aight. so. i have a phd in math from 1992, and i spent 23 years or so writing code professionally, and now i raise kids and write photography criticism.
Bellingham, WA
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I'm amusing myself sketching out a "Pretty Good Books" program of study. Rather than reading books that specifically cover however dubiously this topic or that ("Euclid is math!") we admit that the point is to read a hell of a lot of thought provoking text and think about it.
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I'm sure they're around someplace but there is a notable absence in these photos.
Grad school is hard but I have never been more inspired to study in my life because this is what my university library looks like
ALT Library in a tall brick structure with high arches
ALT Skylights and arches of a library in a tall brick structure that was formerly a water tower of
ALT Library in a tall brick structure with high arches
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I kind of wonder what's going to happen to all these guys who think they're going to Mars or uploading their brains or becoming immortal. DoorDash 2.0 Dash Harder is gonna be a letdown.
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tell me you don't know what any of these words mean without telling me.
this is fucking hilarious. a guy shows up who actually knows what words mean and the AI bros are in a shambles.
With the greatest of respect to the Holy Father, if you look at a piece of art (whatever medium it may take) and you cannot tell whether it was made by man or machine, then what is the difference?
I don't believe there is an ontological difference; just an epistemological one.
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it's perhaps worth noting that Larry Niven's ringworld blocks about 0.5% of its star's output. It's an interesting read because at a certain age the thing feels doable, but also Niven is at some pains to impress upon the reader how impossibly large it is.
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1PW of light can accelerate a mass up to 670t with a 1g starting acceleration and get it relativistic in under a year.
100,000,000PW reflected could reasonably send 6.7 gigaton of total mass (1-5Gt payload) out of the solar system a year at relativistic speeds.
The Sun puts out over 380,000,000,000PW.
3% of its output at 30% pumping efficiency, 90% beam targeting efficiency, and 25% reflectivity (75% transparent ultralightweight sail) would be good for over 50Gt/yr of total mass, at least 10Gt/yr of which could be payload.
Iow sending billions of biological human beings out of the solar system a year at >0.5c is quite within the reach of laser sails.
I don't know of a more promising technology for this.
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i love science fiction and have read probably 1000s of novels (I'm very old and also a dork) it's pretty clear that the current generation of technology enthusiasts has heard of a lot of science fiction tropes, but hasn't actually read a lot.
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the best we can do is note that other humans look and act a bit like we do, and further that we feel conscious, and that as a consequence it's reasonable to guess, and even to act as if, other humans were conscious in the same way we are.
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you can tell that the AI risk people are all Vinge because it's always "the AI will be persuasive" (Vinge) and not "the AI will crash the human brain with a pattern" (Stephenson, but I'm see also DFW)
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The story of AI development as a culture is going to make a hell of a movie some day. The following sketch will be wrong in some details, but I think in broad strokes I'm largely right:
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Presumably there are a couple of actually smart guys hiding in there somewhere? I don't know who they are, the public facing people are all visibly imbecile, and most of them seem also to be sex pests. Maybe there are some smart fringe weirdo sex pests.
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