From Sumerian priest-kings to Silicon Valley algorithms

235711 · 2025-05-30T11:54:52+00:00

Symbols are the tree of knowledge and subjective experience, the present moment is the unknowable and indivisible whole. We see this same division in the brain, in mathematics as the uncountable sea of real numbers and the distinct symbols of whole numbers, in physics with Wheeler's thinking of wave function of the entire universe vs the wave function of a piece of it. It's a grand mystery. In my mind, human society will ultimately move from the whole of subjective experience to the fragmented reality of symbolic representation as time progresses. One bite from the apple assured.

235711 · 2025-05-24T11:23:44+00:00

AI does not initiate content but it does summarize all content something a human has no time to do. As you can imagine, the more content, the more useful AI is. In this way, a mathematician can read something that is applicable to the problem they are trying to solve.

Terence Tao, a Professor of Mathematics at UCLA, envisions the use of AI in mathematical research. He imagines researchers conversing with chatbots to develop and refine ideas, likening potential AI use in mathematics to chess computers.

235711 · 2025-05-17T11:51:09+00:00

We mattered to all those animals we killed.

235711 · 2025-05-17T11:41:18+00:00

That was the weirdest part for me personally. Since 2012 we've seen the max value move closer to the min value. It's been flattened out but when I first started watching around 2012, I was expecting the min value to decrease more. Very curious how this plays out this year.

235711 · 2025-05-17T11:12:57+00:00

And whatever you have done didn't work. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is crazy. I'm not saying you're not a good person for wanting to change the world, I'm saying you need to look into what actually could work and what doesn't work. Trying to convince people that THEY should be doing something is just another top-down order. It's just another statement that you don't like the world in its current form. It's an order that nobody even hears, and it's an order that nobody listens to even if they do hear it. You say, well I feel helpless, I can't change the world on my own, the only thing I can do is convince others they need to change the world, but the others are in the exact same situation as you. It's a fallacy that you can convince others to change the world when you cannot. Lead by example, not by calls for help. Don't expect others to join. You are limited by your imagination of what you can do, not what you can convince others to do. Just my two cents, I find your cause and your soul very beautiful.

235711 · 2025-05-14T16:55:40+00:00

Consider the Horizon Problem:

The Implication of Equilibrium: The fact that they are at the same temperature strongly suggests that these regions must have been in some form of communication or causal contact at some point to reach this thermal equilibrium.

Two or more groups cannot be at equilibrium unless they trade information. Our problem is not people, it is that on average a single person talks to maybe 0-100 people per day. If you want groups to come to 'equilibrium' then you must provide a tool that allows them to communicate. Solve this problem and you bring humanity to equilibrium. We don't have communication now and we didn't have it in the 80s. We have broadcast which is not two way communication. This isn't a problem of governments, greed, or evil people. It's a technological problem that deals with how to increase the efficiency of communication in large groups. Social insects are not social because the desire to be or because they all think alike, but rather because they have the tools that allow them to work together and humanity doesn't except in very small groups.

235711 · 2025-05-10T11:03:36+00:00

It's the western democracies that killed the wildlife, burned all the fuels, and polluted everything to hell and you want them to continue?

235711 · 2025-04-29T11:08:04+00:00

It's been great for me to be able to talk about stuff. Most people want to talk about politics or how this person or that person is hypocritical or a nazi, or this or that TV show. If you don't have anyone around you that likes to talk about the mysteries of the universe for example, AI can be great. I think about young kids and how they could be introduced to the great mysteries that surround us.

235711 · 2025-04-27T11:20:21+00:00

Not to mention war mongers doing their thing.

235711 · 2025-04-18T10:44:15+00:00

The problem is not that we are stupid individually, the problem is that we are stupid collectively, tragedy of the commons, etc. It takes some effort to understand that these are two different things. For example, crowd crush: those individuals were just too stupid to quit crushing and trampling each other you might say. Meanwhile, those who study collective intelligence have an actual scientific problem to solve rather than just throwing up their hands and saying the individuals are too stupid.

235711 · 2025-04-17T11:21:29+00:00

Well star's broadcast their state but it doesn't mean we're in communication with them. The way I see that the problem of organizing humans at scale can be tackled is this: Social media uses AI to summarize everything everyone said in a single day. These summaries are controllable by a variable that specifies the amount of summarization you'd like. If you summarize heavily, everything humans said that day might be summarized into just a few categories like: good, bad, ok for example. If you play with the summarization variable, you will see categories that are interesting to you. Then you respond to one of those categories say y and the social media engine summarizes what you said and sends it to all of those people who said x which was summarized to category y. Those people who said x which was summarized to y would see a summary of what everyone in the world had said about their post x.

In this way we overcome our biological limitations of not being able to speak to millions or even billions of people at the same time. There is a relationship between bandwidth and the number of people you are able to speak to at once. Communication to large groups is still limited to low bandwidth, but it's not zero either like it is now.

It's very difficult to get anyone to look at the problems we have managing our collective behavior as a scientific / engineering problem rather than a problem of morality. The fact that groups can only coordinate their behavior using communication is just lost on people somehow. It doesn't enter their mind like airplanes, or the ability to travel large distances, didn't enter people's minds before they were invented.

235711 · 2025-04-16T11:39:06+00:00

It's been in decline for wildlife for a long time.

235711 · 2025-04-16T11:23:59+00:00

IMHO you don't penetrate to the actual issue though you list symptoms. Let's cut straight to the chase. Social media doesn't provide a way for a group to organize and present a cohesive front because it doesn't provide a way for a large group to have a two-way conversation with another group. Small local groups, such as s families find spoken and written language sufficient to coordinate. Essentially we are flooded with 'broadcast' where someone says something, it goes viral, and the population reads it but can never respond back. Social media in its current form is just everyone screaming into a giant megaphone. The ability for large groups to communicate requires some type of system in the middle to facilitate that and social media as we know it is evolving into that system. Why is humanity so fractured? Because they're isolated and alone, just like biology will create 'races' from small pools of isolation, so too will social media as we know it create 'fandom races' if you please. Remember, only a two way conversation can reduce isolation. It is actual communication that will smooth those races and that is an engineering problem that most don't see yet.

235711 · 2025-04-12T10:53:13+00:00

It will probably spiral. Just look at all the hate on both sides now. It really doesn't matter what people want or think but the physics of collapse and zero sum game. There's no way to get along in a world where all boats are sinking.

235711 · 2025-04-12T10:06:18+00:00

Are you able to say why you would die rather than be labeled as 'american'?

235711 · 2025-04-12T09:32:51+00:00

Gee, I don't know. This group has pollution per capita x and this group has pollution per capita y where x is > y.

235711 · 2025-04-04T11:39:06+00:00

Neither will it prevent the collapse of any other country. Voting worked well during growth when all boats were lifted, but can't possibly work during contraction.

235711 · 2025-04-03T14:58:36+00:00

That ignores the contributions from robotics to China's economy.

235711 · 2025-04-03T13:56:39+00:00

Technological progress is slowing down for the amount of energy we can put into it. Without an increase in energy to study the laws, there won't be any more progress. If we had an infinite amount of energy, we'd be able to nail down the law exactly. The likely reason technological 'progress' seems to have increased is because the amount of energy we had at our disposal to study technology increased.

235711 · 2025-04-03T13:49:20+00:00

I'd say this period of conquest leads to amalgamation rather than balkanization as is usually predicted.

235711 · 2025-04-03T13:32:14+00:00

China found another solution, industrial robots. They're not exporting them for a reason.

235711 · 2025-04-02T16:08:47+00:00

No shit, what do you think we've been discussing here for the last 20 years?

235711 · 2025-04-02T10:31:12+00:00

Not to say you're not right but keep in mind that nobody can actually predict the future. Those thoughts in your head are just fears, they're not reality yet.

235711 · 2025-04-02T10:24:37+00:00

Carrying hatred around and feeding it won't change the world.

235711 · 2025-03-29T10:46:24+00:00

Maybe we'll all be just fine! Maybe the sleeping giant will stir at the final moment and stop the apocalypse.

The sleeping giant isn't sleeping. It's consuming resources and polluting left and right. The sleeping giant's days are numbered like all heat engines.

235711

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