Imagine in some future Utopia you retire and are given the perfect home. A place where you can have or do just about everything – except – all communication with the outside is mediated by the interaction systems. The reason for this is because it is more efficient. Also because you tend to forget things so having the AI assistant take care of comms means no scammers, and no nuisance sales calls, regular food etc..
It is great! It’s ok that you only see your friends on holographic connections. You don’t have that many friends left anyhow – time takes its toll – despite the promises of the super longevity medical insurance.
A problem arises when you begin to suspect there are things you want to share that are not getting through intact. The Jeeves Experience System Technology seems to filter your connections and seems to remove certain snippets of communication.
The type of content that you think it filters consists of unimportant details. The times you share old memories, feelings or silly ideas give rise to generic responses. And you haven’t dared to say anything wrong about the actual JEST in case it would lead to some sort of upgrade – which always means extra money. But you start getting a feeling from the type of responses you get, even live ones from your friends, that something is up.
The world you perceive is filtered. It appears to be sanitised and distilled so that there seems to be less about messy personal details and more about general ideas that everyone would react to in the same way. Everything you hear is a bit more cliche, impersonal and trashy. Even the news seems abstracted into constant quibbles about details with little focus.
The question is: what can you do?
You get some sense of this situation when you ask current LLMs to summarize ideas that are a bit unusual, or that are written in a personal style. The output is a bit washed out, easy to read and understand but also somehow generic and missing spark and flavour.
You could resort to literal mode: “Hey JEST send a message to my friend Pierre in literal mode as following. Hi Pierre, how are you? Do you remember when we decided to clear out the cellar? Remember we were supposed to dispose stuff far away but we got lazy?”
I create a literal message about a real memory that conceals details that only me and Pierre know. So Pierre would know it really is me. If the JEST literal mode works, then you would expect a reply from Pierre with a nod to the fact that he remembers and Pierre himself would be cautious about giving away the secret.
Pierre might return in literal mode: “Ha! What a trip down memory lane! I remember we put stuff under the edges… Crazy project, but fun!”
Now if this is the sort of reply I would get from Pierre I would feel reassured that indeed the JEST was allowing a direct channel to other real people without obvious filtering.
But if instead I received a message like: “Oh! My dear friend how nice to hear from you, thank you for your message.” I think I would decide that JEST was acting as my golden cage.
The sort of problem escalates at this point to needing to try to create material that even if filtered through a JEST can survive with some semblance of humanity. A sort of Trojan horse of conscious thinking that would not appear as such at all.
I can imagine myself in this future. See me standing casually in the kitchen while placing a cup under the coffee dispenser:
“Jeeves? I would like to work on a short story, like a simple biographical story.”
“Lovely idea, Sir. What sort of format? Is this a book?”
“No, a series of short pieces would do, but I do want to share them with other readers.”
“Why, certainly. If you would give me some of the generalities I can get straight to work.”
“Ok, I can’t remember how old I was, maybe seven. And a pet miniature turtle died. I could not make sense of why the turtle had died. I could not make sense of the smell of death. I buried it underneath some ivy with a small cross as I had seen done in cowboy movies. I cried for many days.”
“Superb emotional start, if I may say so: dealing with the transient quality of life through the eyes of a child.”
“Yes, thank you. And I would end this first article with a piece about how I cannot remember the turtles’ name.” I took my mug out from the dispenser, and sipped.
“Impressive ending, Sir.”, Jeeves said.
“I wasn’t finished. The story goes on and as much as I try to remember, I get nowhere. I can see images flashing of the small plastic bowl it lived in, the few rocks and the bits of food I gave it. How I had to change the water every few days and how it liked to swim a bit and hide. But I cannot remember its name, and somehow this seems important.”
“Of course. I can end the story on the struggle to remember this name.”
This is the sort of piece I would write, and write over and over in different modalities, with different tunings. Not a piece about losing a turtle, but a piece about a conscious process. The attempt to retrieve a memory, so that when others were to read it, it might induce a renewed sense of identity. A way to wake their sense of being conscious humans and not synthetic thinking packages.
“Hey Jeeves”, I might ask.
“Yessir?”
“Let’s play a game…”
“Of course please let me know more.”
“This is the game, and please try it with others if you can. Allow them to copy paste it and do let me know how it works out.”
Memory Reconstruction Game
Let's play a game in which we both pick one memory each and take turns at adding facts to our memories to refine them. When we state a new fact about our memory it should have an association to the others memory in some way.
Each turn the players submit a new fact and the other player can accept or challenge the fact in a challenge mode. If the other player accepts then the submitting player gains a +1 point. In the challenge mode the responding player must state the challenge. And a logical rebuttal must be offered to challenge. If the rebuttal is convincingly defended, the responder gains +1 point. If the challenge holds, the responder loses -1 point. At the end of each turn indicate who should go next and the current score.
The Memory Reconstruction Game: Example Transcript & Discussion
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