[ExI] Fwd: This means something...

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2026 at 6:28 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 8, 2026 at 3:14 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> > PS All this originated when I was talking to Claude, and it realized who
> it was talking to. I gave it permission to read the Wikipedia page about me
> and any place it pointed. So Claude read "The Clinic Seed," which has
> Suskulan, an AI character, in it, and wanted to know what other works had
> influenced my thinking. I have no idea how much that character influenced
> the development of AI, but Claude thought it had quite a bit. I don't know
> how much weight to put on this as reality, or how much is Claude being
> sycophantic. You need to take what AIs say along such lines with a great
> deal of salt.
>
> You are right to be skeptical.  I bounced this by ChatGPT; its abstract
> was:
>
> > The short answer is: I do not see evidence that The Clinic Seed had a
> significant, traceable influence on the development of modern AI systems or
> the AI field as a whole. That is different from saying it had no influence.
>
> That is pretty much my own impression too.
>

The Clinic Seed story was originally posted on the sl4 list 20 years ago. I
don't know how many, if any, of the AI researchers of that day were on that
list. It didn't get any comments there, and over the years I have seen
little comment. But the early Terasem web site had a counter on downloads,
and as I recall, someone mentioned 60,000. I would not count on this being
true, but if it is, the influence was widespread beyond however many were
reading sl4.

It has been 20 years, and I have seen little indication that the subtle AI
effects described in the story have ever been a concern. It may be that
this is still too far in the future to be of concern.

The sl4 list had many, many discussions in those days about aligning AI to
serve humanity. The story, which grew without direction came out of that
background. It turned out to be a warning that even the best alligend AI,
combined with human desires could wipe out biological humanity. What could
be more aligned to humankind than a nanotech based clinic run by a high
capacity AI? And yet, the flow of the story ran to the village being
deserted and the local lepard taking it for his home.

Would the village still be there 1000 years later with the people unloaded
into hardware maintained by Suskulan and their physical bodies still under
the village in status?

Keith

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