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#tescreal

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Via the @ataripodcast: in a 25-minute video, Jean Michel Sellier, Research Assistant Professor at Purdue University, demonstrates the use of an #Atari800XL to train a neural network using a genetic algorithm instead of the memory-hungry technique of gradient descent.

hackaday.com/2025/02/21/geneti

I've had a soft spot for Artificial Life for a long time. During the last AI Winter in the mid 1990s, I was spurred to get back into education and onto a career in commercial software development by Stephen Levy's book "Artificial Life: The Quest for a New Creation". I loved that Artificial Life researchers borrowed well-understood mechanisms from genetics and implemented them in software to converge iteratively on solutions, in contrast to AI research, which was attempting to build models of categories which were not understood at all (and largely still aren't) - intelligence (whatever that is) and perception.

In subsequent years I wondered why I wasn't hearing any hype about Artificial Life; it turns out practitioners have been quietly getting on with solving problems using the technique. Meanwhile, yet again, AI boosters have blustered their way into the consciousness with another round of overcooked hype.

The Stephen Levy book is still worth a read, if you can find it. (IIRC Danny Hillis and the Connection Machine folks get a mention too.)

(I don't know if any of the genetic algorithm folks turned out to be supporters of eugenics, as many of the current crop of AI boosters seem to be.)

archive.org/details/artificial

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_win

Hackaday · Genetic Algorithm Runs On Atari 800 XLFor the last few years or so, the story in the artificial intelligence that was accepted without question was that all of the big names in the field needed more compute, more resources, more energy…
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A funny thing is that Egan, through this book at some of its successors, has become a kind of a hero among the techno-utopian crowd. Either, they do not get the irony of Egan's work, or they are truly insane, and deeply deluded.

Although great food for hard sci-fi, the underlying pancomputationalist worldview is clearly absurd, anti-human, and dangerous. Read Egan to find out why these views should *not* be taken serious! That's what this book was written for.

/END

Isn't it ironic that longtermism, with its delusional machine worldview and its unlimited hubris, will very likely accelerate the breakdown of human civilization and increase the probability of total human extinction?

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TL;DR:

is a pseudo-religious cult that stems from a strongly computationalist world view (the world *is* computation) and the movements (transhumanism, extropianism, singuaritarianism, cosmism, the rationality community, effective altruism, and longtermism.

It's popular among engineers, tech entrepreneurs, and tech nerds in general. /2