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> What if people are the real “Artificial” intelligence?

Yes, or rather: what people consider "intelligence" is becoming more and more artificial. I really believe that any sort of "singularity" involved with "AI" will be more about humans lowering themselves to the level of machines than machines raising themselves to the level of humans.

Obviously there are material goods that come from technology and I do believe that part of the human condition is a symbiotic relationship with our signs/symbols, languages, systems, and machines. In a very real sense, we always have and always will live in a singularity. However, it feels like we keep forgetting that. And keep falling deeper and deeper into these weird religious crazes that some new technology is going to fundamentally transform what it means to be human purely for the better. I'm sure people will disagree with me here, but I don't see that at all. Without denying material benefits, I think people thousands of years ago did as well or better wrestling with and answering the important questions.

If you want to see what mass AI generated content looks like, look at YouTube. Yeah, it's mostly being made by actual humans. But just barely. It's one big dance being performed for an algorithm. Especially children's videos. It's not about nurturing and developing the human soul but about a machine-like desire to optimize engagement, feeding back into the machine itself. And that machine feeds back into the stock market machine. Same with SEO. Same with the internet. Having more 100% AI generated content will just be another layer of the same.

Of course, I'm not fundamentally against any of that stuff. Personally, I would choose to keep them all but in moderation and with more introspection. Instead of saying that access to the Internet is a human right, I think freedom to live without layer after layer of the Internet imposing itself into your life is what should be held up as an ideal. But we seem to be going in the opposite direction. This is yet another new layer is selling itself as the solution to all our problems in the previous layer.

I will never accept that AI deserves anything like human rights by virtue of intelligence any more than I would accept that someone retarded doesn't deserve them. But I do see the risk for it to further dehumanize existing human rights. When half our coworkers are empty AI generated husks that disappear like a fart in the wind at the end of the work day, how will that affect how we treat the remaining human ones?

The thing that scares me most is that ethicists who talk about the deep questions seem to be more fascinated by above situation from the machine side than the human side (perhaps humans who are on the docket to be replaced by a machine are only barely human anyway /s). And the ethicists who claim to be people-focused seem to be mainly fixated on making sure that white people suffer as much as United States protected classes and that no one violates copyright law.

It seems like we're ready for another industrialization where everyone is working off an implicit assumption the ends of this process are going to justify the means and it won't be til we discover that wealthy rent seekers have been greasing the wheels of the machine with thousands of children that we realize maybe we should take a step back.

In summary, I think AI is a similar type of risk to industrialization. But the thing I worry about is that the way it is being pitched now -- like a religion or new consciousness -- is going to create and exacerbate problems with inequality and exploitation in a way that will make us feel foolish later.

[Sorry, turned into kind of a rant. Apologies if a little off-color or off-topic, but I figure I may as well post]

> It's always, "If someone else sees nipples, it will harm them."

... I find it more compelling to put it this way: "If we make [something currently seen as sexual] normal in public, it will harm society".

There isn't anything more magically sexual about the nipple than there was about the thigh. It's an arbitrary line in the sand. Culture/advertising has exposed the fact it's arbitrary by pushing up against it, but maybe it's just as sensible to argue that the line should move back towards being more modest than being less so.

There is a separate discussion about why women's norms are more restrictive than men's, but I think things have gotten more libertine across the board.

> As long as I am improving, these models are able to improve at a faster rate. Of course, I cannot compete with the top researchers at these big labs. So whatever I do will be insignificant.

Just because you aren't on the cutting edge of technological "progress" doesn't mean what you do is insignificant. It doesn't have to be futile to resist. There are good things produced by technology of course, but honestly I'm not ashamed to admit I'm just sick of it and have no interest in the cutting edge anymore. Maybe I'll be a fool 100 years when a few more cycles of tech "disruption" finally solve all material poverty, but I just can't see the world that way anymore.

Solving the problem of how to make enough money to get by is a different question, but it's not a new one. IMO the correlation between highly paid work and meaningful is lucky when you can get it, but nothing to count on. Sometimes compromises need to be made.

It might be a lie in the objective sense, but it is certainly possible to imagine Holocaust-deniers whose belief that the Jews screwed up the country is just as genuine as the person who thinks that of Merkel. There is a long side discussion about how many such people there are, of course. But that gets into pragmatics.

Oppositely, I think our collective epistemic certainty that the earth is round is even higher than our (already very certain belief) that the Holocaust happened. Yet few people think that the government should prevent people from saying this.

Personally, I believe freedom of speech is a false goal. I'm 100% OK with governments restricting speech because it helps the population flourish. But it's a false frame to just make the question a matter of "truth".

Personally, I'm mostly in favor of them, but I think there can be a strong case that Holocaust denial laws are bad for society.

> At the very least from what I recall there are sections of songs and poems which made my eyes glaze over and just skip.

I felt the same way the first time I read the books. But the more I re-read and understand about Tolkien's worldbuilding the more I particularly appreciate them. The culture of Middle Earth is passed down by song and poetry, and when songs show up in the books they aren't just random interjections of the author but strands of culture connecting the characters.

If Tolkien had sprinkled more of the content of the Simirilion throughout LotR a lot of the meanings and symbolism would have been made more clear, but I don't think it would have been as immersive. The enjoyable thing about Tolkien is that he balances giving you enough explicit detail to follow and enjoy the main narrative, while also giving you a breadcrumbs that reveal the complex cosmology that contextualizes everything and is in the back of every characters mind.

> "Sprints" are a very bad name, giving the impression that the team is always running, which is a bad for morale and quality. In reality, they are just "cycles".

Agree. Actually, my first experience with Agile used the term "iteration" instead of "sprint" which I thought made much more sense. Everywhere else I've been has used the word "sprint". I suppose a "sprint" does includes three parts: start, run, stop; parallel to an iteration of the development cycle: branch, develop, reintegrate.

My paranoid, anti-management brain still thinks the fact that sprint for most people is associated primarily with speed rather than starting/stopping is a feature, not a bug. In this case idea of always being in a "sprint" is inherently stupid and insulting.

Anyway, another word to file alongside "grooming" for Agile words with unpleasant associations.

I agree, especially considering the version of the story Vonnegut previous told in Sirens of Titan [1]. In that story (written earlier), the people are shown willingly embracing handicaps out of love. Definitely makes an interesting contrast. My theory is that he wrote the later story (Bergeron) is to clarify the distinction you mention. Loving people will want to "handicap" themselves for the sake of solidarity, but you can't turn it around the other way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron#Parallels_wi...

I got a laugh out of this [1] comment yesterday and was considering how it applied here. I don't necessarily think that the methodology is garbage, but I would question the ability of science to contribute useful information here

> they asked people on their iPhones: Who are you with? What are you doing? And how happy are you, 0 to 100? And they built this chart, a happiness activity chart.

... basically, this study "proves" that people say they're happy when they're having sex, in a comfortable environment, or enjoying good community and are unhappy when they are "doom-scrolling". I don't doubt the integrity of the researchers or that the study is reproducable, but I'm confused who this study is for.

Are scientists just now figuring out that there is a discrepancy between what people KNOW is good for them and what they actually do? If not, what business do they have pretending to make scientific pronouncements as if they were impartial researchers who genuinely considered the opposite possibility?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32941889

Combining the current-ness and expansiveness of current research and journalism with the connectedness and cohesiveness of an encyclopedia is, without a question, a revolutionary product.

But I think when people say that Wikipedia is "accurate" and "reliable", they mean nothing more or less than that it's a faithful rendition of what you'd get if you grind up a certain set of secondary sources into a slop and bake it into a homogeneous pie. Within any given article, the mistakes in Wikipedia are nothing more or less than you would see slip through in a random mainstream newpaper or academic journal.

Wikipedia feels like a grand unified "view from nowhere". In a scientific journal, you can speak with a neutral point of view, representing the consensus of experts in that field. But when your scope is "everything", who are the domain experts? Is it the domain experts for the specific page (who may have fringe views about adjacent topics), or is it the editors who have a shallow consensus about everything, despite not being experts on the page in question?

...and ultimately, why do we take it as a given that this question can be meaningfully resolved?

I tried to switch for a Nokia dumb phone a while back and I got burned by buying one that didn't support the right bands (definitely no LTE). It got borderline unusable service and I had to give it up.

Next phone I get will probably be a dumb phone, but it's just something to be wary about for other potential buyers. If anyone has good resources on understanding this stuff, I'd love it. Otherwise I'll have to write it up when I learn next time. It feels like it's hard to get good info on.

This was a good read. For me, more inspiration to pick up something by Simone Weil at some point.

Another similar essay I liked, contemporary to both Wittgenstein and Weil is "Why Work?" by Dorothy Sayers [1].

[1] https://www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/mission/fai...

Huh, didn't know about this. Another link for those interested:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/tonga-eruption-blasted-unprece...

You're not alone in your fears, I've been thinking a lot about the same questions over the last few years especially.

What gives me comfort is acknowledging the limits of technology in general. Even though technology has profound material affects on human life, it ultimately is a system with its own motives that are totally alien to human interests. I thought "Technopoly" by Neil Postman did a pretty good job summarizing this.

Humankind has always been and always will be codependent with technology, but ultimately, human culture is a distinct thing with distinct values from technology. To find meaning we need to take seriously philosophy, tradition, and religion. Taking the thoughts of people who lived before the major technological shifts as seriously (if not more) than of people today made all the difference in my mindset.

I admit, I'm still pessimistic about our technological future -- uniquely worried about some profound harm coming down the pipeline. But that's not the same as despair. I still feel like I can have a meaningful (even if very small) part to play in the story of humankind, separate from the story of technology.

I thought your title and tagline were kind of clickbait-y, but you really inspired me to try what you suggested. I haven't yet overcome the feeling that anything I write to my wife needs to be an elaborate carefully constructed love note to be worthwhile. What you outlined sounds like just writing down some of the contents of regular conversations is what I usually talk about with her in the evenings (since we have no kids yet).

... it also made me think about one of the interesting balances I have to strike in our evening conversations, where I need to remember to stop rambling about technical details of work I'm excited to tell her about but are selfish to monopolize the conversation with (even though I know she does want to hear sometimes). The idea of transferring aspect of conversation to writing is very interesting, and seems like a good opportunity for self examination on my part to be a better spouse.

Anyway, thank you for writing!

The fact that he killed himself colors every bit of his work to me. Whatever people may say about depression being a chemical phenomenon outside of our control, there will always be something perverse to me about learning why not to commit suicide from an author who did.

That said, I found Infinite Jest to be very insightful when I read it at a low point in my life, but I went into it knowing who the author was.

As I understand it, even though the Foxconn deal was ill-conceived and wasted tax payer money via planning for the deal and funding foolish road projects, the deal does have milestones built in that resulted in not receiving the credit for at least the first few years. I also think the amounts in the deal have also been further diminished after failing to meet the original milestones.

That said, I was looking into it today and it looks like they have actually been meeting some sort of revised hiring target recently [1]. I have heard from some peers that the jobs they are hiring for are basically make-work jobs, but the deal doesn't care what they accomplish -- only how many "jobs" they create.

It's still shady crap which wasted tax payer money (not to mention abused eminent domain), but I don't think in any way involved a big check with no strings attached.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_in_Wisconsin

Reminds me of a joke:

A doctor, an architect and a programmer talk about their professions. "Mine is the oldest", says the doctor, "as everybody knows God created Eve from the rib of Adam, and that's definitely a medical operation". "Right", says the architect, "but in fact architect is even older - it's definitely an architectural project to create the world from chaos". At this point programmer kicks back in the chair and gives friends a mysterious look. "Who, do you think, created the chaos?"

(copied from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25855674)

Counter-example, or exception that proves the rule?

On a related note, am I right in understand that the "Google Experts" [1] do it for free?

[1] https://developers.google.com/community/experts/

Yeah, what I see here is a moralistic attacks on the "Facebook tracking network" from an organization that's 90% bankrolled by one of their largest competitors.

No doubt they'll report some true and nasty stuff about Facebook, but this is straight out of the "Big Tobacco/Oil" research funding playbook.

> The idea that fundamental differences in approaches to incarceration drove the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union strikes an odd chord from our current vantage point. Today 2.3 million people are locked up in the United States, and an additional 4.5 million are on parole or probation, for a total of around 2 percent of the population under state control.

If you're looking for the "fundamental differences in incarceration" that separate Gulag from prison, maybe it would be wise to also consider how executions and severity of forced labor come into play. This statistic generated by adding number of people on parole to people locked up strikes me as meaningless BS.

I'm not happy that the US seems to be developing police state tendencies and a lot of the rest of this article rang true, but based on how disingenuous the intro seems I can't help but assume the whole thing is trash.

Depends. How do you feel about math?

http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/graphics/manual/

I really like that this includes frequency tables for tetragraphs.

I had to laugh a little at the fact that "STOP" is the 5th most frequently used tetragraph though.

Yes, but this article is not about the GNU parts. It is about how the Linux kernel begins execution. There is nothing wrong with describing this as the "Linux (kernel) booting process".

though there is a bit of syslinux/grub stuff that isn't strictly this.