“Computers will be really good at chess” was already a trope in 1960s science fiction. HAL 9000 is canonically so good that he was instructed to throw the game half the time so that his human opponents don’t get bored. The Enterprise computer is so good that Spock being able to beat it — Spock — is a major plot point.

You know what? “Go fuck yourself” is way out of line for a conversation about cameras. Bye now.

Some of Kurzweil’s predictions in 1999 about 2019:

A $1,000 computing device is now approximately equal to the computational ability of the human brain. Computers are now largely invisible and are embedded everywhere. Three-dimensional virtual-reality displays, embedded in glasses and contact lenses, provide the primary interface for communication with other persons, the Web, and virtual reality. Most interaction with computing is through gestures and two-way natural-language spoken communication. Realistic all-encompassing visual, auditory, and tactile environments enable people to do virtually anything with anybody regardless of physical proximity. People are beginning to have relationships with automated personalities as companions, teachers, caretakers, and lovers.

Also:

Three‐dimensional nanotube lattices are now a prevalent form of computing circuitry.

And:

Autonomous nanoengineered machines can control their own mobility and include significant computational engines.

And:

ʺPhoneʺ calls routinely include high‐resolution three‐dimensional images projected through the direct‐eye displays and auditory lenses. Three‐dimensional holography displays have also emerged. In either case, users feel as if they are physically near the other person. The resolution equals or exceeds optimal human visual acuity. Thus a person can be fooled as to whether or not another person is physically present or is being projected through electronic communication.

And:

The all‐enveloping tactile environment is now widely available and fully convincing. Its resolution equals or exceeds that of human touch and can simulate (and stimulate) all of the facets of the tactile sense, including the sensing of pressure, temperature, textures, and moistness. Although the visual and auditory aspects of virtual reality involve only devices you have on or in your body (the direct‐eye lenses and auditory lenses), the ʺtotal touchʺ haptic environment requires entering a virtual reality booth. These technologies are popular for medical examinations, as well as sensual and sexual interactions with other human partners or simulated partners. In fact, it is often the preferred mode of interaction, even when a human partner is nearby, due to its ability to enhance both experience and safety.

And:

Automated driving systems have been found to be highly reliable and have now been installed in nearly all roads.

And:

The type of artistic and entertainment product in greatest demand (as measured by revenue generated) continues to be virtual‐experience software, which ranges from simulations of ʺrealʺ experiences to abstract environments with little or no corollary in the physical world.

And:

The expected life span, which, as a (1780 through 1900) and the first phase result of the first Industrial Revolution of the second (the twentieth century), almost doubled from less than forty, has now substantially increased again, to over one hundred.

“Humans are generally far removed from the scene of battle” (if you don’t count the people that the drones are blowing up)

Some of Kurzweil’s predictions in 1999 about 2009:

• “Unused computes on the Internet are harvested, creating … human brain hardware capacity.”
• “The online chat rooms of the late 1990s have been replaced with virtual environments…with full visual realism.”
• “Interactive brain-generated music … is another popular genre.”
• “the underclass is politically neutralized through public assistance and the generally high level of affluence”
• “Diagnosis almost always involves collaboration between a human physician and a … expert system.”
• “Humans are generally far removed from the scene of battle.”
• “Despite occasional corrections, the ten years leading up to 2009 have seen continuous economic expansion”
• “Cables are disappearing.”
• “grammar checkers are now actually useful”
• “Intelligent roads are in use, primarily for long-distance travel.”
• “The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition (CSR) software”
• “Autonomous nanoengineered machines … have been demonstrated and include their own computational controls.”

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insert appropriate reaction GIF here

To avoid confirmation bias and subjective interpretation, we decided to leverage language models for a more objective analysis of the data. By providing the models with the complete set of notes, we aimed to uncover patterns and trends without our pre-existing notions and biases.

… the Hell?

The smug presumption that any brand of spicy autocomplete is a viable tool “to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge” is so fucking galling.

Elon Musk Begs Advertisers to Return as Twitter’s Revenue Plunges

More broadly, (ie not just in relation to Cory Doctorow), I’ve seen the take floating around that’s like “hey, what the heck, artists who were opposed to ridiculous IP rights restrictions when it was the music industry doing it are now in favor of those restrictions when it’s AI, what gives with this hypocrisy?” which I think kind of… misses the point?

I’ve noticed that too, on occasion. I think the “hey whoa, artists are copyright maximalists now?!” takes tend to miss how artists are coming from concerns about what is morally right and how they can make a living, not copyright as a principle. The latter is, at most, a tool to achieve the former.

With that in mind, a lot of the artist outrage over AI feels much more in line with artists getting mad about, say, watermark-removal tools, or people reposting art without credit, than it does with the copyright battles of the 00s.

This says it better than I was going to.

In the first Foundation story, there’s a weird mention of applying symbolic logic to human language that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. Campbell insisted upon it because

he felt in our discussions that symbolic logic, further developed, would so clear up the mysteries of the human mind as to leave human actions predictable. The reason human beings are so unpredictable was we didn’t really know what they were saying and thinking because language is generally used obscurely. So what we needed was something that would unobscure the language and leave everything clear.

Clear being a fortuitous choice of wording on Asimov’s part there, given, well.

TESCREAL and Scientology don’t just share methodology; they both descend directly from “Golden Age” science fiction. In this essay I will

“And a waifu is only a waifu, but a good cigar is a smoke.”

Mastodon has Reply Guys. Lemmy has Cater To Me Whilst I Am Literally, Not Figuratively, Taking a Shit Guys.

banned for obnoxious not-pology

If we trace one ancestry path back to science-fiction fandom, well, there’s John W. Campbell.

I’m trying to think of a polite way to say “in short, no” and “the linked tweet having “effectivealtruism” in it twice should have been a clue”, because I’m not that mean, but I probably need more coffee too.

I’m sure that taking a noisy average of everything posted on Twitter about Gödel machines will produce a Gödel machine, any day now.

Step 2: the Gödel machine becomes the monolith from 2001 that can do anything not explicitly prohibited by the laws of physics

“Pronouns” with a hard R

Bio people here are poorly informed. Just in general some of the presentations are factually incorrect

B-but rationalists are experts at covalent bonds

Also meeting people… as a woman I have never felt as ignored and disrespected as I have in some instances the pa…

I’m sure the feedback becomes more positive in the cut-off part, no doubt about it