📡 No.317 — From utopian Star Trek to absurdist Douglas Adams? ⊗ How to fix “AI’s original sin” ⊗ Islands of coherence
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📡 No.317 — From utopian Star Trek to absurdist Douglas Adams? ⊗ How to fix “AI’s original sin” ⊗ Islands of coherence
The first step is to understand the fundamental difference between humans and AIs. We are analog, chemical beings, with emotions and feelings. Compared with machines, we think slowly—and we act too fast, failing to consider the long-term consequences of our behavior (which AI can help predict). So we should not compete with AI; we should use it. At... See more
Esther Dyson • Don’t Fuss About Training AIs. Train Our Kids
The one thing technology doesn’t provide us with is a sense of how to make the best use of technology.
Pico Iyer • The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (TED Books)
It also could not be a better time for a paradigm shift. AGI and likely soon after superintelligence will force us to rethink human role in society. In the new world, the value of the human brain is increasingly defined on how creative it can be. Cosmic optimism helps us navigate this transformation by emphasizing focus on the very human qualities ... See more
The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge.
Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to
... See morepaulgraham.com • How to Get New Ideas
Bank of spiky takes:
Essay quality can be objectively measured.
AI editors will breed a generation of brilliant human writers.
Typewriters should be mandatory for writers.
Give kids remarkable tablets instead of iPads.
Take gibberish seriously if you want to improve your prose.
Your truest self is waiting for you in a pseudonym.
Write down every th
The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism. For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the assumpt
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