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Comment Re: At least some of the actors are honest ... (Score 1) 73

The AI thinks Tay is most likely a rapper and the battle was one of his rap battles. I'm calling stupid on the AI and ignorance on myself. (I also considered if Tay might equal YOB, but couldn't square it. YOB = TACO.)

Care to clarify your reference?

However I'm more focused on the 30% of people who the surveys identify as wannabe authoritarian followers. Or freedom haters, if you prefer. Or just lazy, because being free and increasing your freedom require hard and unending work.

Time for an immigration joke? Anyone know if the Chinese are addressing their demographic problems with migrants who want to escape the YOB/Musk famines? New way to kill two birds with one stone? But the funny part is that I'm sure the Chinese will use AI to filter their immigrants in FAVOR of that 30% who just want to follow orders. More innovators and troublemakers? No thank you. I'm sure Xi thinks he has too many born-in-China problems already.

How to get back to the story? I've got it! (Time for a storm of exclamation points!)

An AI gave me that idea! No idea how my question got interpreted that way!

Comment Re:At least some of the actors are honest ... (Score 0, Redundant) 73

Still sounds ad hominem to me. Assuming both of you are human.

But of the two of you, you actually sound more like the AI.

(What does a guy have to do to get a Funny mod around here? Oh yeah. Be funny. And then be ridiculously lucky to be seen by a moderator with a funny bone.)

Comment Re:At least some of the actors are honest ... (Score 3, Insightful) 73

Gee, I wonder if JoshuaZ might be receiving money for AI-related work... Really hard to get a man to believe something when his income depends on not believing it. (I don't remember whose quotation I'm mangling, and I don't trust any of the AIs to tell me.)

Actually I think the main problem is that we are mostly still thinking in terms of the distorted Turing Test. You should look at the original paper. I'm sure it's on the Internet somewhere.

So I'll go for funny and say we need to correct the test and then consider how many humans would fail a properly revised Turing Test to prove they aren't machines. When more than 50% of the humans are below the critical threshold, then we have to say the AIs are smarter than we are. (Oh wait. Looking at some recent elections, it would appear that it's already too late.)

Comment Obligatory citation if you read Japanese (Score 1) 26

Leaving it here as a continuation of the attempted jokes, but resorting to (detested) Romaji (since Slashdot.jp with Japanese support is long gone), I have to cite Toire No Himitsu (The Secrets of Toilets) about the development of the washlet. That is Volume 22 in the Gakken Manga De Yoku Wakaru Shiri-zu (Understand deeply via manga from school research (the publisher)). Each volume in the series has a corporate sponsor and almost all of them include some corporate history, but I'm pretty sure that Volume 22 didn't say anything about the semiconductor division of this story.

I better confess that I'm not sure of some details because that was a long time ago. Currently almost finished with Volume 226 about corn starch. I've read 'em all, from Volume 1 (around 2000) about hamburgers (sponsored by McDonald's) and even including the rare Volume 13 about home delivery pizza (sponsored by a welcher?). Gakken is still cranking out about 10 volumes a year, 128 pages each.

Comment Going the way of the dinosaurs? (Score 2) 301

Actually reminds me of teaching basic English debate to Japanese students. Most years I used a debate proposition about smoking cigarettes and killing people off was one of the stronger affirmative arguments that got used pretty often.

Currently reading T. Rex and the Crater of Doom and it has me thinking about extinction events again. The book is about a large one provoked by a major disaster, and I actually don't believe we humans yet have that capability, even with all of our nuclear bombs. However I think we are rapidly and and basically at random for the sake of profit fantasies working hard on technologies that could lead to a minor disaster that would be big enough to exterminate our species. And that's the way the Fermi Paradox is pointing, too.

I also got to the same conclusion from an evolutionary perspective, trying to understand punctuated equilibrium. I think Stephen Jay Gould may have put the cart before the horse. But that version would run long and just get a lot of TL;DRs. (The websearch AI says SJG may have gotten to the same conclusions I reacheed on the Freudian part of it, but maybe that's just another hallucination because of how I worded the query... Give the AI an inch of hint and it will take a mile of jumping to what it thinks you might want to hear.)

I sure hope there's some good Funny on the story. But I sure ain't gonna hold my breath on it.

Comment Are the genAI tests comparable to the old SAT? (Score 1) 14

Thanks for the information and I'm seriously considering trying it out, but what I really want would be to know how I perform now in comparison to when I took the SAT. In my case "old SAT" means really old.

However mostly I'm surprised how little interest the story elicited. And now it's rather late to worry about it. Falling off the front page with this 12th comment (and no funny).

Comment Re:They should plan for (Score 1) 79

I just wrote a reply on the topic in a different place, so I can quickly paste and edit a bit here, but I'm sorry if it doesn't give you as much personal focus as you deserve. Sorry, but writing for Slashdot is not too motivating these years. I want to reply to be polite, but...

As regards the dinosaurs, I think it is clear that they had evolved into many niches including the same niches our primate ancestors occupied. Mammals have evolved a lot of primate species and I’m pretty sure the dinosaurs did the same. My focus was on the last few ticks of the million-year clock. I’ve heard numbers from 4 to 8 million years for the branch away from chimpanzees, but you might want to include some ticks for the earlier primates. That’s out of a total of 65 ticks since the dinosaurs were wiped out—but the dinosaurs had 150 ticks of that big clock.

I’ll just summarize my thoughts about the Fermi Paradox. First, I don’t see how we can survive a million years—one tick of the big clock—if we continue on the path we are going on. Exponential growth and geologic time do not go together. But I think we have shown the capability to create AI successors, which gives me a kind of dark hope for some sort of survival. However, if any form of machine intelligence ran amok, there would be a paperclip crisis, and do to the exponential problem, the universe would be quite full of paperclips. (One of my wilder speculations was about dark matter and energy as some form of paperclips)

Therefore my optimistic resolution of the FP is that the aliens exist, and they are intelligent, curious, and merciful. If they were only intelligent, then they would probably exterminate any potential problems, but I think they curious to watch how life evolves, even though their own evolution is probably convergent (within the laws of physics).

Comment Lamarkian evolution of religious lies (Score 1) 49

Feeding the trolls never works. Trusting TepCo may belong in the same category.

Don't get me wrong. I actually think nuclear power could have been a good thing. However I think the military motivations and resulting bad decisions drove the technology down the wrong road and now we've hit a dead end. "You can't get anywhere from here."

Not sure how the YOB got dragged into the story, even though he's sticking his YUGE orange buffoonish nose into everything these months, but I do have a possibly fresh thought on the religious side. Funny story starts with Sigmund Freud. The book was by Umberto Eco or Stephen Jay Gould and it described Freud's attempts to develop an evolutionary theory for mental diseases. The approach failed because evolution is not Lamarkian.

But religious development is quite Lamarkian. The acquired characteristics are deliberately acquired and then deliberately passed down to the later versions of the same religion. And the main focus is on creating lies that people want to believe more strongly than the previous lies. Popular examples include "You will never die", "Follow these rules and you will become rich", and even "Gawd loves you". The last one is especially problematic since most normal people are aware of the limitations on their lovability.

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