When biologists, botanists, etc. use the term "species", they are not using it in a principled way. The distinctions are oftentimes quite arbitrary, I'm very sorry to say.
For what it's worth, there isn't even much agreement on what constitutes a genus or species among professional philosophers of science (i.e. academics who care about giving a principled definition for species/genus), even for those that share many of the same views otherwise (like ur-Platonists, Aristotelians, Thomists, Scotists, etc.).
This is a broader fundamental question which you are better off asking AI to give you an overview. It involves various techniques like;
1) Paleo genomics i.e. DNA study of any surviving material.
2) Statistical study of Human Morphology i.e. variation w.r.t. current day human (and close primates?) biological structures. Eg. Current-day human cranium sizes vary within known limits. So if we find a fossil cranium which is outside these limits then there is a high chance it might be a different species.
3) Fossil dating shows different species (w.r.t. above data) occupying the same geography and within overlapping time periods.
When did owning a physical console become a hassle and require maintenance? I feel like I'm on crazy pills reading the comments in this thread. They can't be real.
It takes up space, you've got to clean out the dust from the fan grill every so often, it requires constant maintenance in software updates every time you turn it on, unless you leave it on all the time in which case it's using non-trivial power all the time. I have an Xbox. But there's no question that it would be a much simpler setup to not have one.
Maybe, but Frank Herbert's Dune books don't really explain it. The Butlerians simply exist to justify Mentats, and then get tossed aside. There are lots of similar plot points that have an "oh cool" moment but never see proper exploration.
Dune's central theme about balancing power and authority is much more prescient for our time, but I suppose we'll have to wait for Villeneuve's Part 3 before Silicon Valley discusses it.
I feel like the book explains it plenty, it's just extremely succinct.
> “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
What else needs to be said? We see examples of this throughout human history all the time. People thought at the early onset of the industrialization that people would become freer by leaving feudalism but all it did was immiserate workers for another 130 years (immiseration still ongoing in certain areas of the world).
The Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild were also a result of the Butlerian Jihad. All three started as schools of human development in the absence of powerful technology.
Also, Herbert's point about dependence on machines creating machine-dependent humans, trapped in a deterministic arc of evolution, feeds into his larger themes about open-ended evolution and its arms-race. It's not just a throwaway backstory.
There is actually an active "BJ" group in the Phoenix Metro area. It was about a year ago when I noticed they were slapping up custom graffiti stickers on Central Avenue (Midtown).
Then later, I saw their handiwork in person: they would take an angle-grinder and obliterate the QR Code from those rental e-Scooters, slap on a BJ sticker or three, and then leave them where they found them. This would render the scooters as e-waste, un-rentable and blocking the sidewalks.
I would not be surprised if they are quietly influencing groups which are agitating against AI Data Centers. But the BJ I have seen is a chaotic group of direct urban sabotage.
Isn’t intelligence a fully automatic mechanism? You go down that rabbit hole enough and I always find it hard to find the differences. Same thing with LLMs, people say it’s just a word predictor. But that’s how I wrote this comment and how I think.
I think there's a point as you increase the comolexity of the "information processing" system where you get emergent intelligence.
A mechanism that makes a rotor go one way or the other as a function of the time derivative of a variable would not qualify as such.
Now, if you have a trillion such mecanisms atuned and feeding one anothers inputs in a network... Well you just got yourself a brain and then we can start talking about intelligence.
Markets are down today over nonsense stargazing like this. If we lose cryptography, we lose everything in a sort of blackout level event like on Blade Runner 2049. It won’t matter what you buy or sell to. I see no signs we are even close to that.
Is your argument that it would be really bad if it was true, therefore it's not going to be true? It would be really bad if I got cancer, but I don't respond to that by refusing to think rationally about it.
Possibly more along the lines of, if modern civilization collapses, it doesn't really matter if you buy, sell, or hold.
If anything, you should be stockpiling food and guns. Or, who knows, maybe GPUs and DRAM. Physical possession of goods, not paper ownership of the same.
Debt only exists by the mutual belief of debtors and debtees that the alternative would be worse.
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