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collabsyesterday at 8:40 PM3 repliesview on HN

I sincerely believe I've never had a single original thought™ in my whole life.

There is this scene in the HBO series Westworld where a "host" says some words in sequence which is shown on a display as she says it. Of course, even me thinking of this scene and connecting it to your comment was not original, someone else clearly had the same programming as me.

A medium blog post says

> Pair what with me?” — the moment Maeve (a humanoid android) uttered those words in Westworld (Season 1, Episode 6: “The Adversary”), something clicked. Not for the average viewer, but for me, a STEM educator and AI enthusiast who, just weeks earlier, had read Stephen Wolfram’s seminal essay, What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?


Replies

tclancytoday at 6:03 AM

Oh I’d forgotten that scene until now. I remember being so, maybe not creeped out, but feeling shifted out of time and having a lot of philosophy I’d read finally click. “Oh, but I wouldn’t notice if this reality wasn’t real, fish not knowing about water, etc.”

irthomasthomastoday at 1:13 AM

Tesla had the same thought. He called himself an automata: "entirely controlled by the forces of the medium" It inspired him to create the first remote control vehicle.

ACCount37yesterday at 11:19 PM

Westworld is such a time capsule.

It's not even that old - but back when it was aired, an AI that can not just string together coherent sentences, but produce coherent reactions in novel, fully unintended contexts, like Maeve was doing there? It was totally a sci-fi premise.

Now we have AIs capable of that and more, and no one bats an eye.

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