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Head cannon: Wallace & Grommit
New head cannon: Wallace & Grommit, far from the 1970s it appears to be set in, is a wildly transhumanist future. This is why they could build a moon rocket and go to the moon over the course of a bank holiday weekend, and why when they got there they could breathe, eat the ground,…
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An end to copyright?
I suspect that AI generated content is (eventually, not any of the current versions) going to destroy copyright as a concept. The generally-stated reason for copyright is to incentivise the creation of more works: artificial scarcity, which drives up prices, introduced around the time the printing press was invented (but the idea goes back much…
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Not a Singularity but an Event Horizon
I was never a fan of the term “Singularity” for the AI thing. When mathematical singularities pop up in physics, it’s usually a sign the physics is missing something. Instead, I like to think of the AI “event horizon”, the point in the future — always ahead, yet getting ever closer — beyond which you…
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LaMDA, Turing Test, sentience
A chatbot from Google called LaMDA made the headlines last weekend. It seems it convinced Blake Lemoine (someone at Google) that it was sentient. While, like the majority of real AI researchers[0], I do not actually think it is sentient, the transcripts make it plain why it caused this belief. When Alan Turing originally described…
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No, a black hole can’t be used as a rocket
With a headline like that, I need to introduce some concepts. First, a black hole: if you have enough stuff in a small enough volume, the outside is causally disconnected from the inside. This is normally phrased as “nothing, not even light, can escape”, but that’s a little misleading because… Second: Black holes emit Hawking…
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Arguments, hill climbing, the wisdom of the crowds
You ever had an argument which seems to go nowhere, where both sides act like their position is self-evident and obvious, that the other person “is clearly being deliberately obtuse”? I hope that’s common, and not just one of my personal oddities. Ahem. In the current world of machine learning (yes these two things are…
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Blasphemy, LARPing, mandatory vaccination
Back in the olden days, when Lord of the Rings was new, my brother introduced me to LARP — live action roleplay — which in his case meant Fools And Heroes, a swords-and-sorcery themed game with foam-rubber weapons and vampires dusted with flour[0]. In Fools And Heroes, there is a pantheon of gods. My brother…
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How big might real wormholes be?
AFAICT, there is no actual evidence for real wormholes existing, they are merely interesting ideas not obviously forbidden by known physics. That said, they are fun to think about. Quoth Wikipedia: “The quantum foam hypothesis is sometimes used to suggest that tiny wormholes might appear and disappear spontaneously at the Planck scale and stable versions…
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