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Comment Who asked for this? (Score 1) 53

Weâ(TM)re going to have a brand new source of aggressive noise pollution and another danger you have to watch out for while walking around. It wonâ(TM)t stop with Amazon drones, either. Police drone use will increase and, almost certainly, so will use by other bad actors, corporate or otherwise. Any government that has the power to stop this needs to be pressured to do so. It shouldnâ(TM)t become normalized.

Comment Re: What I don't like about Dawkins (Score 1) 403

The relevant determinant here is not consciousness at all, but mattering and significance. Computers have purposes that are derivative of their programming and the representations that are framed through that programming. Humans and other animals have original purposes that are shaped by more than just their representations of things, but also, and crucially, their feelings about the things with which they are practically involved. Their feelings change the content and vice versa. Machines don't have feelings, and nothing matters to them or has any significance. People shouldn't be misled by talk of "consciousness," it's not what makes us human. What makes us human is the things that we care about. See Charles Taylor, Hubert Deyfus, Martin Heidegger, Harry S. Frankfurt, Nikolas Kompridis, and others on these issues if you want a philosophical explication of this.

Comment Re:Death and Selection (Score 1) 70

Not if they allow you to help your children and grandchildren survive after they're born. Not to mention your extended family, with whom you share many genes. Or species. Or a related species. Or a species that you and your conspecifics depend on to survive. Or something even higher up on the taxonomic hierarchy. Or life as a whole, with whom you share DNA itself. Thinking of natural selection only exerting pressure on an individual organism or even species is way too limited. Whole blood lines, phyla and species disappear under new conditions, and others that survived those conditions reproduce. We share an enormous and probably unquantifiable percentage of our genetic structure with plants. Mutations can take eons to play out. We're currently facing a future in which the conditions of our own existence, even the conditions of life, are threatened. The universe is about to make a selection for us if we can't adapt, and that adaptation might not be hard coded into our genes at all. The capacity for changing how we live in relation to nature could be, though. To live less destructively, for example. If not, wish us luck.

Comment Re:Yes but... (Score 1) 138

None of these are the reasons that 3D failed. It failed because it's a step backwards aesthetically and technologically vs 2D. The great innovation of photography and cinema was the presentation of 3D space on a flat plane. This allows the eye to roam freely over the depth of the image without having to do the work that it would do in real life. 3D can be fun, but it takes more effort on the part of the viewer, and that effort isn't rewarded with any deeper aesthetic experience. The rare exceptions, like Wim Wenders' Pina, prove the rule. Pina was a dance film, it was a re-presentation of something that had already been finished for the stage. Ask yourself why a film like Citizen Kane is so highly regarded for its use of depth of field. It's because you can see everything at once on the 2D plane.

Comment Solidarity (Score 1, Interesting) 42

People in tech should be in 100% solidarity with this, as their jobs are as threatened by AI as anyone else's. I'd go even further than that, though. Given climate change, it's time to abandon a linear (or exponential) notion of technological progress. The planet can't support it, and neither can human beings. Ask what our real technological needs are. They certainly don't include whatever this is.

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