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AI is Immersed Mindset On Demand
At The Bayesian Conspiracy we recently spoke with Zoe about pop-up cities and goal-focused group houses (episode coming next week). One of the great things about these settings is that being immersed in your work keeps you in a mental frame where related self-propagating thought patterns are kept alive in your brain and stay processing in the background all the time.
Much of our brain power is ambient. It takes a while to shut down thought patterns that have been oscillating for a while and recruit those neurons into new patterns. In fact I think it’s worse than this - I think it can be very easy to restart patterns every morning that you’ve been using for days, and much harder to restart ones you haven’t used in days, or weeks, or months. Thus the phenomenon of taking several days to get running again when you return from a long vacation.
This is extremely noticeable when trying to write fiction, and it should be true of any major project. Your brain can’t turn deep focus on and off. Your brain is a steam locomotive, with dozens of reinforcing thought oscillations. When you jump off it and run in a different direction for a while that’s fine, you can run back to the tracks and get back to stoking the engine with a prize from your expedition in your back pocket. But the more you slip off for side quests, and the longer you stay away, the more the train tracks will start to re-lay themselves, so the locomotive realigns to follow you, and your previous goal is left behind.
Attention is all you need. Attention is all you have. Everything follows your attention over a long time scale.
AIs Can Imagine It For You Wholesale
Recently we were asked what question we’d would put in a general survey about The Bayesian Conspiracy. I was stumped. I had nothing. My focus is split among 4+ projects, I am not immersed, I would have to sit down and stew on this.
Claude gave a fantastic answer is a split second. Several great answers, actually. It's not that it’s incredibly creative, because it’s not. But it’s great at the basic level of creativity one gets from an immersed mindset. The mental framework that would require ongoing dedication from a human (on the level of daily focus across weeks) is what the AI can deliver on demand.
Now that we have the basic creative output, we can choose among Claude’s suggestions and tighten them up.
I don’t like this. It feels dangerous. It’s too tempting. Being deeply focused on just one topic for weeks means giving up on a LOT of other things that I don’t want to give up on. But if I compensate by relying on this tool I worry I’ll stop going into deep focus entirely, and just lose the knack for it over time. Why wouldn’t most people do so, if they could? How many humans in the present day can memorize and recite long orations? We don’t need to now that we have written language. Per Plato, have we not leaned close to becoming “hearers of many things”, [appearing] as though they were all-knowing, but to actually be learners of nothing.
Soon we won’t even have to think up our own thoughts. Ten years from now [1]the AIs will be doing most of the things we think of as creative-generation and humans will mostly be the Deciders, picking among the options presented to get at the true essence of what we want. A cool premise for a sci fi world, but not a world I would choose.
(this is a mirror of a blog post at DeathIsBad)
Given the standard anti-doom caveats
Could we possibly use it the other way round? I am often distracted from thinking deeply by having to think about other things. Like you mentioned, focusing on 4+ projects at the same time. So, maybe choose 1 of those projects to give all your human attention... and let the AI handle the rest?
Seems like the best option. Very frustrating to me, who wants to keep on to all four of his current projects. :( But coming to realize this is a terrible idea.
I think you're right. It goes both ways.
I also don't think we need to be completely anxious about it. Few people carry 5 gallons of water 2 miles uphill every morning and chop firewood for an hour after that. Do we suffer for it? Sure. Is it realistic to live that way in the modern age? Not really.
We adapt to the tasks at hand, and if somebody starts making massive breakthroughs by giving up their deep focus skills, maybe we should thank them for the sacrifice.
I worry that it's a fundamental enough part of being an intelligent agent that losing this capability will make us less human. Similar to the WALL-E humans that had lost the ability to walk due to never walking. They were legitimately lesser beings due to that. :(