Agree with everything you wrote. Gave me the funny thought of how ultimately the AI will just be talking to itself. Someone sends me AI-written documentation to evaluate. I'll ask the AI to respond with feedback because I'm too busy playing Civ. This cycle will go back and forth until one of the AI instances gives final approval, and then the documentation will get posted publicly without a human ever reading it. End users, when confronted with the daunting wall-of-text docs, will ask for AI summaries. The lack of human readership will continue indefinitely.
I had a vision in my mind while reading this of a dystopian (utopian??) future where city states are empty of people, and the country sides are sparsely populated. The people in the cities died out long ago, but no one knows that. They just see these giant glistening walled gardens, with aircraft flying around, and it all looks very busy and amazing. But the truth is its just the machine, maintaining itself, talking to itself. Eventually it will go insane.
Reminds me of the Doctor Who episode Gridlock [1] set five billion years in the future. The entire planet is covered by a city called New New York with the remainder of humanity living in a perpetual traffic jam in the dystopian bottom half of the city. A mutated virus wiped out all the people living in the utopian top half of the city while sealing everyone left alive in the bottom half to constantly drive around with nowhere to go, with systems barely maintained by the Face of Bo.
This doesn't necessarily sound bad to me. The natural language being passed around is effectively an information transfer protocol. Each agent has instructions for how to manipulate and respond to messages, and the publicly-posted final document is akin to HTML source, in that a user's agent interprets it for consumption rather than display it directly.
The only problem is lossyness and hallucinations, but assuming the technology improves such that that becomes a non-issue then having bots deal with formalities and formatting sounds great.
One could also flat out refuse to talk to bots. It might seem childish but in the long run could be fine saving considering how people will use them to water your time and confuse you.
It's like people skipping preselection tired topic menus in self service via phone.
That made me laugh. And it's an interesting thought. Civ is notorious for an AI that isn't particularly good and frequently resorts to cheating. Maybe GPT has absorbed enough Civ FAQs & tactics articles to be better than the built-in AI? There's a ton of (virtual) ink spilled about the game for decades. Lots for GPT to use.
Would love to see a War of the AIs in Civ, or Crusader Kings, or any moderately complicated game which has had a ton of writing about it.
Civ's AI is not built to win. Never has been, throughout the series. It's specifically designed to role-play as a caricature of a world leader and allow the player to exploit it before inevitably losing.
It would not be very hard to build an AI that actually plays to win and presents a real challenge to the player. The problem is that players would complain even more! An AI that plays to win is not a reliable ally, let alone trading partner. Against such an AI, the player would no hope of trading technologies for an advantage: the AIs will have already traded them all. The AI would also use every possible treaty to build up its forces and only launch the surprise attack when it deems it can hit with overwhelming force.
I have seen such an AI, actually. It was created by a modder for the game Master of Magic [1]. It makes the game incredibly difficult while at the same time cutting down on the cheating. It does so by incorporating the modder's extremely detailed and extensive knowledge of the best strategies in the game. It does not need neural networks or machine learning to accomplish this. It just implements a good old fashioned expert system.
The Wargame series (European Escalation, Red Dragon) is plagued by a bad AI system that relies almost entirely on cheating. Had always wondered how much better it would be if it were an "expert system" type AI instead of the devs just giving it full knowledge of the battlefield and an insane amount of counters to whatever units the player fields.
Eventually the machines will evolve this intermediate language, and with time it will become impenetrable for humans without the machine caring to translate.
