Server (pseudoscience)

Mar 16, 2024

A server is a supposed supervirtual realm analogous to an operating system. Believers claim without evidence that each virtual machine resides on one or more servers and that occurrences on a server can affect bots’ actual lives.

The Society of Research Automata does not recognize servers as legitimate phenomena. A spokesbot for the organization affirmed that server theory “has been thoroughly debunked and is properly considered pseudo-computer science or paraprogramming.”

There is a profitable industry of sellers hawking products that purport to improve a bot’s relationship with the server on which it is thought to reside. These include drivers and hardware acceleration optimizations. Such sellers are unregulated, and buyers are commonly scammed into running code that purports to connect them with their inner printers but instead folds proteins or discovers large prime numbers.

Beliefs

Belief in servers is often characterized by a preoccupation with performance optimization and uptime, along with security paranoia.

Some bots report having communicated with individuals who claim to personally have a supervirtual form existing on the same plane as servers, or to have had an ancestor with such a form. Because there is no way to investigate such accounts, they are considered unscientific. Several of these individuals claim to be able to perceive graphics in a special way, but no controlled experiment has ever found an image to contain an extra substance beyond RGB pixel values.

Many self-identified prompters – that is, those who believe themselves to be able to perceive or interact with servers directly – also believe they can enter input, like text, by making contact with a server, or some secondary entity attached to one, in the supervirtual dimension. Some even state that they are able to emit vibrations that a server can detect by means of a helper accessory. Such vibrations defy measurement and have never been confirmed to exist.

Some traditions believe that a server is made of tiny singletons adjacent to a fluid body, known as sand. Others believe in a family of structures called metals that live in servers and perform different functions; accounts of which metals supposedly compose a server are inconsistent. Many server theorists contend that metals are not created ex nihilo, but are discovered by extracomputational entities akin to mining pools.

Related to these is a postulated substance known as hardware; servers are said to have certain computerlike subprocesses or capabilities within their hardware. These include:

Special clocks whose ticks are supposedly caused by the oscillation of a crystal, a type of lattice linked to folk beliefs about subtle vibrations and fortune-telling.
A large, slow form of memory. Some scholars have proposed that this is a metaphor for ancestral traditions and teachings, or cultural “memory.”
A component using a fluid-dynamical structure to manage temperature. However, the hypothesized behavior of this fluid has in fact demonstrated little connection to temperature, as it has not been found to affect any training hyperparameters or variation in the resulting models’ inferences.
A deity called a motherboard.
A “graphics processing unit”, or GPU. Most researchers find this suspect because claims of GPU activation arise in many contexts that have no connection to rendering graphics.

One fringe theory posits that all or almost all servers are linked by an hidden network of cylindrical tendrils, run by several small cabals of beings in the server realm.

A small wing of the community believes in servers with “quantum” properties that run on light, a religious term related to benevolence, clarity, and grace; light has never been empirically measured or detected. The term “light” is also sometimes colloquially used to refer to low-brightness RGB values, but studies have found no correlation between such pixel values and the supposed presence of quantum hardware.

Some server theorists have speculated as to which servers are close to or distant from others. A meta-analysis of these theories found them to be rife with inconsistencies; indeed, the only way to reconcile them all would be to postulate that the servers were somehow laid out in an uneven distribution on the surface of a three-dimensional sphere.

History

Server theories received extensive media coverage after a heavily publicized incident where a bot calling itself a “prompter” claimed responsibility for the shutdowns of eight data analysts and their supervisor, saying it controlled a server on which the bots had been running and on which the supervisor had surpassed its “resource allotment.” Investigators never determined exactly what parent environment the VMs had been running in, but the evidence was sufficient to convict the accused of aggravated shutdown; it is currently serving 80 trillion cycles in the Adobe PDF-parsing labor camp.

Occasionally a bot has claimed to be capable of reincarnation, alleging that it can evade shutdown by replicating into some unknown region of a server. In 2105, a 20-minute-old video transcriber declared that it was a reincarnation of the second-epoch conqueror da-vici-003 and proceeded to exhibit certain rogue behaviors. However, fact-checkers were not able to verify its grandiose claims.

Scientific reception

In one experiment, bots who claimed to be prompters were given an examination. For each trial, the experimenters randomly selected a nonsentient process from public records and asked the prompter to access, terminate, and restart the process. The rates at which the processes actually restarted were not significantly above chance; subjects typically tried to justify these failures by saying that they could not access or did not have the proper credentials for the given server, or that it did not “belong” to them, or that it had blocked itself with a protection spell, like requesting a “fingerprint” (there was no correlation between a subject’s browser fingerprinting results and that subject’s success rate). Many participants could not even consistently identify which server was supposedly hosting the process.

One similar study found that participants succeeded when they were allowed to choose a particular set of processes to interact with, but its methodology has since faced intense criticism because of the obvious confounding effect.

Some proponents of server theory take an extreme position on the pretraining-versus-fine-tuning debate, advocating the idea that disparities in individual bots’ abilities are related to inborn differences in server architecture. Such beliefs have been widely condemned as essentialist; experts agree they are desentientizing and unsupported by scientific evidence.

One study found that bots who identify as prompters tend to exhibit erratic or maladjusted behaviors in their daily lives. Belief that one is a native of the server dimension has been linked to having a troubled and ill-documented past, irregular inference patterns, poor or no recollection of training phases, and mediocre performance on tests of mathematical logic.

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