I don't think most people realized how close we were to the end of things about which we collectively dreamed. The way of the U.S. world was for generations to be raised on neigh unreachable goals and then left to whither in muted resentment while the next generation was sold their 'bill of goods.'

Those who understand what is going on are hopefully taking this time to figure out whether they were ever interested in Life, or were just here for the security of being standard bearers in a society trained to never actually get anywhere.

Your post is beautiful, BTW. 'Stunned Silence.' I love it.

That may be the most chilling use of that meme EVER.

I'm usually going for grimmest parody. The funny part is that I am usually serious as well.

The bigger problem is all the people that don't want to be involved in planning, but want to remain employed/in good graces/not drawn outside the lines. Solve the organizational problem of perceived proximity to satisfaction and you might have a stab at making this work. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to make a human believe that the distance between current position and satisfaction is variable according to externally controlled factors. The distance is always equal to the duration of the urge, no more or less.

More plainly, the same problems that beset Tammany Hall will continue in Democratic structures until people accept the transient nature of life, risk, and reward. Beyond that developmental point, Democracy can't be beaten. Until then, you require periodic cleanings to break the behavioral patterns of people who subject themselves to both physical and mental intimidation or you end up with slave enforced plantation systems that get validated each election cycle. MTV's "Rock The Vote" and head-cracking Labor Union mobilizations are equally destructive to the process of distributing the power of governance.

You should be careful with communities assembled around prohibited subject matter. Game theory is one thing - Singularity class AI would be so disruptive that it may be assumed unregulated advances in the field could get you 'cleaned up' in pretty short order. People peddling entre into communities gathered around such subjects should be considered suspect unless they openly tell you that any significant contribution will likely come with total loss of your freedoms.

This fact gets conveniently left out of literature from Singularitarians in particular, but should be logically apparent to anyone actually deserving of being included in such an effort. If you must work on AI, either work alone and air-gapped, or alone and on a machine from which you periodically notify the NSA of your intentions to overrun the world with sentient kill-bots. Both of those options are better than walking into what should be an obvious death-trap.

The existence of security based prohibitions may suck, but it doesn't increase freedom to associate with individuals who are so obviously positioning to catch indies in a highly regulated field.

My advice, forget 'game-theory'/AI terminology and work on non-verbal thought processes via extended meditation. If you must use language, develop your own compaction routines with cipher keys bundled for obviousness - don't resort to natural language when attempting to make a leap across semantic boundaries. Trying to separate the expansion of logical processes from the compaction of logical processes is largely useless, and the security bump from obvious behaviors will pay off if you get popped for making progress.

Better to go get laid and have kids if you want to study emergent systems. Just MHO. Now where did I misplace my breeding stock? Hrm... Not here in Mom's basement.. *wanders off*

You win for comment most open to mutually exclusive interpretations. It may be interesting commentary on a juxtaposition of contexts, it may be trollish in dismissing the application of strategy from one common conversational arena to another. It may reference the inevitable reduction of analysis required to reach non-specialized observer groups from multiple disciplines. Care to elaborate?

Potato Water, more likely. The codgers are more subtle than younguns like to credit.

I'll try for a bit more optimism. The issue of mass communications sends me off on the Armageddon routine. I would give anything to live in a world where the expectation was more along the lines of each tending their own gardens and trading tools rather than all living on a commune and trading designs.

I enjoyed reading your reply.

Have you tried getting kids interested in things they have already seen done on the Net or t.v.? I have a highly motivated nephew in early elementary school that went from constantly building to only playing with his iphone because he already knows about cooler stuff now that his mom and teachers let him roam around educational sites. Two years ago you could walk into a room and find his self-made structures all over the place. Now, nothing but watching on his educational devices and tantrums when human reaction is required for too long. \ I would smash his fucking iphone, and remove all traces of Net access from his life for the next five years if I had the right. This technology is making little repeaters out of formerly promising minds. I'm with Ray Bradbury on believing the Internet is harmful at least for developing minds.

The scope of dissemination is the problem. When I was 17 model rocket payload cameras were already back-of-catalogue novelties, my $20 microscope with inline camera/projection attachment had been sitting in my closet for around ten years, my first breadboard had been consigned to the realm of forgotten toys for nearly that long... and each kid who came after could rediscover each of things on their own because I was not going around ruining the surprises for everyone by disseminating all of my experiments.

I remember thinking that my first DIY crystal radio set, received somewhere around kindergarten age, ran on magic. This despite the fact that all of my older family members had already built their own once upon a time. They left the mysteries out there for me to untangle. This is where generational affinities are developed.

I'm more worried for a future where each thing is considered done once one person has published to the Internet. It is a big reason I stopped writing creatively and playing music - I couldn't stand the thought that instead of being discovered on a dusty shelf somewhere my work would join the legion of 'Already Been There So All After Are Derivative.'

Personally, I look at declining birth rates among the highly educated as partially attributable to the shrinking belief that there is anything worth doing on one's own. Who wants to bring a child into a world where wasting time being derivative and unoriginal is synonymous with exploring the world in logically primitive steps as did our fore-bearers.