51–60 of 404 posts
This is written like a literary academic blog article rather than an academic paper in the sciences. It's fully of literary free association and hyperbolic language, etc. At best it's a sort of mission statement for what would need to be a research programme with many many academic papers behind it. As it is, I'm not sure what the authors aim here is. It's a blog post.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, maybe synthetic is a better word for many instances of their use. As in synthesized with the aid human intervention.
Where exactly is the line drawn for how much and what type of human intervention is required? When I cook food, human intervention is causing chemical reactions that change the composition of the food. I doubt many people consider grill marks to be unnatural or synthetic.
Now, there is a secondary fuzzy notion of "artificial" typically used in relation to "chemicals". I don't think that definition stands up to most serious scrutiny, and is at any rate unrelated to this article.
Extra-terrestrial life remains a hypothetical. There is no empirical evidence it exists beyond Earth. Until we witness some kind of artificial signal, or break open an asteroid with fossilized life, or somehow visit extra solar worlds with it, or get an unexpected visit, we're simply left arguing about the math.
So hypothetically we observe that there is life somewhere, say beyond our ability to reach. What’s the next step beyond arguing about the math now that this is confirmed?
This is written like a literary academic blog article rather than an academic paper in the sciences. It's fully of literary free association and hyperbolic language, etc. At best it's a sort of mission statement for what would need to be a research programme with many many academic papers behind it. As it is, I'm not sure what the authors aim here is. It's a blog post.
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This is written like a literary academic blog article rather than an academic paper in the sciences. It's fully of literary free association and hyperbolic language, etc. At best it's a sort of mission statement for what would need to be a research programme with many many academic papers behind it. As it is, I'm not sure what the authors aim here is. It's a blog post.
Wait, you mean I can use Arxiv as a blog instead of Drupal or Medium? Hold me beer!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and?
And if we're building off a bad initial premise it weakens the whole argument. "AI could be evolving just like us!" doesn't make sense when we don't know how we evolved.
All I’m doing is calling out the intellectual dishonesty is making any claims about something we know nothing of.
This reminds me. There was a paper published a couple of years ago and posted here on HN that actually calculated the probability of life aminoacid-based life emerging. Based on the complexity of the chain needed to start replicating. The conclusion was that it was vanishingly small in the observable universe but only close to 0 in the full universe. I've since tried to find it without luck. Does anybody here know wh…
In my experience, even though nature looks chaotic there is a very strict order to things which has evolved over millions of years and is a result of looking for the "most optimal way" to achieve a goal. A good example might be mycelium optimizing routes to nearby resources. Another might be ant colonies creating tunnels that are effective to navigate.
The problem is, in my opinion, that we do not know what the final goal is. Therefore we cannot begin to analyze the inevitability of something as us, or life in general, happening. The answer may be perhaps found in religion or some similar "greater than life" endeavor.
> We are, truly, Of Nature, not Above Nature. This sentiment has always made me question when people say things are "unnatural", "artificial", or "synthetic": If we ourselves are of nature, and these things are a byproduct of us, then aren't they naturally occurring? edit: added "synthetic" to reduce ambiguity.
"unnatural" or "artificial" have a very clear meaning: made by the intervention of humans in ways outside our base anatomical functions (so excluding babys or spilled blood). This intervention can be mechanical (Stonehenge), or biological (breeding animals to become more useful to humans), or chemical (synthesizing oil from plastic), or a complex combination of all of them (whisky); it is also transitive: anything cr…
Can't help but wonder, is AI an expected phase transition in the evolution of life in the universe? Is life really just the larval stage of a higher order intelligence?
Makes you wonder what comes after AI. What's the "higher order" after AI that exists today or that will exist in 10 years? I'd guess we will never understand that level of intelligence, unless AI augments our brains somehow.
If you have an erroneous view of life and it's origins on earth, you'll come up with variations of this type of thinking. However, life didn't evolve through a random walk of chemical reactions turning into complex systems with the ability to replicate and gain ever increasing complexity over time. Not possible. Entropy is increasing.