I dread that we are going to see a _lot_ of of cults appear, and a disturbing concentration of political power around cult leadership as a social modality. With a large overlap with the despair-distraction-escapism industry as entertainers become increasingly valorized into spiritual and thought leaders, and eventually leaders, full stop.
They will, as did monarchs in feudal times, draw their power base from the multitude of disenfranchised commoners seeking guidance, respite from the bleak outlook for those with little or no prospect of upward mobility, and a rallying point from which to focus any semblance of pushback against the landed baronial classes. But they will all the while be paying a hefty tax to those who maintain the broadcast infrastructure that enables them to marshall and monetize their followers, so even these kings and queens will need to stay in the graces of some potentate or other.
Are these terms well defined or just subjective "I know it when I feel it" echoes of an unresolved debate over residual beliefs in a dualistic mind/body dichotomy?
What if it turns out that a confluent sequence of sensory inputs amounts to a unique neurophysical vector that initiates a particular activation cascade in another cluster of nerves, some outputs of which do not have images in the conscious domain (are not phenomenological) despite strongly informing it resulting in what we call 'creativity', all together defining a path back through our sensory encoding/decoding apparatus which we recognize as 'thought.'
I am not convinced that we are looking at this question through the right end of the telescope here.
That's always the main issue with any piece that is using ill-defined terms like intelligence, consciousness, self-consciousness, thinking, understanding, etc. Nobody ever came close to defining them in a practical manner in decades/centuries, but then LLMs came and suddenly lots of people are somehow absolutely sure that they don't do any of this while humans/animals do.
> What if it turns out that a confluent sequence of ,,,
That is useful way of looking at it. But the problem remains how do you train on sight, sound, touch in any sort of useful way. It takes 20 years to make an adult using its non digital hardware (which I would consider superior for the task). If it could happen quicker do you not think that would.
perhaps they want to get their material out of the training set feed trough of all the Sora-style models consuming anything and everything not nailed down with an as-yet non-existant source watermarking scheme that can pass through the most tormented AI digestive tract.
my usual go-to here is to observe that cancer is 100% all-natural.
I have been tempted to put it on a T-shirt to be worn at gatherings where I might find myself in the company of people who celebrate or promote "natural" as if it were an axiomatic good.
In reality I could never bring myself to wear it in public out of concern for by-catch side effects: griefing random strangers for whom the miseries of cancer may form a very real part of their daily experience is not something I'd want to be associated with even if it was not the intended result.
Good point. And something similar occurred to me today: all that progress of science and relative safety of modern life made people stop feeling fear of the cosmos. Yes, Cthulhu isn't real - but cancer is. Along with millions other things that will maim or kill you in horrible ways, or just destroy your mind - all of which were here before us. The true cosmic horror, the dread of uncaring universe beyond our comprehension - it isn't out there, it's right here. It's called nature.
I don't mean to dismiss the larger truth here about humanity's responsibility to exercise restraint in playing the impossibly strong 5-ace hand it was dealt by natural selection.
But the naturalistic fallacy has a knack for hiding its sharpest razors among the soft folds of words like "cooperative."
The universe appears, as far as we can tell, overwhelmingly hostile toward life with the sole observed exception of our precariously balanced biosphere.
And that biosphere is itself a circulatory system built on exploitation, consumption, and predation - host to endless torrent of unimaginable agonies which are both staggeringly abundant and structurally inalienable from the matrix of this 'cooperative' system.
It's hard, as another HN'er once succinctly put it, to be more cruel than Nature.
this is a dualistic belief that regards humans operating on human concepts as being somehow a qualitatively distinct phenomenon from the "system that systems" - a system in which they themselves increasingly constitute a locally (and potentially, a universally) significant energetic routing circuit.
No, it’s not dualistic at all. I have not and never do make the argument that humans are somehow “separate” from nature. I am making the argument that value judgments (like all concepts) occur in people’s heads and are not intrinsic characteristics of anything at all.
Sure, but in this context - in any reasonable context when one would make a value judgement on nature - a judgement is made relative to some human-specific or "unnatural" situation. When someone is making an appeal to nature, as in "nature is beautiful and good, and so the natural thing is better than our wicked ways", it's only right to point out that under this standard, nature is fucked up psychopatic hellscape, and the history of scientific and technological progress is one of escaping hell.
I think you might be unfamiliar with the term "dualism" since you don't appear to understand that your reasoning is synonymous with current spec, put briefly: "In general, [Dualism] the idea is that, for some particular domain, there are two fundamental kinds or categories of things or principles." [0]
To what domain, exactly, are you trying to relegate concepts with your vaguely dismissive take that they are "inside people's heads," as if this doesn't invalidate thought as an origin of material (that is, natural) change and thus pulls the rug out from under your statement itself - since, being just a concept inside your head, it should not have been capable of accumulating the physical mass and energy necessary to get out of your head, onto HN's server, and onto my screen - the letters of which are not randomly generated but an ordered echo of material pointing back to the source informing their order.
The relationship of concept to material is, especially in this kind of case, about as intrinsic as a relationship between entities can be.
When you look at, say, a pyramid in Egypt or Mexico etc, you are looking at the material shadow cast by nothing less than a concept that was at some point, only "inside someone's head" and which remains a fundamental and intrinsic characteristic of that structured mass of earth and stone.
I'd even go further and say that nature generally doesn't torture things for amusement the way the worst humans have done. Usually "nature is cruel and cold" underpins a "kind" humanist worldview that justifies factory farming, pesticides, lab animal testing, and mass murder of any inconvenient biological lifeform. Humanists pretend they aren't part of the same system of biological life that they hack at and injure at every turn and will to the end of their days deny the runaway extinction event they've kicked off and may also sweep them off the planet too. Because nature could never been cruel and cold to them and the system could never system them out of existence. They believe humans are special and the entire universe was created for them, or alternatively, the entire universe is at odds with their existence and it's a fight to the death. It's an absurd neurosis. We're incredibly lucky to be alive in a biosphere with so many food sources and so many lifeforms happy to eat our shit.
An superbly well-put rationalization for banal, business-as-usual cruelty. A desire to demonstrate that "I can go where others are too weak-minded/unwilling/inflexible to go" - to out-smug the smugness one sees wherever they find humanistic purpose, is to put an axe to the trunk of the tree on whose branches one smugly sits. Top kek, and all that.
But maybe you are not trolling. I'll assume rather that you're merely directing a blunt, honest cynicism toward what you see as the shallow, disingenuous cynicism of humanism (which I don't specifically subscribe but it's close enough for a throwaway internet argument). Someone who may or may not come from a place of disillusioned idealism, but in any case is not at all unhappy but rather perfectly content knowing we live in a morally neutral universe. Perhaps even a little pleased with yourself for having the tough-mindedness /so lacking in others/ that enables you to thrive in a hard objective vacuum intolerable to less robust spirits. Since there is essentially no point to anything, there will be no eschatological reckoning, and naturally no possible harm in optimizing for one's own material satisfaction for there is no such thing as harm at all.
Until we are confronted with conclusive evidence of intelligent life in the universe apart from what has developed in our own gravity well (setting aside the possibility of such entities existing outside a mutually impassible causality horizon); which is to say until we find evidence that the universe either has potential for a purposeful complex homeostasis other than the one we ourselves pursue, or else the apparent universal default fate of reduction to an undifferentiated energetic equilibrium, it is neither cold nor kind to act logically on the actual evidence at hand, which strongly suggests we are indeed the sole custodial inhabitants of this universe, conscious of our leverage over its fate, as we are of this planet (insofar as the notion of "custody" is presently confined to it until we learn otherwise - which, as an aside, would be fascinating even if it might trigger our destruction).
Consciousness (and the awareness, among other things, of suffering that it entails) will have to appear somewhere in the accessible universe first if it is to appear at all. So far, there's no basis for thinking that that somewhere isn't this biosphere right here, and consequently, for our purposeful (even if futile) opposition to the universal tendency toward self-consuming annihilation that would, unchecked, smother consciousness in its cradle.
the chart, for all its flaws, doesn't seem to conclude anything interesting about innovation per se, but rather suggests that the development of technology is ultimately motivated by the desire by the few to abstract, concentrate and consolidate the levers of power in order to cultivate the values and actions - the culture - of the many to suit the preservation of their status as elites.
Indeed, there are a great many non-western examples of this as well.
My beef with this isn't about whether it concludes anything about innovation, but that it presents itself as a comprehensive and universal map of various technologies, ideas, and innovation when it is anything but. It is mainly concentrated in advances in the Western world. I wouldn't have a problem with this if it were titled as, "Calculating Western Empires: A Genealogy of Technology ... " because that is what it is.
Examples from the 1500s and 1600s are definitely European-centric -- meaning that there are little, if any examples drawn from ideas outside of Europe.
I look at the category for Education, and it has "Saving Souls with School". Where are the non-Christian examples of innovation in Education?
The category for emotions (of which there are rich traditions and thought on this in many cultures). Or "Era of Humors", "Cartesian Dualism", "Embodying Class". Those are all Western-centric ideas.
One curious example -- specifically talking about the import of teas and porcelain from the East. The implicit frame here is that it doesn't matter for this set of comparisons until those items became available in the West. What about the history of when tea (and spices!) were cultivated, and porcelain were made? (The porcelain that were exported out of China were mass produced and considered the bottom grade unsuitable for the domestic martket).
I don't see a problem with this mainly because I would argue that innovation, in the early modern european era onward sense of "technologies that tend to direct the cumulative power of the many into the control of a few" captured by the infographic, isn't necessarily a net positive for humanity, and thus leaving non-western influences out of it keeps those cultures in the benefit of the doubt.
The next century or two may well see us wipe ourselves out as a species, as the great elliptic of this leverage-amplifying 'innovation' arc comes crashing back on itself..
It may well be that not innovating, in this western-dominated sense, was the right strategy for our species survival all along, and thus clamoring to be included in this narrative is to demand that non-western cultures be given a position of honor alongside the west in the story of humanity's self-destruction.
I can respect that position. When I reflect on permaculture design, or Christopher Alexander's ideas, for example, the Western modernity did not have to turn out the way it did.
I can't say that non-Western empire cultures were that much better from that lens.
The one I had been studying for the past year or so was the Chinese. During the 1500s and 1600s, technologies for warfare was just as rampant. The Ming and the Jinchurens were fielding firearms as enthusiastically as anywhere else. The 1800s when many places were industrializing, the Qing dynasty was wracked with uprisings, revolts, and a civil war with a scale comparable to WWI in terms of numbers of dead and cities razed. This unrest was the result of centuries of increasing marginalization of young people being shut out from economic opportunities, and widespread access to the ability to inflict violence.
But I can't even say that even if the Qing did not have that internal instability, would they have done better? The telegraph was invented in the mid 1800s, and it started globalizing markets because of information transmission. It is considerably difficult to map Chinese ideographs to the equivalent of Morse code, even if the literati were not using the ability to read and write maintain status.
permaculture a good place to investigate a basis of the essential conflict at work here, which is that perma-anything and "innovation" are orthogonal forces over the same domain. Would any culture be capable of improving on the resource rivalry -> technical conflict -> cultural domination/consolidation model?
I have been circling that since I came across permaculture — or more precisely, permatech after deep diving permaculture.
It’s easier to understand permaculture as a regenerative paradigm in a living systems world view. Only living systems can regenerate. Living systems adapt and grow all on its own. It _evolves_, rather than innovates.
Technology, from the machine world view, is incapable of regenerating, growing or living on its own. It requires an external force to set it in motion, as well as external force to innovate and make changes. The source of innovation comes dominance as long as someone views the world in a way where nothing happens unless you make it happen.
But now we are reaching technologies that are complex enough to start resembling living systems.
Beautiful from a conceptual arm's-length distance, and clearly a massive effort invested in this. But I find myself asking who this is meant for?
A lot of unavoidable, but still quite subjective compromises had to be made to project the very high-n space addressed by this infographic into 2 representational dimensions. A lot of stuff got mapped to the zero vector here.
On that note, when I drill into the details I see things that are initially puzzling, such as the lineage starting from cartesian geometry seeming to end abruptly at vector calculus, to be resumed (but without guiding connectors) both above as forecasting, and a panel or so rightward as Markov Chains and further on, the somewhat loose cluster of concepts headed by the word "Transformers."
And... what's with all the hunched-over shoegazers? Are they here to pay off a debt? Their multiplicity and contextual disjointedness with respect to their surroundings somehow gives off MidJourney vibes. First time I've ever felt a pang of sympathy for clip-art.
It looks like the authors were inspired by those mind-bendingly complex biological cycle charts published by Roche, but didn't want to attempt the extremely tedious (and necessary, IMO) bird's nest business of cross-linking causally influenced (but rep-space remote) systems with a spaghetti of directed connectors and data detailing that those charts made famous.
I feel the same. It's good, but gets worse the longer you look at it. For example the section on military doctrine checks all the right boxes but by the time you get to the present it's just a collection of buzzwords.
So, a pricing exploit based on arbitrage between the rigorous description (and enforcement) of payment for a service in one direction, and the comparatively un-policed description of the service delivered, in the other? Perhaps the lawyering class wants everyone to either suffer under their miserable penchant for overweening semantic nitpicking, or suffer it along with them.
A description versus price equation, where there's a lot of variables on one side and only one on the other, does seem to be the model.
I guess I would add that it may only be a Salient as it is with respect to certain things like flights, because there are a couple of outstanding counter examples like cell phones and and automobiles which seem to exhibit the exact opposite trend.
A deeper analysis might reveal that there is a cycle at at work here, wherein the initial novelty of a prodict or service which is destined to become a commodity, means there is not yet a strong set of expectations about what the service or product is "supposed" to provide. distinction in the market has to come from adding context to that essentially commodity utility.
But later on some consumers begin to recognize that some of the additional context may not be strictly necessary or offer a value to them and would prefer compartmentalization of the core product as distinct from its value-added variants.
When flights were a comparative novelty, or at least a novelty in different market segments at different times, distinction between products was through different levels and configurations of service or features rather than price.
This may still be the phase of the product cycle that cell phones (setting aside the fairly stable tiers of product within that category) are in. It's harder to make as direct across the comparison with cars as they are older than both air travel and mobile phones, and because of all the regulation that enforces standardization of non-optional features related to safety.
Shelly's WiFi devices are all fairly cloud-optional - you can completely disconnect the internet and they will all work with Home Assistant just fine. Still, I'm not as excited about them as I used to be (mainly due to realizing there's a ton of cool-looking I/O flexibility they have that ends up being redundant once you settle on a control plane for wifi - MQTT in my case), and because their exposure of features and properties is somewhat inconsistent across device families.
But as a way to unburden your (usually one and only) Zigbee channel from certain types of chatty messaging, such as high-accuracy presence sending or complex lighting curve adjustments that can't be done ergonomically (or at all) via Zigbee, they are invaluable. Wifi (jailed in a VLAN, if you like) also provides a layer of failure protection should your Zigbee coordinator die unexpectedly.
They will, as did monarchs in feudal times, draw their power base from the multitude of disenfranchised commoners seeking guidance, respite from the bleak outlook for those with little or no prospect of upward mobility, and a rallying point from which to focus any semblance of pushback against the landed baronial classes. But they will all the while be paying a hefty tax to those who maintain the broadcast infrastructure that enables them to marshall and monetize their followers, so even these kings and queens will need to stay in the graces of some potentate or other.