Category: Opinion
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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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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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Post-scarcity
There are many different ways to discuss “post-scarcity”. The traditional idea is that all material goods are available at no cost, kinda like the replicators in Star Treks TNG and DS9. However, even in the Trek universe, replicators used power, and this allowed replicator rationing to be a plot point in Star Trek Voyager. Even…
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Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy confuses me. How can someone someone be angry to be called a “TERF” (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist), how can they denounce it an anti-feminist insult, when in the next breath deny the existence of Trans-* people? That’s what the acronym means. How can someone claim that it’s justified for a police officer to shoot…
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The worst form of government except for all the others
(Does this sound fair? I’m not formally qualified in politics). Democracy The only way to get a government which wants to do the sort of things the public are OK with. Technocracy The only way to get a government of people who know what they’re talking about. Industrialism The only way to provide a government…
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Memetic monocultures
Brief kernel of an idea: Societies deem certain ideas “dangerous”. If it possible to technologically eliminate perceived dangers, we can be tempted to do so, even when we perceived wrongly. Group-think has lead to catastrophic misjudgments. This represents a potential future “great filter” for the Fermi paradox. It does not apply to previous attempts at…
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