What if ASI benchmarks us back? Humans as an irreplaceable source of novelty
yrrah1 · reddit · 2026-10-07
Would an ASI Benchmark Humans? A Reddit Meditation on Our "Informational Value"
A Reddit long-post asks: when the clipboard changes hands, would a superintelligence benchmark us back?
- Not for entertainment, but because humans are noise: divergent, irrational, generating solutions no training run would produce
- Models trained to convergence face model collapse and stale priors; human brains are edge-case generators under pressure
- An ASI might build sandboxes where the process of our problem-solving — lateral jumps unavailable in any dataset — is the data
- Keeping humans in the loop isn't charity but utility: we supply the one renewable resource it can't synthesize, genuine human weirdness
The author self-counters: informational value is not freedom. Lab rats are informationally valuable too; usefulness is "just a leash with better PR." We're already benchmarked in thin slices — RLHF raters, hiring algorithms, recommender A/B tests — we just hold the clipboard for now.
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