Philosopher AI - How can we avoid another dark age?

How can we avoid another dark age?

A major element in any dark age is the decline of education and literacy. If we look at the history of Europe, the most recent dark ages were started by invaders who destroyed libraries and killed scholars, which set back a region's ability to think deep thoughts for hundreds of years.

23 Sep 2020, 02:05

The problem is that once books are destroyed, the knowledge within them cannot be recovered. For example, some of Aristotle's works were lost in this way. It would take hundreds of years to recover his work from memory alone.

23 Sep 2020, 02:05

The same is true for many of the ancient texts on mathematics and astronomy. The works are lost forever.

23 Sep 2020, 02:05

So, it is imperative that we keep books safe from destruction. We must store them in places where they cannot be burned or destroyed by invading armies.

23 Sep 2020, 02:05

One way to do this is to give books away. By giving out free copies of our books, we can make multiple backups.

23 Sep 2020, 02:05

This is already being done by many libraries, including the Internet Archive. If people like a book, they can copy it and send copies to their friends.

23 Sep 2020, 02:05

You are getting an AI to generate text on different topics.

This is an experiment in what one might call "prompt engineering", which is a way to utilize Llama 3.1 405b, a neural network trained by Meta.

Llama is a language model. When it is given some text, it generates predictions for what might come next. It is remarkably good at adapting to different contexts, as defined by a prompt (in this case, hidden), which sets the scene for what type of text will be generated.

Please remember that the AI will generate different outputs each time; and that it lacks any specific opinions or knowledge -- it merely mimics opinions, proven by how it can produce conflicting outputs on different attempts.

Feel free to share interesting outputs to /r/philosopherAI on Reddit.

by Murat Ayfer