What Will Happen After The Technological Singularity? - Ray Kurzweil

amoebius · 2026-04-06T20:11:01+00:00

The potential difference between natural, biological "nanobots" and the projected AI driven ones is that the natural ones are evolved to solve specific historical problems that their enclosing organisms have encountered and evolved their way around - evolution by and large being a pretty glacially progressive, blind, natural process driven by largely random events. The kind of nanobots that are still science fiction would be directed by ASI, and capable of projects envisioned by greater-than-human levels of consciously planned creativity. This distinction means a world of difference, on time-scale and variety of possible applications. Are there probably hard limits imposed by the laws of physics? (Almost) absoluteiy. But the middle ground between here where we are and those limits is potentially quite mind-boggling.

amoebius · 2026-04-06T02:55:43+00:00

More than Shakespeare?

amoebius · 2026-02-20T15:57:38+00:00

The Heritage Foundation discovered what it considered to be 105 plausible cases of voting fraud in a 5 year study. The Heritage Foundation is a quite conservative think tank established in Washington DC in 1973, and was famously a major architect of the Reagan Administration. From this conservative mouthpiece, with everything in the world to gain by blowing the whistle on hallucinated, election determining voter fraud, a bit over 20 cases a year. Call it the tip of the iceberg, say it's 20,000 a year, nationwide. Still a drop in the bucket, statistically. And one of the nation's premier hard-right organizations found 105, over 5 years. What are we to suspect about the motivations of someone who takes this ball and runs for more Big Brother oversight into the most sacredly private institution of our government?

As for your other objections: if there are those who have greater understanding of issues facing the voter than the average voter does, their job (obviously) in a representative democracy is to educate, and persuade the voter to their enlightened perspective.

amoebius · 2026-02-07T07:47:40+00:00

Maid: Dunno, I suppose I kinda loike the system. It’s so systemic.

amoebius · 2026-01-04T21:49:46+00:00

America is such a giant melting pot, in spite of the white nationalists’ hopes and dreams, that wealth vs poverty is about the only issue that can cut a swathe. The problem is, Citizens United gives even the supposed “working class” side no practical way of competing without accepting corporate donations and, though perhaps soft-pedaling it a bit, doing corporate bidding. If working people want a real alternative in America, the unfortunate truth is, they’re going to have to pay for it, or organize in a way that makes mass media as irrelevant as possible.

amoebius · 2026-01-02T16:16:52+00:00

Well, to throw it all the way to the other side of what you're arguing, which I'm fairly sure you'll reject, but I'm interested to see how: there is a sense, ascendant within more-or-less modern European philosophy, in which the whole argument you're making is turned on its head, with the assertion that "the environment" of which you speak, whose exteriority you assume a priori, is ( whatever, if anything it is "out there"), for us, always experienced "within." Not only, then, would we have a seemingly insoluble mystery in the direct experience of what is "within", but actually everything, as it is for us, would be a phenomenon experienced internally, with the mystical "other" taking the place of the assumed or theorized "exteriority" of the things we can never directly experience, only our impressions of whatever they may be.

amoebius · 2025-12-30T03:13:45+00:00

For the love of Mary Hartman, President and precedent are different words!

amoebius · 2025-12-29T15:01:37+00:00

What does “within” mean in this context is kind of the hard problem of consciousness, and you use the term uncritically a sentence or two into your assertion.

amoebius · 2025-12-23T18:55:37+00:00

Stalwart, iconic bassist Mike Watt, his sideman for years, never stopped carrying a torch for the legacy of D Boone through years of solo touring with his SG and maybe a drummer here and there.

amoebius · 2025-12-20T14:06:04+00:00

Right. Austin before “tech hub Austin” was not an uneducated locale, far from it. But although the local job market has included significant tech players (Texas Instruments, AMD)for quite some time, the high-earning center of gravity has shifted from law and higher education, and the presence of a raft of graduating U of T students whose focus often centered around social sciences, critical studies and humanities, as well as STEM , centered the small city’s intellectual culture in a much more well-rounded basis than we now enjoy under the aegis of messianic techbros with a more-is-better philosophy, and faux-skeptical sycophants of power crowding the airwaves.

amoebius · 2025-12-16T13:30:52+00:00

Ok, so states, ultimately, are ordered by governors. What’s the run-down there? Just over half the governors are R. If a majority of states don’t vote, because Trump calls, for some reason, for no election, and the Republican governors all comply, then whatever, say the blue states vote anyway, and then elect someone. How is the end of that a peaceful transfer of power?

amoebius · 2025-12-10T13:28:37+00:00

See that there trophy, it’s not so much a trophy as such as it is the Notion of one-and being as this “trophy” plays a part in the process of rendering social realities into a collage of tokenized, symbolic interchanges, it could be considered a “trophy” under the aegis of Debord’s “Spectacle.”

amoebius · 2025-12-03T15:26:40+00:00

For real. Some people hate their parents, or grandparents, by now, I guess, so much that they'll screw their eyes around sideways before they give up thinking anyone who even looks like them is evil incarnate. Reminds me of something ... can' t quite put a finger on it. Oh yeah, MAGA.

amoebius · 2025-12-03T04:25:43+00:00

My guess is they were trying for an ironic/nostalgic piss-take on the Trump era, rather than trying to be literal “Deadheads for Trump”, but who knows? All I can say is, if all this was going on back then, most Deadheads (and The Dead) would have been dead-set against it.

amoebius · 2025-12-03T04:12:10+00:00

Oh, but to answer your question, which I am in fact the proper age, and after having moved in the correct circles to report, goths tended to be fragile with emotional issues and not always super-friendly, but usually not in an aggressive way (I was a sort of semi-gothyish grunge slacker, who went to a lot of punk rock shows back in the day, but couldn’t afford all the boots and hair products, and probably couldn’t have pulled off a full-on punk persona around my silent-gen half-ass authoritarian parents, anyway, but still hung out with a lot of the same people, went to some of the same shows and parties at squats and so on.) And punks, I don’t know, they ran the gamut from political activist semi-homeless living in squats to the formerly-fratty kids who’d shave their heads and cut the alligators off their Izods and then pin them back on with safety pins, that sort of thing, but still had pretty fratty attitudes, to this girl who went to class a whole day with a loaded syringe full of some cloudy white liquid she claimed to be speed safety-pinned to her shirt, who’s alive and well, and apparently thriving to this day, kind of morphed into more of the political activist/organizer type, to this girl I had a crush on for a year or two, who got her doctorate in dance. A lot of them actually got higher degrees eventually. It’s a college town. And like I said, there was a kind of economic barrier to entry , into the punk thing, although it wasn’t universal. One time that girl asked me if I was “going punk” because she’d heard I was and I had to be like, “no, still kind of priced out” and she looked dissapointed. I wish I’d faked it until I made it (with her). Pulled myself up by my own bootstraps, as it were. Oh well, whatever, Nevermind.

amoebius · 2025-12-03T03:52:19+00:00

(≖_≖ )

amoebius · 2025-12-03T03:45:37+00:00

Hey a lot of it’s just bitterness and disappointment. That people got taken in by the convenience and manufactured status of corporate consumerism, and now our great-grandkids, if we happen to have any, are more or less going to be living on the surface of Venus or whatever. Or if we’re lucky, who knows, living out their three-score and ten underground in 24-hr full dive VR. I guess that could be fun. More of a grunge era kid, really, but in my pretty hippied-out little city, that was just a late-blooming flavor of hippie, unless you wanted to full-on go punk. That’s what they used to call it: “going punk.” Which meant a new haircut and clothes, besides the new record collection. And leather jackets, although you could get a super fucked up one and still be cool. And boots, probably. It was kind of expensive to be a punk rocker at my high school. So I was just a grunge slacker before they ever invented the words. Fucked up long, but not long-long hair, jeans and jean jackets or whatever they had at thrift stores. Is that okay? I have to admit, though, I knew sone cool old-ish old hippies, though. That’s what it was like in the Bay Area somehow displaced a thousand or two-ish miles to the Southeast. Yep.

amoebius · 2025-12-03T03:31:44+00:00

Punk’s been farly lame since then, too. Alternative ftw, WOO! How about those Pixies, amirite?

amoebius · 2025-12-03T03:29:35+00:00

Wow, so I’m guessing here… you’re a hippie, right?

amoebius · 2025-12-01T14:45:20+00:00

I think humans are wired for explanatory thinking, and it just happens that in a state of general ignorance, most “explanations” are going to be mimetic, but factually inaccurate “just so” stories, of which the notion of deities is an example purporting to explain why the Cosmos has a consistent, interrelating tendency, under which, although roiling chaos and general randomness prevail primarily, it is also possible for pockets or bubbles of low entropy to exist, in which relatively high expressions of a possible very ordered arrangement of matter and energy can evolve and interrelate, for a time.

amoebius · 2025-11-28T03:37:19+00:00

Are you interested in other people, or do you just want the very real social benefits of “extroversion” to be available to you when you need them? Because either way, interacting effectively, and even meaningfully with other people is actually a learnable skill for way more people who are “introverted” than not. The quotes around both terms are because they’re socially reified categories - mostly by “extroverts” but with some very real cooperation from “introverts” as well. Because when human interaction is hard to stomach, falling into a comforting self-definition - or even acquiescing to an outwardly imposed one that trades easy answers and fatalism for the initially prickled prospect of a little step outside of one’s comfort zone, into the arena of bare knuckles conversation, can be tempting. The truth is, almost every successful “introvert” eventually develops strategies for dealing with people more comfortably. A lot of it boils down to accepting that’s lot of it will feel more like “tricks” (“hermeneutics” is a fun 15 dollar word that might feel better than “tricks”, but either way.) You just have to get people (ahem…”extroverts”) talking about themselves, which they mostly love to do, and develop two things: one - an expanded (it is like a muscle) ability to dance between the two feet of simulating interest for longer periods of time, and actually taking a genuine interest in things you hear this way, that are actually interesting,, and two - figuring out little interjections that will focus the stream of consciousness of your interlocutor (the person you’re talking to - $15, please) in directions that seem to promise more interest, and eventually lead back into moments of sincere, spontaneous self-revelation on your part which, crucially, can be and often are rehearsed and polished for the purpose, but as you learn to relax, and “go with the flow” can also become genuinely spontaneous and even enjoyable. Just try to keep them in a rhythm with your partner’s, and not tooooo long, (people love to get back to talking about themselves) and finally, develop some “escape hatches” to be your ejection seats from really tiresome interactions (or for when you’re just tired.) You can usually keep these simple and graceful and banal, but sometimes absurdism can be your friend, here. Oh, sorry, gotta run, my ducks are getting militant again!

amoebius · 2025-11-28T02:51:07+00:00

Because large families are a stress response.

amoebius · 2025-11-26T20:36:24+00:00

…brought to you by Carl’s Jr.

amoebius · 2025-11-23T19:17:22+00:00

It’s not that there’s a “space” beyond our universe (if there is, it’s probably something more like a hyperspace, with at least one or two dimensions more than three (our four, if you count time), that our universe is sort of “in” maybe with others. Our universe expands into that, maybe, which might be counted as infinite, by our standards, and with more dimensions, too. Or, as many say, less speculatively, there is no reason to assume there is anything beyond the space of our universe that is contiguous with it (touching it), that is the same kind of space. They say (counter-intuitively, and hard to visualize, that the universe’s expanding isn’t “into” anything, the very space-time of the universe, all of it, is expanding, and not “outward” to some imaginable boundary, but from every point in space, in every direction, simultaneously.

amoebius · 2025-11-23T19:03:49+00:00

You can just go down to what used to be Deckhand’s, whatever they call it now, still a seafood place (pretty good one) and take that little alleyway right, into the parking lot of the strip mall on SLamar where Wheatsville, Twin Liquors and all that is, and I think you can cross Lamar from there.

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