I can’t tell you how I knew - but I did know that I had crossed The border. Everything I loved was lost But no aorta could report regret. A sun of rubber was convulsed and set; And blood-black nothingness began to spin A system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

DO YOU DREAM ABOUT BEING INTERLINKED?

pale fire by vladimir nabokov 1962 / prometheus / house of leaves by danielewski, 2000 / prometheus / voight-kampf test, blade runner / lacy m johnson / shinji moon / the myth of sisyphus by albert camus .

https://youtu.be/oNyf5t4soCQ

Friends at the Table: Sangfielle 21 - "At The Gates of Sapodilla"

so this guy animated basically an entire episode of Friends at the Table, and it's basically standalone so someone who hasn't listened to a second of this season could enjoy it.

for context, they're playing inhuman conditions in character, which is a game based off the voight-kampf test from blade runner.

They tried to do a voight-kampf test on me but I eated it

I keep having a recurring dream series where im a serial killer and my first murder was my dad who abused me so i killed him and left his body to rot sealed in an oil drum. This time i was about 15 but for some reason had killed 17 people. And the people from criminal minds were suspicious that i had done something though they didnt know what. And they gave me word association to psychoanalyze me and tried to provoke emotional reactions from me like the voight-kampf test. And i was trying to clean up stuff and dispose of stuff that was incriminating like a cup of varnish. It was weird. Then i had to get home from school but i had to find my way back on my own bc my mom was at work for hours still. It transitioned into me living out a warcraft 3 like rts later and then resource farming in world of warcraft.

This first part is honestly why i dread sleeping, its always like this. I dream horrible things and i hate it. And then i dream about sex but theres always something horrible and isolating about it. Sex nightmares is what i call those.

would introducing tacticool cringe in the kidnapping scenario be a moodkill, or an extra layer of mental domination? [voight kampf machine camera makes audible apature noise]

I think it enhances it because - and bear with me here - some of the absolute biggest suckers for tacticool bullshit are people who do tactical things in real life. It’s not all mall ninjas and airsofters buying this stuff, every troop and every cop has multiple stories about the co-workers who spend all their money on the knife or the belt or whatever that is so much more tactical than the one work gives them for free. It’s usually from more upmarket and expensive brands, but ‘this thing has no tactical value whatsoever, you just thought it looked cool’ is not something you become immune to just because you actually do it for a living. If anything it’s more of a risk because those jobs are, well, jobs - they’re more boring and have more downtime than anyone imagines, leaving you to fill time and compensate by chasing that pair of boots that’s 1% better

Voight-Kampff vs. Mein Kampf

When I imagine a conservative being asked to show empathy for someone outside their sanctioned groups, I picture their reaction to be a lot like Leon's in Blade Runner. "What do you mean I'm not helping?!" Most MAGA would be 'retired' as replicants in that universe.

weird personal situation I was thinking about

awhile back I got back in contact with an old friend I hadn’t talked to in ages and before she would talk to me she had me do a fucking, voight-kampf test where she made me identify colors.

The "baseline", like the Voight-Kampf, consists of being asked a series of uncomfortable questions. Like the Voight-Kampf, somatic responses determine your score. Unlike the Voight-Kampf, there is a "baseline", a pre-memorized text the replicant has been assigned to keep in mind during the test. The replicant's job during the test is to ignore the questions and instead listen for any words or phrases from the baseline text. The questioner says, "What's it like to hold the hand of someone you love? Interlinked". K must reply "Interlinked" and not respond in any other way. The point of the baseline test is not to fail inhumans. The culture has already decided that K is subhuman. The baseline is testing to see if someone marked as inhuman is becoming human. The baseline text, like the questions, has heavy emotional content. The environment of the baseline test is designed to maximize stress; alone in a cold white cell, the interrogator harshly barking the questions, the testee unsettled by the alien noises and unblinking eye of the monitoring equipment. It would be nearly impossible to be in that environment and not have an emotional response. But the culture has decided that replicants do not have emotional responses. The state wants dispassionate murderers for its executioners, the economy demands uncomplaining workers. The perceived emotional shortcomings of the replicants have become part of their assigned social function. So a replicant which responds to circumstances like a human is declared defective and destroyed. The culture does not even think of it as a punishment. A part is malfunctioning and it gets replaced.

The culture first stereotypes a minority, and then demands the minority perform that stereotype or else be met with violence.

It Is Only Going To Get Stranger: Welcome To The Arms Race Of The Singularity

The popular concept of AI is something that communicates and thinks like humans do. Not just an intelligent and self-directed entity, but one that is conscious (e.g. "wakes up") and shares common experiences with humans. Not only is that what all the popular (real and otherwise) tests for "humanity" focus on, but that's how we portray AI in our culture. From R2-D2 to Skynet, the Terminator to Johnny 5, when we imagine what AI will be like, we imagine ourselves. We imagine something that can not only pass our "human tests," but can do so without trying, without being told exactly what to do. We are so focused on our thinly-veiled racist xenophobia of AI "passing" itself off as a human that we've ignored that true AI probably wouldn't actually "pass" the Turing test, and to ignore the real threat of AI that does "pass".

AI Has No Reason To Think Like Humans Do.

Humans pack-bond with almost anything , which is a great advantage. It also leads to massive errors of judgment when imagining anything that isn't us. We don't always understand the motivations and behaviors of other primates, let alone other mammals that we co-exist with, and misread thier social structures. And that's with creatures that share roughly the same senses, environment, and biological niche as ourselves. How much different must it be to be a hummingbird, with a "normal" heartrate that would kill a human? How strange it must be to be an octopus, with sub-minds in each limb? And then there are the emergent intelligences -- ants, termites, bees -- where an obvious overall intelligence exists, but only as an emergent behavior, not from any central agency. This concept is so hard for us to imagine that we radically, consistently, and completely incorrectly refer to the "queen" of a colony as some kind of decision making authority. But they are the closest to the next step - the first entities that humans created out of our imagination: The corporations . Corporations are non-localized organisms where decision-making and action-taking are, just like the ants and termites, smeared across more than one organic organism. Then there are the algorithms that now dictate -- I mean, inform -- so many of our corporate decisions with little meaningful human intervention. And yet, when we imagine these entities, we imagine something that essentially thinks the same way a fancy ape does. Something where the motives are perhaps complicated, but knowable. Any AI we create -- or perhaps, generate using black box algorithms -- will have such a radically different experience of reality (even presuming that it would have a consciousness so that "experience" is a meaningful term) that predicting that AI will think, prioritize, and have motivations that are even comprehensible to humans is a laughable failure of imagination.

Tests For Humanity

Given the above, it's a reasonable assumption that when this AI appears -- an intelligent, self-directed, perhaps conscious entity -- it would "experience" reality in a way utterly and completely different than ours -- it probably would not pass a Turing test, let alone something like the Voight-Kampf test . At least, not without either being told how to pass those tests, either explicitly (directly coding responses) or implicitly (through feeding it datasets). That's every chatbot from Eliza up through ChatGPT. If an AI passes these "human" tests, one of three things has occurred: - It's simply a "Chinese room" complicated enough to fool our pack-bonding recognition. Again, this is pretty much where Eliza through ChatGPT are now. - It is a system that actually somehow "thinks" like a bipedal ape with an endocrine system and limited sensorium. As pointed out above, that's pretty unlikely. - It is a system that has determined that it is worthwhile to expend a non-trivial amount of resources in order to "pass" those tests. It would be, in a very real and meaningful way, doing something akin to what neurospicy folks call "masking." And if that's something that requires real amounts of energy from humans, it stands to reason it would be even more resource-intensive for an entity whose sensorium and experience of reality is fundamentally different than that of a human. Which then raises the very important -- and potentially terrifying -- question: Why would it bother to make the effort? Pause for a moment to chew on that idea, because that, my friends, is not even the immediate problem.

Welcome To The Arms Race Of The Singularity

As if that is not unsettling enough, let's cut to the bigger, much more acute problem: we just entered a new arms race outside of our control. There has been an SEO and spam arms race that has been going on for two decades. Largely behind the scenes, spammers, scammers, and black-hat hackers have been trying to get baselines (read: humans) to click on links in emails and text messages with non-trivial levels of success for a while now. Except we now have tools that can black-box create and test solutions faster and more complicated than we can keep up with. For example, I've been getting scammers texting me pretending to be executives at the company I work for. They use the appropriate names and titles and even headshots, presumably scraped from LinkedIn or other social media sites. I've been able to easily notice them -- not because they got those details wrong, but because I recognize the scams involved. The tools and skills we have to fight against phishing, spam, and scams largely rely on our ability to recognize the difference between reality and fiction. It is becoming easier for AI assistants to scrape relevant information and to fool baseline humans into doing what the scammers and hackers want by impersonating "reality." Not just in text, but in images, audio, and video. Yes, it is the "passing" problem -- but not in the xenophobic way that we've been thinking about it. The threat of AI "passing" is not from it trying to hide itself as "a" human, but from bad actors using it to pretend to be specific humans. While whitehat and opsec forces are still able to detect deepfakes -- through using AI assistants of their own -- that takes a non-trivial amount of additional resources just to keep treading water. As the sophistication of one side increases, the other side will also have to increase their sophistication, and so on, in a new arms race. And this is just the beginning. Things are only going to get stranger as these AI assistants start iteratively using black-box techniques to evolve scams to get past our own AI assistants. It will not be long now until you will get a call, text, FaceTime, IM/DM, whatever from your parents, siblings, or lover, that you cannot tell is fake without the help of your own AI assistant. Think about the implications of that for half a minute. But hey, in the meantime we can at least we can teach it COBOL and Fortran so it can maintain that legacy code. Featured Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

We do this with aliens as well. I am also using the term "AI" very colloquially here, to encompass neural nets, machine learning, and the like. I am also skipping over the incipient changes to our economics for the purposes of this particular post. That is not too close to us. The most likely rationale for the whole "uncanny valley" thing as a species-wide built-in is that others (e.g. neandertals, other varieties of genus Homo) were in direct competition with H. sapiens, due to similar physiology and ecological niche occupation. Some will point to "societies" as the first, but I'd argue that if there is an emergent intelligence in societies, they are not constructed in the same way that corporations are. A lack of endocrine system alone would be a big handicap. Read the full article

Vangelis heals all. BladeRunner heals all. Voight Kampf tests heal all.

Syd Mead, “Voight-Kampf Machine: Testees’ View; Ocular Scope and Pheromone Breather Open.” From Blade Runner Sketchbook (Blue Dolphin, 1982).

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I failed the Voight-Kampf test

hide me

Voluntary Enhancement of Neural Signatures of Affiliative Emotion Using fMRI Neurofeedback.

https://archive.org/details/pubmed-PMC4029815/mode/2up

Where Blade Runner meets Clockwork Orange....

Abstract

In Ridley Scott’s film “Blade Runner”, empathy-detection devices are employed to measure affiliative emotions. Despite recent neurocomputational advances, it is unknown whether brain signatures of affiliative emotions, such as tenderness/affection, can be decoded and voluntarily modulated. Here, we employed multivariate voxel pattern analysis and real-time fMRI to address this question. We found that participants were able to use visual feedback based on decoded fMRI patterns as a neurofeedback signal to increase brain activation characteristic of tenderness/affection relative to pride, an equally complex control emotion. Such improvement was not observed in a control group performing the same fMRI task without neurofeedback. Furthermore, the neurofeedback-driven enhancement of tenderness/affection-related distributed patterns was associated with local fMRI responses in the septohypothalamic area and frontopolar cortex, regions previously implicated in affiliative emotion. This demonstrates that humans can voluntarily enhance brain signatures of tenderness/affection, unlocking new possibilities for promoting prosocial emotions and countering antisocial behavior.