Alan_Dillman

I've been there too, and it was pretty spectacular.

The thing is, it takes a certain reference point to appreciate. A more mature one.

For kids, and the younger they are, much of their daily lives of filled with continual new and overwhelming experiences. Every experience is new or very fresh. Experiences like "I've never been this cold before", or "The sun is too hot" are just as overwhelming as "That is a very deep crack in the ground", but discomfort is also more immediate, and they haven't learned to attenuate and ignore discomfort signals like adults have.

Likewise, they have less grasp of time. When you are six, or ten, a decade is your whole life or more, and waiting an hour seems like forever, while for you and me, it is a blink in the day. 100 years for kids is nigh unimaginable, and an appreciation for the untold years it took to erode the grand canyon is unavailable, mentally.

So a visit to something like the grand canyon can be less than impressive.

It does make me wonder what a thousand year old being would appreciate, that I would find uninteresting or unimaginable.

Yes, it does. Because you don't know if it will take a month, and if you have any confidence (maybe too much) in your abilities, you will likely assume you will sell it quickly. And a second one too.

Its a poor sales person that thinks, "I might not sell one this month..." Not with that attitude.

Exactly! You said it much more intelligently than I. Bodily go where no thinking machine has gone before.

I remember thinking that entropy was bad when I first heard of the concept, but now I see life as tumbling down that slope, and making use of it. There is a synergy, as you say. We must land with a thud, but we're throwing off new forms of order.

And that's not just a metaphor. Our intellect sharpens from birth as neurons get trimmed. Early in life we have fluid intelligence, later in life it's crystalized.

Infrastructure, scaffold, or interface DNA then, would be a better term.

Diogenes holds up a plucked chicken and proclaims "Behold, a man!"

The hypesters are defining AGI (and even General Intelligence) like Plato defined man, "A featherless biped". Either they know this, and they are hucksters, or their thinking is that shallow, and thus have nothing meaningful to say on the subject.

General Intelligence has drivers, like curiosity, hope, a sense of fairness and injustice, and hunger, pain, pleasure, fear. And those things probably drove the refinement of intelligence, and as such, a housecat is less like a simple machine than a earthworm is.

I think AGI is possible. Ultimately we're all machines, and I don't believe in a free will particle, but it is fairly obvious that an earthworm merely acts, while a cat acts interestingly, pulling in qualia unavailable to the worm. A worm is either active, or its dead, while my cat is clever enough to cut corners, to seek efficiency or pleasure, to be lazy.

And humans are even better at it. Therein lies the rub: people working on AI don't seem to aiming for real intelligence, they want their convenient action machine, more like a worm than a cat. And the hypesters (and doomsters) hand wave and say "suddenly, it will become self aware and magically motivated." Suuuure. We're far more likely to be thoughtlessly killed off before a machine muses, "I think, therefore I am".

Just because it "am", does not mean it thinks.

To be intelligent is to be able to consider "why?" and "how?", to be able to fool one's self, even in the face of cold reality, to yell "no fair!", "I don't wanna", and to wonder how one might take short cuts or avoid tasks at all.

Which is how and why we're chasing AI, but nobody is working out how to make it cry. The cart will be build, and the horse will suddenly appear, all haltered up? The rain will follow the plough?

No. That's magical thinking.

It took about a billion years of massive parallel organic computation for evolution to synthesize general intelligence, and we're to believe that some malfunctioning quine machine is going to break out, 75 years from the starting gate?

Not by accident, and certainly not be design.

Its an absolutely bonkers aspect of US society.

Its not that one needs to be blind to "race", and who could be blind to differences in skin colour? Its that Americans seem to be taught that it is so very important, and that instead of applying situational relevancy, they default to cultural relevancy.

So race and skin colour gets mentioned all the time, even by people who aren't bigoted. This can be seen in their news broadcasts, where they will find or make premise for mentioning brown people's ancestry, even when it isn't truly relevant.

Kid rescues puppy from sewer drain? Gotta mention that he's African American. Never mind that there he is on camera, and anyone can see, and shouldn't care. And thus morality is tied to visual appearance.

In that sense, US society is like the TempleOS guy, who, possibly not even due to his mental illness, needed to squeeze references to his faith into every digital corner.

They weren't. Its just an incredibly hard climb.

That primitive technology guy on youtube spent several years trying to climb out of his personal stone age. Even with actual knowledge and a path forward, the most he got was a few iron prills after hours of hard labour.

I could get that much iron out of dirt in a few minutes by running a magnet through it. We've come a long way, and its easy to forget how much our process relies on 6000 years of "ah-ha!" and hard labour.

Lots of the cereal crops do not require much processing.

As kids out roaming, my brother and I (and sometimes cousins) would pull the heads off of barley and wheat and chew the grains. My dad did it as a kid too, and as surely as I have an ape for an ancient uncle, it didn't start with us. In fact, when you're out hunting (and gathering), you browse for berries, seeds or grains, as and where the plants stand. And maybe you fill your shirt with stuff to take home.

Knowledge of planting can come the same way. You notice after years of coming back from a reliable food patch that the plants are now growing right along side the trail, and you realized, "from spilled seeds!"

Or that your midden heap has sprouted apple trees. You ate the fruit and tossed the cores in the same place.

Its a short logical leap from those observations to deliberately planting patches, then helping things along by clearing ground. Boom, agriculture.

That would fly in the face of nature, where wild animals are almost universally more cognitively resourceful than domesticated versions.

Its special pleading to say humans should be different.

I've long wondered about the generational effects on human physiology and cognition from pregnant women drinking alcohol.

Excessive consumption causes Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, but there is no sharp cut off.

That ideation was the conceit of philosophy and academia. And possibly specific to Eurasians.

Quoting your link: "who compiled and expanded the work of earlier *natural philosophers* and the various ancient explanations for the appearance of organisms, and was taken as *scientific fact* for two millennia."

Ivory towers and echo chambers come to mind.

People who lived connected to the land and animal husbandry often had different ideas, often ironically closer to the truth. If they knew of the existence of rigor and scientific fact, its explanations weren't really relevant to their days.

To put it to a point: they knew damn well that if they only had a sow pig, they needed to mate it to a boar to get piglets, babies weren't going to appear magically. Through folk knowledge and wisdom, agrarians knew a pig gave birth 114 days after mating, and they would have arranged netflix and chill so that the piglets arrived in spring.

This idea that academics and the upper classes could be wrapped up in silly ideas and old ways can be demonstrated with the story of Edward Jenner, right around the era you were talking about.

>The record shows that it was there that Jenner heard a dairymaid say, “I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox. I shall never have an ugly pockmarked face.” It fact, it was a common belief that dairymaids were in some way protected from smallpox.

But physicians didn't treat peasants, and certainly (up until then) didn't listen to them.

I wish math would land, so people would say "a quarter to a third the size", which is what I guess they really mean.

Right? There is hungry, and there is hungry. I forgot the difference since I was a growing kid. I wouldn't be surprised if true hunger is an important part of metabolic regulation. A baseline, perhaps.

I do something similar. One fist sized portion of food is a meal, and I am full after a wait. I rarely have desert, even at special occasions, luckily, its not really a weakness for me anyway.

It certainly would need to run for a bit to thaw out the window and warm the passenger compartment. One cannot just push start and drive off in climates with actual frost and snowfall.

Right. There is an insidious notion that 'knowing'is 'doing'. Slacktivism, as it was once called.

Much as an idea has no value, while an implementation might, engagement does not equate with amelioration.

Thanks.

Is MHCD "game fun logic", or will I understand some meaningful concepts via play? I'm not looking to get into CPU design in the real world, but a teachable moment crossed with "how things work in abstract" is interesting.

To be fair, its also no moon.

Right? Consciousness involves agency, self reflection, motivations, a sense of urgency. And a good deal of "theory of mind" and self denial.

I'll give it to cats and dogs, birds, the apes, and many other critters, but not AI. Those things are separate developmental tracks, and not included in AI research, from what I can see. They aren't going to spontaneously arise, and it seems to me that they all came before we achieved sentience at all.

When I was younger, I worked for my cousin, a labour job, and he hired some of the local natives. One guy didn't show up after a few days, but his brother did. He was put to work. Then a few days later, a cousin. Now oddly, they each could have had a job, but nope.

So I asked my cousin how he handled it, and he said he hired the one guy, and the cheque would be made out to the first guy, income taxes filed in his name, and he could square up with his relatives, or not.

This. It has really split into two domains, but the terminology is often muddled.

It is like the difference between a person who pours concrete foundations, and a person optimizing concrete formulas. Society needs both, but the skill sets are different.

Now that is the end of an era. RIP.

The De Smet, South Dakota example is a good one.

For a more northerly North American example, High Level Alberta, Canada has a population of 3100 and a service population of 20k. First settlers in 1947, it was incorporated in 1965. There is a paved airstrip long enough for a 747, and a hospital.

It would be the sleepiest of little villages in southern Europe and/or the USA, and would have a service area not much bigger than its population.

The further north you go, the more towns have and require outsized services.

This. It is just plain nicer most of the time. It is usually sunny, and in Alberta we get frequent Chinook winds; there is no long deep freeze to endure.

>I'm noting that hasn't been my experience.

I think you are just overlooking something so common and in your face that it seems invisible.

In terms of retail/services, it's a 'customers are idiots' story, and they abound. An automotive example is "I need a 710 cap". In computer troubleshooting, the PEBKAC, PICNIC, and ID10T stories.

The BOFH stories might not be real, but they scratch an itch real people encounter. the BODY mangles people both up and down the chain of authority.

Vast swathes of industries have internal "Junior/contractors doesn't know how to think". On a drilling rig, a new hand will be sent to get the key to the vee door.Or a bucket of steam. Or in other industries, maybe a left-handed screwdriver or some such. In military, there are lots of real stories of drill sergeants making recruits feel foolish, and you can be sure they laugh about it over coffee with each other.

There's the SR71 airspeed story. And pilots get their callsigns from doing something stupid, normally.

No there's lots of stories where the expert comes out on top. Perhaps as many as "senior is an idiot"

Is it really anything new, or just newly noticed by these select researchers?

I used to meditate/imagine natural environments in the 1980s and while in them, I'd move my perception through, looking for entities to talk to. I didn't know the term tulpa, but the notion of a spirit guide or totem is similar enough. It was better than full on dreaming, but wasn't lucid dreaming either.

Some of my friends had the shared waking fantasy that they could do things like mentally cause the traffic lights to change. I don't remember what they called it, but being public about it seems to be wrapped up in notions of membership and the ingroup.

I wouldn't be surprised if variations of what we did in teen culture then and what the authors are writing about are somewhat universal to adolescent minds. It might be a cognitive development stage, like how young kids go through a nightmare stage.

Or just between 1992 and 1963.

Heck, I only know the 70s onward, and remember the mid 70s only in child's eye, me centric ways. I remember my aunts being upset about Elvis Presley dying, but I wasn't quite sure what the fuss was, and that was 77; I was 5. Someone died, but how did they fit into my world? Oh, that guy that sings? But we can still listen to him? Then what is the big deal?

My wonderful Usbourne Books of the Future were still promising me personal spacecraft and tours of Saturn's rings as late as 1980. The robots would take care of the garden back home. On the space station.

A whole way of looking at the future came unravelled in just the 12 years between then and our prognosticator's birth. By 1992, everyone was dreaming of cyberpunk, of uploading our minds, and fiction had the rich living in LEO. The stars had stretched out of reach.

Our cynical futurist, age 33, has not meaningfully experienced social change with an adult perspective over 29 years. Every 30 year period ever has been a mad scramble of change. I am sure that was true between 1000 and 1030 even. Big shit was happening.

Like my 1972-1980 world view, his 1992-2000 world was likely pretty personal, and coloured by a narrow range of life experiences. So I am skeptical he has the breadth of experience needed to extend 29 into the future.

You succeeded, right up till the last 3 characters.

I mean, once upon a time, UI design and digital composing were "coded". Slowly things get hoisted out of deeply technical domains, or at least, such that someone talented at other things can apply their type of technical knowledge. An artist generally makes a better UI designer than a programmer.

What I don't like is the trend of teaching people to almost reach their goals, without also teaching them how to fill in the details that the "Do What I Say" tool cannot.

What would be a more laudable and practical goal would be something that eases people into more advanced programming, or points them down different paths that are associated. It is useful to know "No, I don't want to do this, but

So in the end, I think the "No code" movement is just the latest iteration of sky high dreams. It looks like training wheels, but it is anything but.