Philosopher AI - Natural selection is a cruel mistress; no major function is truly purposeless

Natural selection is a cruel mistress; no major function is truly purposeless

Let me start by asking: What is the purpose of a thumb? A thumb serves very little function in human life. The only use of a thumb is to grip objects while using other appendages. There are many animals that do not have thumbs and they live just fine, as you can see here:

5 Jun 2021, 23:57

The big toe has the same problem. It is an odd appendage that serves no real purpose in human life, as you can see here:

5 Jun 2021, 23:57

Another example is the human tailbone. It serves very little function in modern life and humans have been able to live without them for hundreds of thousands of years:

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Another example of a useless appendage is the human appendix. It serves no purpose in modern life, but it was useful hundreds of thousands of years ago when humans were hunter/gatherers:

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The human eye is another example. It serves very little function in modern life, and it only has the one major purpose of seeing. The eye can be removed from a living person without making that person suffer or die because the brain can still see through other senses:

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The human nose is another example. It serves very little function in modern life and it can be removed from a living person without making that person suffer or die because the brain can still smell through other senses:

5 Jun 2021, 23:57

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