Philosopher AI - The purpose of life is to protect the legacy of our past.

The purpose of life is to protect the legacy of our past.

First of all, we need to ask the question: what is a legacy? A legacy is something that remains over time. That leaves us with two possible approaches: 1 – We preserve something and make it remain unchanged over time (e.g. mummify someone) 2 – We leave a marker or mark behind for others to see in the future.

4 Jun 2021, 21:42

Now, let's look at the first approach. With this kind of legacy we preserve something in exactly the same form as it exists today. This means that if we have a person or animal preserved now for future generations, they would be just as dead and gone from reality when people see them 100 years from now.

4 Jun 2021, 21:42

What about the second approach? This is a little more tricky, but still doable. In this solution we leave something behind for others to see in the future. However, it must be done with style and not just some random mark that will eventually fade away.

4 Jun 2021, 21:42

The latter is more interesting. We leave a mark that outlasts us, something that can be seen as eternal by future generations.

4 Jun 2021, 21:42

The first thing that comes to mind is writing a book. Books have been around for thousands of years, and will most likely be used in the future as well. There are already plans on storing books written today in special vaults underground so people can read them even if something happens above ground.

4 Jun 2021, 21:42

However, books have a problem. They can be easily destroyed by fire or water damage. To preserve them for eternity we would need to find an indestructible material and then write the book on that.

4 Jun 2021, 21:42

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