10 years in the post and understand if people think we are farther away than that. But I really do believe we are less than 10 years away until AI outperforms humans also in the "subjective tasks".

Interesting perspective. Sounds somewhat like the argument alexiuss makes here in the thread as well - alexiuss doesn't care if 10 million people, or 1000, or no one reads their books. This sounds foreign to me, if I wrote a book I'd want as many as possible to read it. And certainly a great part of that wish is due to validation, that I want others to see me and think I did something good.

But even if you remove the validation, I'd still want to do something positive for the world even if only I knew I had done it. I foresee myself laying on my deathbed thinking back on my life. Did I make a positive difference? If the answer is only that I completed a difficult game, ran a marathon and learned to juggle then I will be disappointed in myself. If, on the other hand I built something that others can use, or helped someone - whether they know I did it or not - I will feel I contributed to the world and take comfort from it. So what I describe as "Fulfillment of purpose" is different from validation, even if I'll happily admit to also seeking validation.

I like the optimism that we will find new meaning, and hope you are right.

It sounds like you believe we all invent our own meaning which could be almost anything. I disagree with that and think evolution has pretty much hardcoded us to want to "make a positive difference" and that it will be very disorienting for the majority of people if AIs do everything better so there is no positive difference left to make.

Thank you for commenting. If your figure of 5% is correct then I agree that it's basically a non-issue.
I realize not everyone sits and ponders these thoughts but I really think the figure is WAY higher than 5% that wonder about their purpose and would feel lost if they see none.