That's all satire, right? I don't believe the author describes a reality, even in a sarcastic way.
Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
111–120 of 284 posts
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#112I was enjoying the article until I got to this paragraph: > Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or th…
This part was a long description of the zeitgeist in SF; it was not meant to be the author’s own opinion.
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#113> Not long before I arrived in the Bay Area, I’d been involved in a minor but intense dispute with the rationalist community over a piece of fiction I’d written that I’d failed to properly label as fiction Anyone familiar with what work this is referring to?
Sounds self-referencial
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think the power grid fell out of the head of some master craftsman thinking in decades? They dont teach the history of science for various reasons, but its basically a ledger of how over rated 3 inch chimp brain intelligence is. The power grid is thing of beauty. Today. But the path to that Beauty is one train wreck after another. Boiler explosions that kill hundreds. Wiring that burns down towns. Transformers th…
Anyway, the original “power grid” guy was not some master craftsman or engineer, he was the original STEM influencer: Edison. He also popularized short videos.
Tesla was the real power grid guy. The scope of his invention from the generators at Niagara Falls power generation to the transformers to the motors is pretty impressive. More so given that he was eventually given the patents (originally issued to Marconi) for radio transmission.
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#115The strangest thing about all of this to me is how contemporary SF seems to have absorbed basically none of the city's previous culture. You can detect the commercial, artistic, cultural histories of NYC in the various industries there, from media to finance. Ditto for LA, or London, or Paris. In SF though, it’s as if the previous culture of the place has just been overwritten entirely. Hard to believe that it’s the…
Hey, I had to read On The Road once for college, and I am currently sitting in SF.
To be fair to Jack Kerouac, I was young when I read it but even at my advanced age I don't think I want to reread it.
Also, the old hippie culture sort of moved out of SF and into the surrounding bay, I think especially toward East Bay.
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#116> "The future won’t reward effort. It’ll reward leverage." (From the Cluely ad) JFC kill me now that is NOT a future I want to live in.
This became clear to me over the last few years. We are quickly returning to a world of entrenched social hierarchy where there are lords and peasants and little room even for social mobility. With the corpse of meritocracy too rotted to deny at this point the elite simply seem to have run out of lies for placating the people. Or, more likely the people are so sickeningly impotent, that’s there’s no need for the lies…
The west had been fighting this since it's founding.
“If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.” ― Ulysses S. Grant
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#117I mean is it any different from 15 years ago?
Silicon Valley has been a parody of itself for long time now
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#118The quote "this...is...necessary" reminded me about this song. Wonder if the person who as singing it:
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can’t survive a steady erosion of mastery. That sounds like an onset of a certain type of dark age. Eventually the shiny bits will too fall off when the underlying foundation crumbles. It would be massively ironic if the age of the "electronic brains" brought about the demise of technological advancement.
Just look at current software. Windows is maintained by morons, and gets shitter every year. Linux is still written by a couple of people. Once people like that die, nobody will know how to write operating systems. I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush. All software is just shit piled on top of shit. Backends in JavaScript, interfaces which use an entire…
> Linux is still written by a couple of people.
How is that? It's easily the software project with the largest number of contributors ever (I don't know if it's true, but it could be true).
Re: Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's all about the pathetic rationalization we have placed on greed and profit. We can make millions redundant with AI and still have a social safety net that keeps society stable and healthy. But no, that wouldn't be "fair" to the people who generate millions of net worth every 5 minute.
If you could confiscate 100% of the assets of every billionaire in the country, and sell all of them for market rate without putting any downward pressure on prices at all, that sum would not fund 10 months of the federal government's current spending levels, and even less if you wanted new programs.
Trump has added 2 trillion (unilaterally and illegally) to the debt with today's Supreme Court decision, while giving huge tax breaks to the wealthy.
The Republican policy for 40 years had been to create unsustainable and unworkable Federal government funding/spending instead of to work to creating a working, fiscally sane Federal government. It's hard to build a working government in a two party system when one side is malicious/duplicitous.