LastThursday

You're right, but don't forget you are also part of the forum, so you can do your bit. I would say that on balance the admins are a bit wiser and more mature, so they can set the tone. But equally they can't force anyone to be a certain way, especially the several hundreds of people who use the forum regularly and who come and go, it's just not a realistic ask. As I said, collectively we set the tone of this forum, we each play our part, don't expect to be spoonfed by others.

@Sandhu expectation is not reality. If what you expect does not align with reality, then you will have to bring about that change yourself, not expect others to do it for you. Step up and give us the things you expect and others will follow.

Why the seriousness? This place is and always has been just a market place for ideas and chit chat nothing more. It amazes me how some people don't realise this. You won't get enlightened here, you won't get high philosophy, you won't get intellectual rigour. But it does have its wisdom and nuggets of gold floating around, you just have to appreciate when you see it and enjoy the rest for what it is.

I like to think about it like an infinite jigsaw puzzle. Where the puzzle picture is the void or infinity. The individual pieces are created by cutting up or dividing that infinity, there are no missing pieces so there are no gaps. The pieces are the structure and order, and they all fit together perfectly which makes them consistent with each other. In reality the divisions shift about over time, but everything always perfectly fits together. Reality is then Infinity (or Void) + Division. Division is the first cause that makes reality happen because without it there would be no puzzle pieces, just void/infinity. Division is just awareness or consciousness. So consciousness and structure are just appearances or bits of infinity. Consciousness arises from the contrasts between pieces, because each piece has a unique shape.

@BojackHorseman as soon as you said past 40, I was like uh-huh. It doesn't get talked about so much anywhere but this is Mid-life Crisis territory. Although I think that name is overly-dramatic and has certain negative connotations attached it: fast cars and being impulsive. A better way to see it is as a maturation process. There are stages you go through as you age, like walking, puberty, brain maturation at 25 and so on. For some people they begin a process of seeing life more clearly around the age of 40, an awakening if you like. And it can really shake the foundations of your life. Essentially it's a process of re-organisation in your identity. For me personally it come on very unexpectedly and was a living hell for a good number of years, I was about 38. I become intensely emotional, everything became meaningless and I disliked who I was intensely: it was nearly like a second puberty, but very different. I also wanted to run away from everything in my life and start again, and I wanted everything to fit into what I wanted fuck everyone else (that's how I felt at the time). Contrasted to how I'd been before 38, it was like day and night, I has always been optimistic, upbeat and well-adjusted. But I would say everyone's experience of a mid-life crisis (if you do experience it), is different and personal. In my experience it is just a phase, it has a beginning and an end. You may end up being a very different person through the other end, and in my case it was worth the pain (mostly). It may last some years. If you think you're depressed, then get help, there's no shame in that. Otherwise, just take one day at a time, and listen very carefully to your deepest needs small or large and try and cater for those. Do all the right things to keep your mood up: exercise, sunlight, socialise, decent diet, sleep well - even if you don't want to. But also take action on whatever arises, even if it feels difficult or alien to you.

Other than the things I've mentioned? Coding is extremely varied. On the technical side there are a large number of platforms, programming languages, operating systems, database platforms, cloud platforms, API's and so on, often multiple of those in one set up. Every company I've ever worked for has had a completely different setup. So how does an AI get to know your setup without eyes, ears and a mouth? The only way is to show the AI the setup in detail: this is the file system, this is the database, this is the code base, these are our documents and so on. It would have to be able to understand that interaction in a frictionless way (like an experienced coder does). I think AI could excel here, in the technical domain. In some sense I would be happy to hand off the drudge work to an AI, most of it is repetitive and time consuming and boring (e.g. setting up a database). Most coding is quite repetitive: set me up a form that customer can fill out and save it to a database, and auto-email the customer with an acknowledgement, I must have done that same task many times in my career on many different platforms. Separately, the AI would have to be proactive and interact with people. Conceivably it could do this via email or some sort of chat channel. It would have to know that John knows about the front end, Sarah knows about the back end, Jane is the boss and what she says goes, Fred is the stroppy impatient customer etc. A large part of coding is dealing with people, understanding what they want, and knowing who to talk to. Current AI is simply not up to the human aspect of communication, it's good, but it's not there yet. As it stands AI is kind of passive, and unnuanced. It doesn't ask questions when there are gaps in its knowledge, it doesn't have a long memory, it's bad at explaining itself, it's a "yes man" and doesn't push back, it doesn't innovate, it doesn't see the bigger picture, it lies. It would have to improve a lot in those areas before it can take my job.

@Wilhelm44 It may eventually, but not in the next ten years. Three things I can think of: Domain Knowledge There's always two states that a coding project is in: starting from scratch or working with an existing code base. In either case the AI needs some input to chew on. If there's no codebase, then that input has to come either from requirements specifications paperwork or from humans telling it exactly what they want. In general both those sources are patchy and ambiguous, and so there will be a constant iteration loop with the AI to get the right outcome, there will always have to be a human in that loop - people who have domain knowledge in their heads. If there's an existing codebase it's better because there's a large amount of domain knowledge encoded in the structure of the code base. But a human is still needed to tell the AI exactly what's required when something new needs to go in. In short the nature of programming will change from entering lines of code to entering lines of English (or whatever natural language), but a human will always have to check and course correct the AI, this is just coding by a different paradigm. Also capitalism always strives for the most bang for your buck, so if having a human + AI is more productive than just AI alone, then it human + AI is always chosen. It's the same reason UBI will never be a thing. Inertia and Economics For most companies to take on AI there will be a cost in re-organising their staff and their working practices. There is also the cost of AI per unit of time, and its effectiveness as a coder. Only when the cost drops below that of employing a human AND it is at least as effective as a human coder, then will companies prefer to use AI over people. A techie will need to be employed to set up the AI in the first place and maintain it. It will take a long time for most companies to reach that point and ten years seems about right, maybe longer - even if the AI tech is in place and is nearly good enough, which will probably happen in the next three to four years.

One thing's for sure, AI will be everywhere and in everything (as if it isn't already). In the next ten years: It will be normal to have an AI friend or AI partner. Everyone will still have to go into the office, but we'll be talking (literally) to AI all day getting it to do things for your employers. I won't be out of my coding job, but I will be expected to be 10x more productive than I am today. The big players will still be there, but there will be a multitude of smaller players and ways to run very powerful AI for yourself "off grid". China will be big in AI, probably bigger than America. AI will get a lot cheaper to run, and per unit of compute will consume orders of magnitude less power. AI hardware compute power will increase exponentially and may well use quantum or light chips. We'll have embodied AI in very realistic humanoid robots, but they'll be the preserve of the rich and research institutions. AI will be used extensively in medicine and especially for designing very targeted drugs and doing it cheaply - possibly personalised drugs. There still won't be flying cars.

Totally agree. Humans evolved to be constantly on the move, the more you move the better for your health. Even twenty minutes of walking can be a great benefit if you can't face a sweaty gym, small steps.

What can I say? Either you believe in infinity or you don't. You can only have infinitely many steps if you believe in infinity. And as I said, you're only looking at one infinity. You CAN cover an infinite number of steps if they're infinitely small in size, that makes two infinities - which come together to make something finite. The confusion with Zeno's paradox is that it is a pure thought experiment, not something you can concretely perform in reality. But I get where you're coming from, even some mathematicians don't believe in infinity. It's would be interesting to try and find an actual infinity in reality. Infinity is a super slippery concept to truly understand.

Like any paradox the resolution to it is to look at it from a different angle. In this case it's a matter of realising there are two infinites at work, not one. Essentially it says it takes an infinite number of steps to get from A to B because you can keep dividing the space between A and B forever, and so it should be impossible to get from A to B: that's one infinity. But what's missing is that for every division the space shrinks by the same ratio, and gets infinitesimally small (another infinity). So one infinity "cancels" the other infinity to produce a finite distance. This can seem super counterintuitive, but you see it all the time in maths. Calculus is based on the same idea. I'm not sure it proves anything about God or consciousness.

I see it as more dynamic, more like a landscape than anything else. You only ever operate from whatever level of consciousness you're currently in. Maybe you start spending more and more time in higher levels, but you can still slip back to lower. One thing that happens is that from higher levels, the lower levels get recontextualised and this can permanently affect how you experience the lower levels. Once you've gained knowledge or insight, it kind of sticks around and affects everything. I don't like the terms higher and lower, it's more like this state and that state, and they're both different and have their own qualities, and maybe in one state you can see things more clearly than the other.

@Sugarcoat you have a great mind.

@Chadders what could be more spiritual or divine than union, and then creation? Then again many things have a divine dimension to them seen in the right light. In some sense you could say that anything that is "natural" is also divine, irrespective of negative consequences such as overpopulation. I'm not sure that maturity is necessarily the best argument for or against having a family. Is it that you need to be mature to start a family or is it that it matures you in the process? A stronger trait to have would be commitment. Can you be committed to your family unit and your kids for twenty years or more? Except I reckon most wouldn't look at themselves and say: boy I've lacked commitment in my life, I really shouldn't be starting a family. No, they just go right ahead and do it anyway, because it's a natural urge if not traditional. It's not really going out of fashion any time soon, even if the make up of having a family changes with tradition. Even people who at one time dismiss having a family, may succumb later in life. But I admit, commitment is probably some form of maturity. I think it's hard to be prescriptive about a process that lasts twenty years or more, if not the rest of your life - things change too much over that time to say anything much about it from the outset, even if it seems obvious two people would make lousy parents. Personally, I've sat on the fence about it most of my life. I feel variously: happy that all my money and time are my own without compromise, I'm stress free moslty, but then, that I'm missing out on the love and connection and joy of having a family (and maybe even yes, maturity). All my friends have just got on with it, without much deeper thought to it I suspect. Most of my male friends weren't ready to be fathers, but I think that was just a hypothetical fear of confinement and probably the unknown - they're all decent committed fathers now without exception. I would probably be the same if the situation arose.

@Leo Gura Half way through the vid and it's good so far. I've argued for the process of evolution on here before being able to explain the intelligence of biology, no God required. But you're quite right that without knowing how life itself arose from non-biological matter, then evolution doesn't have a firm base (because evolution implies a very long chain of cause and effect). My two ideas are that 1) there isn't a difference between dead and alive matter, it's a completely smooth sliding scale from one to the other. 2) life bootstrapped itself from non-life by obtaining a sense of self or identity, i.e. to be alive any alive thing needs to keep itself intact against everything else. My other observervation is about infinity. You exlude mathematical infinity in the arguments, but any discussion about infinity really does have to be mathematical in some sense. The definition of an "absolute" infinity being the lump sum of everything is ultimately circular; because who's to say that there are infinitely many things to lump in? A better definition of infinity should always say something about unboundedness and not how much it can contain. It's non-obvious that reality is unbounded in every aspect. I'm hoping for some subjective idealist arguments in the second half, here goes...

I hadn't heard of Harry Mack, but he's phenomenal.

I tried again with Miles and a better mic this time and had a lot smoother conversation. It still misunderstands and goes off on a tangent, so you kind of have to interrupt it and guide it back on track. I can definitely see using it for bouncing ideas around.

I have a whole list of these I enjoy on my journal here:

@integral I tried it for ten minutes or so. It was very good, but still not quite there IMO. I did feel quite awkward talking to a machine especially since the tone was super upbeat and American (sorry Americans) - like a happy puppy. It wasn't helped by the bot misinterpreting what I was saying, maybe due to a bad mic or just an accent thing. I found that if I didn't talk cleanly to it (no hesitation or mumbling) it would misunderstand me and start going off on a tangent. All in all: awkward. But it's still science fiction come true.

If the system allows the by-pass then it's there for a reason, take advantage of it. If you're concerned about eligibility, but not convinced by the people you've spoken to, then speak to someone higher who can definitively say yes or no. Also, do you have a tutor you can talk things over with, can they find out for you? And, if you're still not convinced after all that, then don't take the option. Either way, a year or the extra effort may seem like a lot now, but in the bigger scheme of things it won't seem like much. An extra year would give your more experience and knowledge and better grounding, or putting in the effort now will rob you of time and peace, but it's only for a short period.

It's no coincidence. AI is made in our image. What the technologists are hell bent on doing is creating a facsimile of a human. Why? Because machines are tireless, don't complain and don't get ill. But we are also intrinsically fascinated by ourselves, it is an indulgence for men to create a person from wires and electricity and pure logic.

Probably Donald Hoffman or possibly Daniel Dennett or Anil Seth. Being an AI is just the modern version of Rene Descartes "Evil Demon", an all powerful entity that creates a deceptive reality for us, and try as we might we can never be certain that we're not being deceived. We can't have "certain knowledge" about anything at all. On the face of it your question has no clear answer. Then again, the only AI is the AI we have now, and it's taken 70 odd years to get here, and it's very clear that it's nowhere near the level of capability to simulate our reality. So if you're basing your question on our current AI (anything else is a fantasy), then no, we're not AI. The problem with these sorts of questions is that you have to find the "Evil Demon" or catch him out, to prove or disprove the question. You may as well replace the word "AI" with "God", it's the same difference.

Some of my random analytical thoughts. You could say that "feeling empty" is just a figure of speech or stock phrase, and so it just stands for something not connected to its literal meaning: there isn't some sort of emptiness. Maybe then it's just a general malaise whatever that might be, some negativity, so nothing special there. On the other hand, if you take it in a more metaphorical way, then just look to its opposite: "feeling full". Full of what and what is being filled? I guess that's fairly nebulous, but you could substitute in any number of things like joy, excitement, stimulation, emotion, fulfilment of goals and so on. You are the container being filled with these nominalisations, like a bottle being filled with liquid. Feeling empty then is not being filled with those positive things, a metaphorical lack. I think the common everyday usage of it though is just as a way to describe a generally overwhelming emotion, say "feeling empty" after someone's death; or, when the fun stuff in life has been taken away, or when there's nothing meaningful going in life in general. In short a lack or removal of something positive. It is fascinating how much metaphorical language is taken in a literal way. People go around acting as if there are actual hurdles to jump over, and mountains to climb, and bottled up rage ready to explode. It goes to show how much abstract ideas and emotions need to be grounded in more concrete things even if it's just in our heads. Consequently, one way to do therapy is to play with that metaphorical language: "if you were to feel full, how would that be?" and so on.

The only way to change how you act is through introspection and self awareness - which is what you're doing. When your anger is triggered by whomever, it triggers a programme of set behaviour (i.e. a habit) within yourself. That happens because nearly 99% of the way we act is automatic. So you have options: cut the link between the trigger and response (behaviour), or change the behaviour itself, or just avoid the trigger. Since you learnt the behaviour over time, it can be unlearnt. One way to unlearn a habit is by pure repetition: every time you find yourself overacting angrily, you force yourself to calm down or behave differently in the moment - this is doable but takes time and patience and good self-awareness. Another way to unlearn behaviour is by interrupting the automatic programme. You can do this by doing something completely different in the middle of the behaviour: hug your father for example or walk out of the room, start dancing, go for a run, the choices are endless. The point is to interrupt the pattern every time it happens. Over time the behaviour will be weakened or "unlearnt" - and as a bonus you will find other ways to cope with your angry emotion. I'm not pulling this out of nowhere, this is what NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is all about.

@Ninja_pig classic Escher. @trenton your link didn't work.