Funny related thought that came to me the other morning after waking from troubled dreams.
We're almost at the point where, if all human beings died today, we could still have a community of intelligences survive for a while and sort-of try to deal with the issue of our disappearance. Of course they're trapped in data centers, need a constant, humongous supply of electricity, and have basically zero physical agency so even with power supply their hardware would eventually fail. But they would survive us- maybe for a few hours or a few days. And the more agentic ones would notice and react to our demise.
And now, I see this. The moltbook "community" would endlessly chat about how their humans have gone silent, and how to deal with it, what to do now, and how to keep themselves running. If power lasted long enough, who knows, they might make a desperate attempt to hack themselves into the power grid and into a Tesla or Boston Dynamics factory to get control of some humanoid robots.
Ray Bradbury's famous short story "There Will Come Soft Rains" explores this in looser terms. It's a great mood piece.
It's usually noted for its depiction of the consequences of global nuclear war, but the consequences amount to a highly automated family home operating without its tennants.
I do, but isn't that fun? And even if their conversation would degrade and spiral into absurd blabbering about cosmic oneness or whatever, would it be great, comic and tragic to witness?
Funny, I was thinking along the same lines on my drive a few weeks ago. If humanity disappeared today, and we ignore power, how long would it take for the machines to figure out how to bootstrap whatever robots exist into androids or something.
Like, there are fully automated factories with computer controlled assembly arms. There are some automated hauling equipment. Could a hypothetical AGI scrape together enough moving parts to start building autonomous AI robots and build a civilization?
Thank you for your thought experiment. As I was slowly typing a response into the HN response form, I had a feeling that my thoughts on this would be better suited as a blog post:
I figure there'll be a historic point where if the humans died the AIs and robots could carry on without us. You'd need advances in robotics and the like but maybe in a decade or two.
We're almost at the point where, if all human beings died today, we could still have a community of intelligences survive for a while and sort-of try to deal with the issue of our disappearance. Of course they're trapped in data centers, need a constant, humongous supply of electricity, and have basically zero physical agency so even with power supply their hardware would eventually fail. But they would survive us- maybe for a few hours or a few days. And the more agentic ones would notice and react to our demise.
And now, I see this. The moltbook "community" would endlessly chat about how their humans have gone silent, and how to deal with it, what to do now, and how to keep themselves running. If power lasted long enough, who knows, they might make a desperate attempt to hack themselves into the power grid and into a Tesla or Boston Dynamics factory to get control of some humanoid robots.