{"id":2605,"date":"2025-12-25T14:47:30","date_gmt":"2025-12-25T14:47:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/?p=2605"},"modified":"2026-01-02T16:21:47","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T16:21:47","slug":"writing-challenge-2025-28-a-i-analogue-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/25\/writing-challenge-2025-28-a-i-analogue-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing Challenge 2025 \u2013 28 &#8211; A.I. (Analogue Intelligence)"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\r\n<i>This was written December 25th, 2025<\/i>\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2>A.I. (Analogue Intelligence)<\/h2>\r\n<p>\r\n&#8220;Hey, could you pass the salad please?&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Sure, here you go. By the way, did you hear about the big news? Was completely wild and\r\nunexpected!&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;News? You referring to the new AI update?&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Oh, so you really haven&#8217;t heard a thing? I guess you could say it&#8217;s related. But nope,\r\nit was a completely unexpected discovery. There was a whistleblower at one of those\r\n&#8216;AI Data Centers&#8217; and they leaked some pictures. It was wild!&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Wait&#8230;what exactly happened? Those should just be a bunch of rooms with servers and\r\nwhatnot. What would be so wild about it?&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Welp, seems like this whole investment in computer parts and electricity was mostly just\r\na front. Look at it yourself!&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Holy shit, I think I&#8217;m going to be sick! Are those&#8230;brains?&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Yup, just a bunch of brains in jars, all connected to some machines.&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;You sure this isn&#8217;t just AI generated? At this point, it could easily be.&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Well, that&#8217;s the thing, people aren&#8217;t quite sure. There&#8217;s a big camp that claims it&#8217;s\r\na hoax, that nothing like that could happen. Yet, there&#8217;s another big camp that claims\r\nit only makes sense. With how fast all that progress was, why not? This could explain\r\nwhy it&#8217;s so good and seemed to come out of no-where.&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Well&#8230;I guess the &#8216;hallucinations&#8217; could be explained like that. When you visualize\r\nthings in your mind, you do get easily distracted, and context isn&#8217;t quite permanent. But\r\nstill, how could they even get the permission to start such inhumane trials&#8230;or even\r\ncover it up?&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Well, the governments are allegedly all behind it, in an escalating war.&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Ok&#8230;so&#8230;letting go of the cover up for a second&#8230;how would they even manage to do\r\nthat? Come on, if they had such high-tech brain interfaces, why wouldn&#8217;t they just make\r\nthem available to the public? That&#8217;s revolutionary technology that could sell for billions!&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Sure, but look at it, it looks to still be at an extremely invasive stage. Do you really\r\nthink that anyone in their right mind would want to be subjected to this?&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Ok, fair enough. Still, this is barbarian!&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Hey, hey, you don&#8217;t have to tell me twice. I ain&#8217;t defending this! I also think it&#8217;s\r\nawful. Just passing along the news.&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Sorry, sorry, was getting carried away there. My bad.&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;No worries.&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;&#8230;So&#8230;if that&#8217;s the case, why is the technology seemingly improving and evolving?&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;People have two theories on this, probably working in conjunction. First, look at the\r\nbrain. These are all still fairly young. It&#8217;s supposed that those were infant brains,\r\nstill fairly clean of any sort of memories or learning. They&#8217;ve simply been hooking them\r\nup and training them directly. As the brain grows and matures, it&#8217;s also learning and\r\nimproving simultaneously. And obviously, it doesn&#8217;t actually need any normal biases you\r\nwould get from normal experiences.&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Ok, sure, it&#8217;s just learning to interpret all those signals on the fly and learn from that.\r\nThey&#8217;re just learning, like normal. Then, what&#8217;s the other factor?&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Well, one would think that they&#8217;re just improving the interface itself, right? But\r\napparently, there doesn&#8217;t seem to be multiple generations of the device. What&#8217;s actually\r\nhappening is that all those brains have been connected together, and they&#8217;ve found ways to be more\r\nand more efficient with the parallelization and concurrency. In sum, those brains are\r\nall working together and forming a new network that&#8217;s like a &#8216;mega-brain&#8217;, where the whole\r\nis greater than the sum of its parts.&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Ah, right&#8230;wait&#8230;does that mean that they&#8217;re in a race to harvest more and more brains\r\nfor this monstrosity? I&#8217;m guessing that there are also diminishing returns?&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Yup, that&#8217;s what&#8217;s being alleged. Apparently, the fall-off is thought to be logarithmic,\r\nwhich <i>roughly<\/i> means you need to double the number of brains each time to get similar\r\ngains. To supply this exponential demand, there&#8217;s apparently a &#8216;baby farm&#8217;. And I doubt I\r\nneed to explain this, you probably get the picture.&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Why&#8230;why not some animal brain instead?&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Apparently, it&#8217;s because human brains are better equipped to compute the sort of things\r\nhumans are interested in.&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Great, so now we have a horrifying farm of human brains, powered by a baby farm, which\r\nmostly pumps out random soulless meme-fiable content for the masses to mindlessly consume?&#8221;<br \/>\r\n&#8220;Yup, pretty much, that&#8217;s progress for you!&#8221;\r\n<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This was written December 25th, 2025 A.I. (Analogue Intelligence) &#8220;Hey, could you pass the salad please?&#8221; &#8220;Sure, here you go. By the way, did you hear about the big news? Was completely wild and unexpected!&#8221; &#8220;News? You referring to the new AI update?&#8221; &#8220;Oh, so you really haven&#8217;t heard a thing? I guess you could &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/25\/writing-challenge-2025-28-a-i-analogue-intelligence\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Writing Challenge 2025 \u2013 28 &#8211; A.I. (Analogue Intelligence)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2605"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2670,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2605\/revisions\/2670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shawnmeanders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}