tehchromic

My understanding of the uncanny valley is that it doesn't get better, it only gets worse!

Fascinating. I think that the capacity of nuclear weapons and MAD decreased the likelihood of future world wars to so low as to be effectively none.

But this article kinda opens the possibility of world war taking place entirely in the data/communications realm.

I had heard the relationship between countries with better football teams having higher rates of t gondii, now it all makes sense

Ugly business is industrialization. I suppose it's seems to be the most noble application of technology to avoid the techno-horrors of the past in the future. But there are always newer, greater techno-horrors emergent. In fact, one might say that techno-horror is a fundamental emergent property of the universe.

"Keep in mind that ideally, you want your market to be addicted to you. You don’t want to be addicted to your market."

Brilliant

Attention and ecological wealth

What is their ethics and motive? This is #1 question regardless of smartness imo

Ah, gotcha. Yes my risk assessment was prehensile.

Risk perception. Clarify?

I love this. I always wonder why I have almost no interest in novels now although I spent my entire youth buried in them. Occasionally I feel guilty. But I think life became the novel?

I binge read Doestoeski at the end of highschool and he remains a major influence on me to this day.

The reason is that, encountering life's most challenging experiences (which are always human in their origin), these novels are like a preset pattern of meditation by which one can find the ground.

It's a well meaning article. My first thought is that it's generated by AI in the service of some moderate yet far reaching religious org.

"Finding our intrinsic values is no trivial task, but something that forces us to stare into the core of our humanity."

I think it misses a critical topical conclusion which is that "intrinsic values" means little or nothing to many, and many folks are fairly incapable of competently doing the kind of contemplative meditating required to arrive at some set of rules like that, and so they look to others.

And here's the crux of the missed point:

To really resonate with our intrinsic values, we need to drop the myth that a rational economic system exists, and build one with the value of present and future human life explicitly built in.

We already have a massive framework for understanding individual intrinsic values in terms of the sanctity of human life and that's the great mystery religions that have birth to our modern age. What's needed now is a planetary ethos where intrinsic human value is put in the proper context of the ecological reality of the biological and geological systems and processes that sustain us. Building that culture requires myth and magic, but also is an intensely rational project. There is really no way around it, and any philosophical text intended to shift the cultural landscape is incomplete without it.

Humans are wiping out the planetary biome as predicted

The big news in Science (big S for the institution of) is the existential crises of the Anthropocene, the art and technology of sustainably occupying planet e, radically transforming human culture around primary support for the ecological planetary biosphere vs the old dominionist paradigm of human centered everything, and the fight to preserve the biological wealth of the planet against the inexorable onslaught of mass consumption and exploit, especially as it impacts global systems like atmospheric and ocean chemistry, threatening habitability of the surface. This news is very exciting!

I think one can only call science news boring if one clings to merely the old idea of science as a simple methodology for validating laws/truth of reality rather than appreciating that Science is the institution of cultural realism and the modern religion to which we all subscribe, so much so that we take it for granted. This is the problem with "science news", is that it's news performed under the presumption that the methodology of scientific practice needs to be more explicit for it to be effective news. This is only true for folks who accept superficial obeisance towards science as significant equivalence for factuality.

With respect, I think you missed the point of the article! It's that we are all 10x engineers in the right context, even if that's providing the context for someone else to be 10x, which of sounds like you are 10x at!

what is collapsing is the planetary ecosystem, thanks to industrial practice. Especially in North America suburban sprawl and industrial agriculture and waste have eaten into and degraded what was very recent a deep well of ecological wealth. I would call this a major impact on the American culture which built it's identity around that seemingly boundless wilderness, and as well our basic human psyche and culture for which (many argue) proximity to deep ecological process is a fundamental need.

The consumer culture and consequent wealth of things, especially images and meditated simulcra, really only echo the naive American soul in a wasteland of it's own making. All cultural realities are fundamentally ecological. We fill our lives with artificial realities so liberally because we are born into a culture that took massive wealth of natural resources and the experiences they provide for granted. As they vanish, we fill the gap with artificial things and experiences.

It's a dangerous game with potentially grave and unexpected consequences, and we have played it before many times on a much smaller scale: hunting food sources to extinction, turning rich farmland into desert, etc.

It seems that the collective human psyche it's unable to reflect accurately on the consequences of it's own actions with respect to our fundamental biogenic foundation.

Take for example the flooding of our nights with artificial blue spectrum light pollution. In evolutionary terms, this is a new event. For billions of years nights have been uniformly mostly dark with a regularly variating moon glow. Suddenly we change all that and dark nights are a thing of the past. Nevermind the massive affect on a whole ecosystems, nevermind studies that show a severe affect on the human psychological health, status quo says lighting up the night is normal, good, and safe.

And there are shootings at schools and terrible crime and massive loss of insect life and songbirds dying off and these quite extraordinary changes to the continuity of our bio systems and our lifestyles, and yet we don't see the connection. We blame the media or Donald Trump or the 1%. We don't see the problem as something we have direct control over. We blame our institutions or leaders or gods or what have you, anything but ourselves, and anything to avoid changing our lifestyles and behaviors.

So imo things really are falling apart, just not the things we think.

Others feel that weird is the greatest compliment.

Use of the word conscious here is interesting. Is there any doubt that fungi are conscious of what they are conscious of?

I think that we have to be careful. Speaking philosophically it's safe to say that we do not yet have a clear, definitive definition of "consciousness" in scientific terms such that we can safely assess what is or isn't conscious.

Some believe consciousness is what distinguishes humans from lower beasts. Others believe it is an emergent phenomenon of some higher order macroorganisms, dolphins but not cows, monkeys but not fish. Still others believe that plants, fungi, bacteria, and all living things display some level of consciousness.

And some weird folks believe consciousness is a property of the universe expressed in all things, which happens to manifest in forms that we understand and relate to in living organisms due to the inherent bias of observing through the lense of being a biological organism ourselves.

It appears difficult if not impossible to prove which of these definitions is correct!

What seems clear is that the idea of consciousness cuts to the very core of the modern scientific paradigm and world view, such that the inherent assumptions made in building our scientific realism allow us only a very narrow understanding of what is consciousness accompanied by a certainty that what we do understand must be all there is.

That's to say, if you've ever questioned the fundamental axioms of scientific truth you've inevitably bumped into the philosophical problem of consciousness relative to the institution of scientific realism.

So to say, when someone says "we now have proof that X may in fact be conscious!" the statement comes across to some ears as most definitely vague and exactingly inordinate!

I think it's more that the geneticists have the sense of humor.

No link because people who like to read about hackers might be offended? Ok

Even in Davis CA which prides itself on being a primier bike friendy city and most people have bikes, it's similar to what I'm reading in the comments: bike lanes are painted in and irregular. Bikers second class citizens. Every few years a biker gets killed by an automobile.

That says there are beautiful greenbelts which can get you around the outskirts of the city with no cars in sight.

I find this absolutely fascinating, especially in the context of emergent technology. One could speculate: will persistent interactive mass media platforms eliminate or vastly reduce the rate of word replacement? Or will they accelerate it? A competent linguist might be able to give a good opinion but even so it seems debatable. Maybe linguistic change is contingent on the sorts of traumatic cultural divisions that were commonplace before the advent of global culture and technology, or maybe language changes more when more people talk to each other. Is language change accidental and traumatagenic or creative and intentional?

We can and should call this a holocaust and we are the good Germans.

I suppose as someone interested in cancel culture I would wonder respectfully why there's anything wrong with celebrating beauty as a feminine attribute, or with comparing a beautiful camel to a beautiful woman, (if in fact that's what was done)?

True, males have been traditionally denied the status of "beauty" in more traditional cultural arenas, and yes, many unfair prejidices towards domesticated animals exist such that their comparison to a human is assumed to be derogatory. However why let a few bad apples spoil the bunch?

I don't think there's anything wrong with celebrating beauty in all its forms and comparisons and I thoroughly enjoyed this article.

Love the name

It's not likely to be a popular opinion with technologists as AI's potential has lit the technopopular imagination, however this question has bothered me for a long time. I think strong emergent AI suffers philosophical problem that won't go away, and to the extent that the conversation revolves around evolution and consciousness rather than logic and intelligence, then we are having the right conversation.

I'll put my argument out there and let the flames come as they will.

Strong AI is about as likely to emerge from our current state of the art AI machinery as it is to emerge suddenly out of moon rocks. That's to say the fear of machines becoming self-conscious and posing an existential threat to us, especially replacing us in the evolutionarily sense, is completely unfounded.

This isn't to say that building machines capable of doing exactly that isn't possible - we and all living things are proof that it's possible - it's to say that achieving this level of engineering is on par with intergalactic mass transit or Dyson spheres - way out of our league for the foreseeable. And, even if we had the technology, it would be so entirely foolish to undertake that no sentient species would do it.

That said, there's a substantial argument to make that we will augment ourselves with our own machinery so throughoughly that we will become unrecognizable and in effect, accomplish the same task through merging with the machine. This is likely, but not at all to be like the experience of the singularity in that all of humanity is suddenly arrested and deposed by autonomous AI.

An interesting scenario in this vein is if a few powerful individuals can wield autonomous systems, modify themselves and simply wipe out all the competition, then in effect the rest of us wouldn't know the difference. This outcome is actually I think on the more likely side, albeit a good ways away in the future.

Less likely but still totally legitimate as a concern is the idea that AI could be very easily weaponized. This is a real problem and is I think behind the more substantive warnings by good thinkers on the topic. Like bioweapons, we might be wiped out by an machine that's been intentionally programmed and mechanically empowered to cause real harm. This kind of danger could also be emergent, in that a machine might be capable of deciding that it ought to take certain actions as well as have the capacity to take them, and then, voila, mass murder.

However it seems unlikely that such a mistake would be made, or that a bad actor would be capable to commit such an intentional crime. I think this is on par with nuclear MAD: even total madmen dictators hit the pause on the push-the-button instinct. And an AI MAD or similar would surely take as much resource to produce as a nuke arsenal. In other words, the resources required to build such a machinery are on the order of a nation-state, and perhaps more complicated to achieve than a nuclear arsenal, so probably more likely to be stopped or fail in-process rather than succeed.

So there are dangers from AI but I would say they are lesser than the accumulated danger of industrial society rendering they planet uninhabitable, which should of course occupy our primary concern these days.

The idea that the biological evolutionary 'machine' whose motive for existence is accumulated over billions of years of entropic adaptation can be out engineered, or accidently replicated by modern computational AI is silly - the two aren't in the same league and it's hubris to suppose otherwise. There's more intelligence in the toe of a lady bug than in an the computing power ever made.

In sum the danger from emergent AI is overstated, however the concern is most welcome to the extent that it informs wisdom and care in consideration for our techno-industrial impact on the biosphere.

I see the artist's experience of family including comedy, tragedy, pleasure, pain, all expressed in the beautiful language of modernist paint which is cryptic and multiple in meanings but simple and direct in material.

I think science is in a crisis today for the same reason society is: the underlying ethics is a scientific realism have yet to be established. That's to say science, or the advancement of organized knowledge and the corresponding cultural realities are still oriented around anthropomorphic biases that were formed during the advent of global culture and embodied by the mystery religions. This made sense when the planet was a conquest, but not so much as a management strategy. Instead the ethics of science and culture need to be organized around ecological ethics: the reality of planetary stewardship is the challenge of the Anthropocene. This is a problem for scientific culture, because it's easy to build complexity on existing paradigms, it's harder to reorganize ones fundamental belief system. Example is being able to describe the surface of a black hole while people starve in the street. The problem of modern scientific progress is a problem of ethical reorganization, and once that is done (if it succeeds) then again we will be able to build systems of thought that appear new and foundational like the classical ones.

Agreed. My point tho is not that mercenary interests are not willing to go to war to exploit resources, it's that the their interest in those resources has more to do with their persuit of status than with an underlying need for resources.

I'd counter and say that natural resources are one, probably the most significant symbol of status with which wars and their outcome are negotiated. But the war outcome itself, rather than diplomatic or market solutions, is specifically the result of evaluation of relative symbolic status rather than underlying resource needs.

Examples: WW I was the result of royal jealousy over who had better navy boats. WW II was fought when a whole cultural identity perceived itself to have loss of status after the fall of Austrian Empire. Vietnam and the cold wars had to do with the ongoing symbolic struggle for status between different factions of aristocratic, government, or corporate interests, etc. And all the mercenary forces enabling the conflict were interested in those resources as status symbols rather than any underlying need for or lack of resources.

Same with global water supply. If the question is, how does everyone get enough water, then it's a practical problem which war only hurts. But if the question is, who controls access to what water, then it's a matter of symbolic status and war is inevitable.

This is why the argument is tough tho, because natural resources are a primary status symbol, so we say "resource war". But I think it's important to talk about the distinction because the difference is life and death.