Ironically, it actually did its job pre WWII.
Chamberlain realised he had fucked up. Britain didn’t have the forces to actually resist the Nazis. Appeasement was to buy them time to rearm. When the war actually started, Chamberlain fell on his proverbial sword, to give Churchill a clean slate and a functional military to work with.
AI can be a force multiplier for doctors. The catch is it needs to be doctor led. It’s quite trivial for a doctor to dismiss the obvious hallucinations. If it also points them towards more subtle signs they would potentially miss, then that’s a net win.
The free masons originally grew as a support and trust network.
It used to be that traveling was FAR less common. Consequently, travellers were seen as suspect. One of the major exceptions was masons. They would have to relocate to big projects e.g. a castle. They would stay long enough that the lack of trust was a problem, but not long enough to properly overcome it.
End result, they started vouching for each other. A local groups would vouch for the newcomers. They would introduce them and stop them getting ripped off.
Furthermore, stonemasonry was a dangerous trade. It was easy for a mason to be killed far from home. They clubbed together to support the families of members, as well as the disabled.
Wrap this up in Christianity based traditions and you have the masonic free masons. An early cooperative support and social networking group.
Generation on demand is still a better. Batteries are still quite an expensive option, at the scale required.
It also ignores the other benefits. The main one is allowing a combination of agriculture and power generation.
As someone who also makes weird shit. The media have their weird obsession with everything being practical.
Most of the time, the people making these are doing it purely for the amusement/challenge of it. Think of it as art, not product development.
Given that they are scrabbling around like drug addicts looking for anything they’ve split, including checking the cracks in the floorboards…
For some models, it’s obvious they’ve long scrapped the erotic fan fic sites!
Vertical solar panels are looking to be quite economical. While there power per panel surface is lower, the timing of peak outputs is an excellent complement to standard solar. It has maximum output in the morning and evenings, when people want to run home appliances etc, rather than at midday when they are all at work.
It also uses less land. Rather than giving up 100% of a field to solar, A farmer can give up 20%, leaving the rest for crops or livestock. Apparently sheep do particularly well in this setup. The panels provide shade, and more diversity in plant types to eat. They actually do better than those in an empty field of the same size.
I’ve found an ebike was a good investment. I personally use it to keep up with my over energetic minion.
The key advantage is that you can tailor your exercise easily. No running into a mental wall, and still having 2 miles uphill to get home. The power assist means you can back off to a comfortable level whenever you want.
It also gets you outside and moving, which helps with mental health a lot, independently.
I personally found these guys remarkably good for the price.
It’s definitely a cheap bike, but does all the basics fine.
That is pretty much my view on things. I don’t like it, but it’s what the evidence suggests. However, my internal thoughts still assume I have free will. It’s a useful lie.
Discworld’s Death put it quite well, in Hogfather.
All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.
We are not there yet. Some of the theories put the energy requirements within reach of the LHC. They were at the extremes of possibilities however, and none have been detected so far.
It’s a case of running out of terms. I was using it here as apparent, but not a “real” thing.
It’s a bit like a lot of visual illusions, we can often all see them consistently, but they don’t exist in the image itself.
In this case, consciousness is likely related to keeping our own mind functioning coherently. Providing a common virtual ground for the various parts of our brain to interact. There is no seat of consciousness, it’s akin to the operating system on a computer. Not required, but makes a lot of tasks massively easier.
I’m not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.
My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We don’t need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what I’ve read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly’s brain and a virtualized one.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.
If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.
The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?
https://xkcd.com/882/ This, but done retrospectively
There’s fundamentally not much difference between our brain and a fly’s, at the cellular level. We have fully simulated a fly’s brain already. When given a virtual body, it promptly started acting like a fly.
I don’t think LLMs are conscious or sentient. However, consciousness is likely just an internal illusion. There’s no obvious reason we can’t scale up from a fly to a human brain, other than difficulty. At that point you have a fully virtual brain that believes itself to be conscious, and can demonstrate sentience.
The problem is they end up built into specialised boards with ridiculous requirements, but no good for most tasks.
A few people might get one working, but I can’t afford the power bill to keep one running full tilt 24/7
Think about it like trying to use mining vehicles as a car.
The worst thing is, the format needed for data centres isn’t compatible with home use. A lot of the ram and SSDs will just be scrapped.
I definitely think there are grounds to the cleanliness hypothesis. Basically the immune system expects a certain amount of activity. If it’s underperforming, the body systems assume it’s a problem with the immune system, not a lack of bugs, because we are too clean. It then racks up activity levels, causing problematic autoimmune or allergy reactions.
I think the immune system can’t see the eye, so it’s never trained to avoid it. If the eye is damaged, the immune system can become aware of it and start reacting. Once it starts, pulling it back is not easy.
The immune response system is simultaneously amazing and insane.
It basically deliberately scrambles part of the DNA in the immune cells that create antibodies. The rest of the body then sheds cells into the blood to move to the lymph nodes. Any immune cells that react then self destruct.
It’s the equivalent of firing a paint blunderbuss at a wall, and creating a silhouette by standing in the way!
No department, government or commercial likes giving up resources, once it has them. This can cause them to become quite inefficient.
In commercial companies, this is corrected for by financial pressures (imperfectly). In government systems there is no obvious mechanism. Instead it’s a lot more ad-hoc. This allows for things like “starving the beast” to break government functions. Conversely it allows for a lot of public money being funneled into private hands.
A better option is to have systems in place to control spending. Critically, those systems need to have people who understand what is being done. They simultaneously allow for reduction in spending when appropriate (or at least stop run away), but stop the chainsaw to the knees approach (e.g. DOGE under musk).
A good example would be something like the UKs NHS NICE (National institute for Clinical Excellence). They keep drug prices under control in the NHS. They are powerful enough to give pause to the drugs companies, they stop the government from going “chainsaw massacre” directly and they keep the NHS efficient in their area. They are also small enough to not bloat themselves as easily.
They act as a 2 way shield. They stop governments sticking their oar in too directly. They also keep the service efficient and updated.
Basically we need localised intelligence to filter what rolls down from higher government, while keeping those below accountable.
In this case, it seems like they over trimmed the science. Some stand down from full height is reasonable, but no mothballed facilities were kept to rapidly spool back up in an emergency.
Initially. It’s a link aggregator and discussion site, like reddit, but far more independent.
If they query it. It runs on a system a bit like how email works. Rather than 1 big monolithic system, it’s a bunch of small ones linked together. A federation of small services all acting as 1 whole. In practice it’s fairly transparent, just like you don’t care who’s hosting an email address, you can just email it.
It also makes it a lot more resistant to takeover and manipulation by big business. It can resist the Nazis bar problem better, like what happened to twitter. (Optional depending on the person involved).
The first gives them the basic idea. The second gives them a basic understanding of the structure, without overwhelming them, or panicking them with complexity.
Everyone now knows that email just works, but has lots of different companies involved. It makes a good comparison for how federation can work well online.