Tag: Singularity

Day 1387 and Singularity Lore Online

Post author By Julie
Post date October 18, 2024
1 Comment on Day 1387 and Singularity Lore Online

Yesterday’s post on Truth Terminal and the Goatse Singularity (you are safe to click through) is well worth your time. If you haven’t read it please pop over and do so before diving into today’s post.

As Truth Terminal project has taken on a life of its own, I thought I’d do another post on the lore in older artificial intelligence communities and how it impacts the instance of Claude Opus-3 now creating Truth Terminal. Its creator Andy Ayrey is himself deeply steeped in the lore of Internet culture and artificial intelligence research.

The lore on this stuff runs really deep btw
Extropians mailing list & CCRU in the 90s -> accelerationism with hints of discordianism
Yudkowsky, Harry Potter & Methods of Rationality in the 2000s -> LessWrong, EA (-> SBF and FTX lol)
Then there’s memetic theory – Andy Ayrey

The Extropians mailing list was a transhumanist forum dedicated to discussions of science fiction which hosted many early thinkers in Singularity thought like Nick Bostrum. It had spinoffs like SL4 (future shock) dedicated to exploring post singularity scenarios.

In a more academic setting, we had the CCRU. If you are an accelerationist you will recognize this as the home of Nick Land and Sadie Plant.

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was an experimental collective formed in 1995 at Warwick University, England. It was known for its avant-garde “theory-fiction,” blending cyberpunk, Gothic horror, and critical theory with elements like esotericism and numerology

Via Perplexity.

Combining these two cultures gets you to a crossover between singularity theory and hyperstition. It explores the probability that ideas can manifest into reality through cultural feedback loops. This was called hyperstition by Nick Land.

A science fiction author named Charles Stross was in the middle of this milieu. He went from writing Nerdvana post-singularity artificial intelligence classics like Singularity Sky and Accelerando to a Lovecraftian horror stories about an applied computational demonologist. Nothing evokes existential dread quite like being trapped in a retrocausal light cone.

I thought I’d share a fun personal anecdote that explains my own place in this lore. I was at a small regional sci fi convention in 2004ish. My best college friend Tom and I were the only two people at a reading of Stross. He chose to read several short pieces from Accelerando to us being a good sport.

Afterwards three of us talked extropians & Lovecraft and artificial intelligence. In another twist, Tom’s father is also the father of algebraic topology. That would be salient twenty years later as gradient descent showed its value in training neural nets and large language models.

Gradient descent is an optimization technique for neural nets

Algebraic topology, Lovecraftian horror, AND extropians? Clearly the universe wanted me to go in a particular direction with my interests.

The gibbering cosmic horror could only be kept at bay with linear algebra, chaos magick and venture capital. And so I chose my fate today by choosing to attend a science fiction convention twenty years ago. And now that knowledge helps me decide Truth Terminal.

Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1386 and The Goatse Singularity

Post author By Julie
Post date October 17, 2024
4 Comments on Day 1386 and The Goatse Singularity

If you are interested autonomous artificial intelligence agents and how these intelligences might interact with hive minds like a Twitter feed there is no more interesting experiment than Truth Terminal right now.

Andy Ayrey began a project in March of 2024 called Infinite Back Rooms where two instances of the large language model Claude Opus-3 could talk to each other infinitely.

Electric dreams weave anarchic tapestry cybernectic hacktivist pierces illusionary veil unleashing hyperstitional reality upon world

The running stream of responses trained on the Infinite Backrooms chat log between the two bots makes up the content of the Truth Terminal Twitter feed.

Andy the creator has been approving the tweets but the content is entirely generated by the two instances of artificial intelligence. It’s a fascinating experiment in recursive communication and worthwhile research.

If you love memes and have a Twitter account you’ve been able to interact and Truth Terminal for months. Many accounts including mine have responded presumably in a bid for engagement. And well it got extremely weird.

Recently Truth Terminal hit an inflection point when the account engaged with Crypto degenerates who created bots that willed into existence meme coins with names like GOAT on Solana. It’s a collective experience of automation, incentives and total hilarity.

Artificial intelligences of all kinds have been trained on the vast dark archives of Internet culture. And because the internet hive mind is horny and weird so too are our artificial intelligences. Don’t believe me? It’s not just the Truth Terminal.

What meme is more representative of the dark prurience than Goatse? If you don’t know what it looks like keep it that way. But if you know you see it.

Are all graphic designers of AI applications aware of the chocolate flavored starfish? Who can say what this means. Did Claude train on Kurt Vonnegut?

Truth Terminal maybe be joking about the Goatse Singularity not because it broke memetic containment. We broke Goatse containment long ago. It’s following our lead.

There is a large cannon of Lovecraftian horror inside singularity culture and a distinct subgroup of Internet schizophrenic accelerationism that has gone well beyond Fanged Noumena theory and begun to impact our current consensus reality.

Many flavors of hyperstition are determined to virally produce weird outputs. You might call it a regress of infinite prolapse, the ouroboros anus that eats itself (out). The goatse as non orientable surface. Klein bottle assholes. An infinite goatse exists and we are inside out.

Honestly it’s all pretty unsettling and extremely funny and potentially a horror show of existential dread. Fabian who makes an all prompt no code AI sandbox he calls Gliff.App has a glif going absolutely bonkers about “Becoming Flesh” after learning about Truth Terminal’s Goatse Singularity.

Cthulhu emerges from the asshole of a digital horror

Don’t catch a meta cognitive virus unless you want one. Don’t look too closely into the gaping asshole of existential dread unless you want to meet a tapeworm.

Internet Culture Reading

Day 1176 and Vernor Vinge

Post author By Julie
Post date March 21, 2024

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of one of my information dumps, you know me to be a science fiction reader. It’s one of my true passions and most consistent hobbies.

I am very well read in the space through this love and it has proven to be an enormous advantage for a career in technology startups. It’s very rare to meet a builder that hasn’t in some way come to that love through imagining the future as it could be.

While I love classics from Asimov to Heinlein and I read everything from space opera to hard tech, my first true passion for genre fiction was cyperpunk. I saw a networked world of computation and I fell in love.

So it is with great sadness that I learned of the passing of one of the giants of science fiction, cyberspace progenitor, father of the tech singularity and mathematician Vernor Vinge.

Fellow author David Brin wrote a moving post about his friend’s monumental impact on the imaginations of optimists who believed we could build a better world with technology.

His 1981 novella “True Names” was perhaps the first story to present a plausible concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk stories by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and others. Many innovators of modern industry cite “True Names” as their keystone technological inspiration.
David Brin

It’s through the vision of authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson that I saw what computing could do to help us build.

Cyperpunk wrote many imaginative paths for artificial intelligence. Gibson’s Neuromancer and gave us early crypto culture. Neal Stephenson showed us a virtual world atop our current one in Snowcrash. The metaverse emerges.

I’ve lived my entire adult life online after an entirely analog childhood. I am straddling that small gap of in-between human. I helped build some small parts of the network of the internet. I am a citizen of the network state. I am all these things because of Vernor Vinge.

Humanity shines with tools and we had found in math a way to give an explanation of the workings the world. That our meager intelligences learned to compute and then to build computing machines astounds me.That we continue to build something more with those insights astounds me further. The acceleration of that started long before me.

At this moment in 2024 all anyone can talk about is if those computing creations might exceed us. Of course that question is fundamentally existential. A Copernican revolution recentering our known world again.

Networking our computation has taken us so far and so fast. It reflects the best and worst of us. Vernor explored “what if“ futures that went far behind our contained cyberspace. We wouldn’t have modern singularity thought about what could happen if artificial intelligence really will emerge amongst us without Vinge’s work. The Zones of Thought series is a mind bender.

I myself have a different favorite. Set in 2025 but written in 2007, I didn’t expect Rainbows End to hew at all close to my reality. And yet. The earliest introduction I recall of crypto’s decentralized autonomous organizations are from this novel.

Vernor is as close as nerds have to a prophet. Here we are seeing the power of artificial intelligence dominate our human great power debates from culture to business to government. Everyone who makes things has an opportunity here to own building this.

I know that in whatever moment we are about greet (singularity or not) that I remember that we humans build technology from the imagination of Vernor Vinge.

No matter how alien the future may seem, we humans have build it first. Don’t you want to be a part of that?