In an elite school it doesn't seem there would be a whole lot of "year full of dumb people" happening.
Don't forget the vast number of students admitted on the basis DEI (race, sex, injustice over the years, etc)....
When you admit based on criteria other than merit and measures of intelligence, you're bound to have more dim bulbs than you might think of in an "elite" university.
Dude. Its Kenya, not Somalia
What's the difference....?
Yes, we are more car dependent than the 70's, but thats only because we're a larger country, more populace more cities than the 70s
I grew up in the 70's....and to my eyes, it isn't much different as far as requiring a car to live....never in my lifetime has there been any meaningful public transit anywhere I've lived across the US, but it isn't like anyone I've ever known missed it, etc.
Just normal way of life here.....I started working at restaurants when I was about 16yrs....saved my money and bought my first car (with some parental help) as a senior in High School.....and got that first taste of independence
I just thank GOD there was no social media back then and we didn't have cameras everywhere....ugh.
But the US has always in modern times been car centric....to see when it was not you'd likely have to look back about 100 years....
For that I got a student ID with picture...and NO DATEs on it.
I also got an
But that ID alone has saved me a TON of money over the years getting educational rates and prices.
Check to see what your local colleges put on their IDs and you might find it worth it to do the same.
It's going to get substantially higher than $4. I think it could end up pushing 7 bucks. Historically, the US has tolerated recessions more lightly than it has gas above 5 bucks. So this is a really really big deal, not least because demand destruction through mode shifting is much less tenable than in the 70s due to greater car dependency, and the SPR is already extensively drawn down ahead of winter. A whacking great recession may well be on the way.
Maybe that high in the "weird" states that overtax and have massive regulations on formulation, etc.....but here in the New Orleans...TX area, I don't see it getting that expensive.....
I don't get from you response one thing clearly...are you saying we had greater car dependency in the 70's or we have it now?
Also, what is "SPR" please?
Just pulling a throttle on a silent EV "motorcycle"....even though it might launch you into the future....will not have the same appeal...
That's the thing with metaphors, they have similarities but there are also points of divergence. Point is, my metaphor was not meant to be understood as a technical description of the system's workings.
For the unsuspecting soul who approaches this modern oracle without the faintest idea of how it works, the experience of facing unexpected demons could serve as a warning of the dangers they may face if they approach the tool without caution.
People compare AI and robots with Frankenstein's monster (or with Pinocchio, on a good day, if they want to give the story a positive spin), the construct which gains a life of its own.
But current LLM chats are more aptly compared with a ouija board. The machine itself is inert, and you can see it as a playful activity. But the model contains within it the highlights of a whole culture compressed during its training. You can access the souls of all the authors whose works were used for learning; but also of all the internet fanatics, trolls and scammers. When you set the machine in motion, you never know whose spirit are you invoking to answer.
I wonder how many people on this site can ride a motorcycle. They have lots of opinions about the clutch, though.
I do. Just about a year ago, I bought a 2023 Indian Chief Bobber (dark horse edition)....just shy of 1900 CC of pure fun.
I could not imagine buying an electric motorcycle....even with all the things they may try to emulate.
There's now way they can simulate how a big V-Twin rumbles at idle or roars with gas......no way an electric can simulate that zen as you become one with the road and a mechanical beast.
Why go to all the trouble with fake clutches and sound effects and shaker motors....to simulate what is already simple there with an ICE motorcycle.
Without even going into real range anxiety (bikes cannot carry large batteries)....it's just the experiences.
The sounds and smells and feel of a real bike....every time I jump on mine, it's an adventure.
I had mine a couple months and removed the slip on exhaust parts and replaced with some "shorties"....now it sound just right....I can't imagine changing the mp3 recording on an EV bike would be quite so rewarding.
Around here you have your summer car and your winter beater. Sure you drive the winter beater all year round to pickup landscaping materials and such, but your summer car never hits those pot holes and salt.
Where do you live where you have "winter" and "summer" cars...??
I've never even heard of such a thing......
Hello from New Orleans....
We can wait them out....$4 gas isn't that big a deal....
s/how the person mental started/ how the person feels mental states/
There is no room for it to manifest in a computer program. There is no room for any "magic" in computer programs.
That's true for classic software in a trivial way, in the sense that a sequence of logical inference steps (i.e. a deterministic symbolic program) do not reflect upon itself.
However it may be possible that the computer program is not conscious, but the computer running the software is. LLMs in particular generate their output not from the specific instructions included in the program, but from the weights trained in the model; the software instructions are a requirement for the weights being interpreted, but the outcome doesn't necessarily follow the rules of a formal system and an inference process.
Current LLMs do not have consciousness because their processing is too simple for it to emerge; not because the software substrate is deterministic and mathematical. If the base software were processing the weights of the model in ways similar to how neurons generate brain waves, it is plausible that the emergent system-level information patterns appearing at the data level could exhibits the attributes of consciousness, including self-perception and self-reflection. This is true even if the computer software is deterministic, in the same that the neurons in our brain behave in deterministic electro-chemical ways.
On the contrary, it means that neuroscientists have measured precise ways in which brain waves of vision and audio processes converge into taking decisions before the person reports being conscious of taking such decision; and that they have studied precise ways in which altering the brain chemistry affects how the person mental started. Just look for the papers on these experiments for these topics.
The problem is that we can't define consciousness. No one can agree on what it means, or whether it means anything at all
No way. We may not have a full scientific understanding, but neuroscience has made huge advances in how consciousness emerges in the brain and how it is affected by the changing conditions of its low-level processes.
We cannot say that machines at some point will never have similar emergent patterns that could become conscious. But we for sure can say that the current ramblings of text generation from LLMs definitely can't be conscious, because they are created directly by much simpler low-level deterministic computations.
The long LLM-generated dissertations that people mistake for conscious reflections do not come anywhere near from the complex introspective processes that we know are involved in having consciousness; they are just mechanic pattern generation from the highly compressed encoding of human culture one which they have been trained. It's true that our own brains do learn by highly compresssing our live experiences, but we know for sure that our consciousness involves something more than just compiling memories.
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. -- Henry Spencer
