The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go

A rather sweeping statement about the way other people think (apologies for being argumentative). In any case I'm sad because it is another frontier put beyond the reach of the human mind.

Science fiction lied to us. It is science fantasy. A fantasy where you have human away parties and depictions of human agency roughly analagous (albeit glamourized) to the role we have always had bringing history up to this point.

Some people value human agency (1) and the human condition and want to preserve it almost for ecological reasons - it is the world we know, and the only one with meaning. Others I think fear death or hate injustice and (optimistically) see technology as a way to solve all these problems once and for all. Human (2) pride be damned (3).

1) possibly mainly white men, since we apparently have more of it

2) (White male)

3) Sweeping blanket statement I know. Sorry for the identity politics bit too, but you cannot really say anything on the human condition without someone saying or thinking that is is a different affair for other people.

This may be off topic, but I dislike Wired's new approach to adBlockers. I use Privacy Badger as my only adBlocker because I am fine with viewing adds if they don't track me. Wired's approach just means I refresh the page, select all the text and copy it into my text editor. Which is a shame because if they would just display non-tracking ads I would happily view them. The way things are going now if they ever make circumventing their restrictions to burdensome, I may stop reading their articles, but I will not allow their ads to track me.

Huh, I run AdBlocker or something and don't see any ads. I just give up on sites that do what wired does, the content will show up somewhere else.

I used to feel guilty about it, people need to make a living, but the tracking is creepy in the extreme and the ads got to be pretty invasive. If they made ads that were fun or funny or insightful or had some value, that's different, but they just seem annoying to me.