Thanks, yes I enjoyed The Expanse tv show. I'll look at the books.

Yes, by all means, identify myths and blind beliefs and wishful thinking where that occurs.

On the point of reason, though, humans have had our advanced technology for, say, a couple of hundred years.

The universe is billions of years old. We've basically just learnt enough to realise that technology can do things we can't imagine, and we've only just started. Say a civilization started out a billion years ago. How would we even begin to comprehend what they're capable of? In fact, the human mind, our brains, may be simply too limited to form the concepts to understand reality at a deeper level. And as a species, we might always be like that. So, anything is possible.

I think it's just a question, in practice, of what's the outcome. If alien intelligences revealed themselves tomorrow to the world in a way that was undeniable to most people, and the message was simply, hey guys, you're like small children to us. We don't interfere, but generally, try not to fuck it up. What would we be doing different?

Indeed. The critical thinkers did better.

The people who rely on copying what everyone else does, what the authorities say, what the consensus view is, didn't do as well as the people who started using critical thinking systematically, i.e. western enlightenment for example, and other places where that was used. The fact that now we can have an AI in the role of authority or group think isn't surprising when you realise it, because so often we do just rely on common patterns, authorities, and copying.

When the moon was blown out of orbit in 1999, taking the Alphans with it, it also created a rupture in space-time here on Earth, which is why we are all living the alternate version where we never returned to the moon.

I think the mistake is imagining that the politicians are doing anything at all based on reason and science, rather than basing everything on politics and vested interests.

It's agents all the way up.

But yes, great point. Why are we using all this stuff to make life more complicated and creating lots of worthless tasks.

Plutarch and a daily patch of stem cells says it'll work.

So that the question can be seen with fresh eyes, perhaps we could all drop the term AI and just call it pattern processing at machine scale.

Score:4, Funny ?

I guess funny is the closest equivalent to life and consequences of complex dynamics being full of ironies.

Micropilot ?

Why pay for two when one gets the job done?

Ok, it's only because I assume people skim rather than bother reading whole paragraphs. I can paragraphs, honest.

I think one of the greatest advances of the Western Enlightenment was a kind of realization that it's really, really difficult to know something.

It's not just about personal biases, and it's not just about cultural biases. It goes way beyond that -- it's the systems we live in and depend upon.

When we were living in tribal times, you could probably find out through direct experience most of everything you needed to know. And anything beyond that was just magic. How to find food, how to make relationships, and the consequences of various strategies. The tribe was local and could learn and retain that direct tribal experience.

Today we live in an incredibly complex global system which is not only 8 billion people, but they are all agents who are part of systems, of systems, of systems.

We're all dependent on and using systems which we have no idea how they're actually made or how they're connected or what they even do.

We have this problem when you listen to what your doctor thinks is wrong with you, what legal advice you might be given, which foods are being promoted as healthy, which morals and ethical views are being enforced, which laws are being made, which things are taught in education, as well as the wider opinions around which side are the good guys in any particular conflict.

And so on and so on.

We seem to be living in a system that is far more complex than we can understand.

If the internet and now AI are to save us from this bizarre place of being both incredibly interdependent and nobody really understanding what the heck is going on, that tech has to give us exquisitely transparent and clear feedback loops.

When someone in some position of authority or influence, like a politician or a company manager, makes a decision, we have no idea what's really going on and why they really made that decision. Yet it can affect many and in unanticipated ways.

And that's even before we get into the fact that 99% of the brain is unconscious.

We are in the kinda Forbidden Planet scenario where we built an incredibly powerful system yet none of us understand the implications, and by the time the feedback loop completes, it'll be too late.

Generally agree, I mean, companies don't need to make their own steel beams, cars, and teacups, Cloud gives the lower parts of the stack over to the specialists, who can industrialise their skill with a massive production line.

But what's kinda interesting is that there's still industries where lots of small players are needed, like housing construction and maintenance. We don't all live in an IKEA like mass produced kit house. There's huge variety of small custom house designs and arrangements, ad-hoc pieces, as every house is different.

I guess the question is whether an org's IT is going to fit and benefit more from the mass production line model or the custom local one.

Holy cow!

Was there no agency you could have tipped off about it?