Whoah whoah whoah whoah whoah:
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Unrequited friendship is rare; we find it very hard to like people who dislike us. (And the reasons it's so easy to love those who do not love us... are scary and we'll leave the question alone.)******************************************************************
"Many scientists are neurologically stale individuals: wholly uninvigorating. They strive away on whimsical applications because "that's what science is". While I can see where they're coming from - it's very good fun to immerse yourself in an application (say, making a better engine using physical arguments) - these people are technologists rather than natural philosophers."
- James Reid
As with all old institutions, the BBC has a lot of hangups, hangovers and strange crannies. (Think of the way that their ethics programme is still considered part of their "Religious" programming.) But this can be serendipitous too. Note the following quirky categorisation on their News site:
Now, "Environment vs Technology" would be one thing. Straightforward, if not an airtight opposition for all time. And in the quote just there James explains how the counterintuitive split "Science vs Technology" might be justified in noble terms.
But "Science and Environment"? That offers us a much better stereotype for scientists! (If you actually stop to think about the scientists you know/have watched on telly...):
But "Science and Environment"? That offers us a much better stereotype for scientists! (If you actually stop to think about the scientists you know/have watched on telly...):
"When some portion of the biosphere is rather unpopular with the human race—a crocodile, a dandelion, a stony valley, a snowstorm, an odd-shaped flint—there are three sorts of human being who are particularly likely still to see point in it and befriend it. They are poets, scientists and children. Inside each of us, I suggest, representatives of all these groups can be found."
- Mary Midgley
Will artificial intelligences have unconscious minds?
Does this imply it's lacking in some way? What might it miss out on by being fully formal and epistemically internalised?
- Creativity? Quite a lot of people put enormous importance on our unconsciouses. It is supposed to be the origin and fount of all our intentions and habits and personal mythology. Less credulously, we suspect that creativity is unconscious - and since David Deutsch holds that creativity is the "core functionality" and "defining attribute" of real intelligence, this is a matter of serious importance for AI techs.
- The numinous? It would be a fascinating sight, seeing which world religion would allow nonhuman converts first. (Oh wait: it will of course be Buddhism. Duh. Online in 1994!) But would the AGI bother? Or be able to?
- Csikzentmihalyi's Flow? That is, will the AGI never get happily engrossed?
- Intuition? Well, that's mostly good riddance. As Stuart Sutherland says, "Intuition is that strange instinct that tells a person he is right, whether he is or not."
No; the things it will miss out on without a dark mental backroom are prejudices, neuroses, and epistemic arrogance. (This we pray.)
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The final fuck is not approved for funding; consequent fucks must look elsewhere, for bread and apparatus. Absent yourself, apparatchik: you're not wanted, even though you may well be needed. My manifold disdain slinks along the ground of the logical space until I am distant from myself. Non-local. A twitched paradigm.
(That ^^^ was automatic writing; which I reckon an AGI could write an algorithm for - e.g. "link vocabulary with relaxed grammar with an eye to ironies, puns and resonances" - in about 10 seconds.)
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One of the best first lines I've ever seen:
"He was born in Paris in a big white house in a lane off Avenue Foch. Of a mother blonde and beautiful and a father quiet and rich."
- JP Donleavy,
The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B
The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B
The book itself is sub-Wodehouse bawdiness, but my eyes are still tickled every time.
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Consider suicide the most general complaint one can make. A stinging review of one's experiences, acquaintances, possessions, and cultural position. A monologue without possible retraction or edit. An uninvited housecall.
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My granda: "Och. Snae use, you knockin in yer heid wi learnin... swannin aboot wi a paper in yer haund. Ging an dae sumhin!"
Yessir.
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