Hard-sf is rapidly become not just a niche genre of science fiction but the basis of one of our most important technologies, because weβve found a way to make computers generate sf stories that are so realistic that we can use their technical details to solve real-life problems.
Weβve now reached the stage of fascism at which the United Statesβ government considers a free market to be a radical far-left concept.
Yes, she was protecting women and girls by inviting Epstein to the premiere of The Cursed Child, long after Epsteinβs first conviction.
For most of human history, people only ever experienced awe commingled with ignorance and fear, from which they distracted themselves by calling it βgodβ or βgodsβ or βspiritsβ. We have the unprecedented privilege of experiencing awe commingled with understanding.
Programming languages are primarily means to articulate precise ideas about data, transformations and processes, and only secondarily tools for producing working software. As the AI coding revolution continues, the need to articulate ideas precisely will not decrease in value.
The earliest author known by name was EnαΈ«Γ©duanna, (possibly first) high priestess of the moon god Nanna in Ur, daughter of king Sargon of Akkad, and prolific poet, who lived circa 2300 BCE.
Is any common experience more intellectually and morally corrosive than prolonged exposure to social media?
Watching βSqueezeβ on Christmas Eve and wondering whether Eugene Tooms rather than Santa Claus will come down the chimney.
At last it is time, before I fade into the gentle embrace of dotage, to learn the subtle and forgotten art of Ring-making.
How about⦠instead of a folding phone you just have two phones, and you can use one of them or take them both out of your pocket and put them next to each other? Or maybe three�
It seems to me that when people say they believe in objective morality, they really mean that theyβre very certain of their moral beliefs.
People who believe in objective morality: what is the procedure for determining the truth or falsity of moral assertions?
People called βJames Bondβ keep being born, growing up to serve in the Royal Navy and then join MI6. The government is currently tracking seventeen further cases in the 007 pipeline. We donβt know why it happens.
Life would be better for everyone if we collectively abolished the policing of gender norms.
War is failure. Humanity wonβt truly grow up until every person fully internalises this.
The government of the United States of America should not be an apparatus dedicated solely to propping up its Presidentβs fragile self-esteem.
Science is the ongoing discovery of ideas that are false.
Almost the entire discourse about AI risk, AI safety and AI alignment is, for all it might be interesting, utterly irrelevant to systems we can build now or are likely to be able to build over the next many decades.
Letβs start with the billionaires and work down.
The main teaching of the Buddha is that numbered lists are really cool.
The path from ignorance to knowledge winds though the endless valley of uncertainty and confusion. Being comfortable with doubt is amongst the greatest of virtues.
I quite want to write a short essay on knowledge, problems, knowledge generation, problem solving, tractability, knowledge models and AI. But would anyone read it?
The rate of improvement in the exploitation of old ideas says nothing about the rate of generation of new ideas.
The Soviet Union provided the vaccine that eliminated smallpox in eastern Europe, India and China. Smallpox killed 300 million people in the 20th century. So the USSR did some good in the world. What has post-Soviet Russia done that isnβt a net negative?
If we make a better world then fewer bad things will happen. It sounds utterly obvious when stated like that but a surprising number of people donβt seem to grasp it. You canβt suppress bad things by making the world worse.
Counterpart.
We need a deep and profound secularism, in which governments donβt attempt to impose any ideological commitments on citizens, except for the most minimal commitments to liberalism and pluralism that we need to be able to all live together regardless of our individual values.
Weβve made machines that pretend to be people pretending to be machines pretending to be people.
Itβs especially true that the βAIsβ like Claude or ChatGPT are fictional characters. Indeed, much of the corpus whose statistical properties they reproduce are human-written conversations between fictional people and fictional AIs.
Theyβre interactive fiction generators. Sometimes the fiction is βmainstreamβ, sometimes alternative-history, sometimes hard-sf, sometimes fantasy. Thereβs literally no way of knowing which without reference to something external.
