> No. It'll be like software. Entry level employment will be affected.
Whether everyone at the labs knows it or not, this it what they are doing to entire industries, starting with software: Embrace, extend, and extinguish
They came for software first. It was the industry that was “eating the world”. Mathematicians were also affected. Because math was also “code” thanks to Lean. It was collateral damage.
Now they’re coming for lawyers. Law also has “code”. It’s text-based. It’s arms extend to every industry.
What's next is capturing all of our audio and visual inputs from cradle to grave, so that we can be truly replaced.
Honestly, if that happened in a 100% trusted environment, it might be cool. But, there is no money in that. Well, maybe Apple would do that? Private Cloud Compute is cool af.
Still, we are far more likely fully cooked than fully trustworthy personal AI agents happening at scale.
Genuinely curious, how could one fight pre-emptive domain squatters once any candidate is publicly suggested?
When I have suggested names in other situations like this in the past, I spent the ~$10 to get the domain, and offered the transfer the free. Of course, not everyone would do this.
Thanks for posting that. Good to know the BBC is moving on from Davies, and investing in a full season with a new production company.
Star Trek is in far worse shape these days. According to Riker, this is the first time in decades where there is no TV or movie even in the planning phase.
I love Star Trek, I love Star Wars, and I love Doctor Who. I have very fond memories of watching Tom Baker's episodes on PBS back in the day.
But once you have nothing to draw on but nostalgia I think it's time to move on. I liked the Doctor better when they were just an outlaw Time Lord in a stolen car doing good and getting into adventures, and not the eldritch abomination they've become, whose mere name causes the galaxy to shiver in terror. I liked Star Trek better when the humans weren't the most powerful force in the galaxy, one-shotting Borg cubes, but they were an upstart species getting a foothold in a universe bigger, stranger and far more dangerous than they imagine. In both cases, nostalgia leads to a sort of narrative power creep.
Star Wars has the same problem. Everything has to be about the Palpatines versus the Skywalkers. It would have been such a better story if it turned out Rey really was a nobody, if the entire plot had the courage to examine its own mythology from the outside and establish that the universe really is bigger than these two players, but we don't dare subvert tropes when the viewer has the media literacy of a mollusk and can't accept a protagonist who isn't Space Goku.
There's no wonder left to any of it. No mystery, no awe. No sense that the universe is bigger than you can imagine. God forbid something take a risk with the fucking franchise. Maybe we should just let it all die.
> Everything has to be about the Palpatines versus the Skywalkers. It would have been such a better story if it turned out Rey really was a nobody, if the entire plot had the courage to examine its own mythology from the outside and establish that the universe really is bigger than these two players, but we don't dare subvert tropes when the viewer has the media literacy of a mollusk and can't accept a protagonist who isn't Space Goku.
This isn't anything to do with "media literacy" - that as a criticism is quite vague, I think. The actual reason is because the two directors were fighting to undo each others' work, and spend hundreds of millions to do so.
Yes, I agree on Andor. But that was a quiet side-project done by good people, and not the main focus of Kathleen Kennedy and her recruits. Both it and Rogue One were made by Tony Gilroy.
Main line Star Wars is a train wreck, unfortunately. I was one of the apparently few people who was looking forward to something new, even deconstructive, in the sequel trilogy. I'm so sick of Palpatine vs. Skywalker chosen bloodline nonsense you can't even imagine, and the last thing I want is to have my nostalgia pandered to.
The ancillary stuff is a lot better however. I hear good things about Star Wars Visions but I haven't seen it.
There is a new movie in the early stages of development. Some news was teased at Comic-Con in July and the directors spoke about it a few weeks ago.
"After years of an unclear future, it seemed as though “Star Trek” finally found a path back to the big screen as “Spider-Man: Homecoming” writers and “Game Night” and “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” filmmakers Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley boarded the film."
Development on ‘09 started after production wrapped on enterprise in March 2005, although there wasn’t a lot in it. Production in earnest was certainly underway 18 months after.
It might be boring, but I can see exactly how I could use this right now to improve my agentic rag.[0] In two months I am supposed to deal with a giant corpus, while still maintaining responsive chat UX. I have been working my butt off to make our first big client happy. This could really help solve the chunk ranking problem.
[0] assuming the policies are compatible with sensitive production workloads, some time in the near future.
It is no wonder that there is an anarchist counterculture there. I find anarchism to be really disturbing in general, but in the context of Germany, it might make a lot more sense.
The more practical approach appears to be fully on-orbit activities, as those are currently far harder to attribute. The field of "Space Domain Awareness" is still nascent and rapidly evolving.
See my other comment for my expanded take on this, informed by being a peaceful space-nerd who cannot seem to avoid this topic, even if I tried:
I believe that attribution is more difficult in strictly on-orbit activities. I would imagine that these weaponized satellites use radar stealth approaches similar to modern fighter aircraft. AFAIK, ground radar is basically what we have for space awareness.
I would imagine that every new intelligence-related satellite will have more sensors to be situationally aware, and make attribution possible.
If you pay attention to space-nerd podcasts like MECO, "Space Domain Awareness" is getting a lot of investment. I believe that's because we are relatively blind at the moment.
Thanks for posting the videos. Two thoughts that came from watching that:
1. It is really interesting that we live on a planet that has such a society, along side one that had built nuclear weapons, and was soon to walk on the moon.
2. Our modern society has not progressed at all from any of these base instincts, and in some cases & applications we have gotten worse.
They had had a long battle with what looks to be hundreds of participants and there were a few wounded, but nobody died. Compare with e.g. battles in the ancient Mediterranean, where the fighting would have continued until one side panics and tries to flee, and the winning side kills anyone who can't run away fast enough. Now maybe they're simply bad at warfare, but I think a more likely explanation is that they're intentionally not escalating to that level of violence and mostly stay at a standoff distance where fatalities are unlikely. The narrator also calls it a "formal battle" at one point.
In any case, I don't think you can ascribe much of their bow-and-arrow tactics to base instincts.
I took an anthropology class that focused heavily on the Papua New Guinea highlanders and they fight a ritualized tit-for-tat warfare where they rarely kill and when they do, it’s essentially tribal revenge for the last kill. Almost every male participates and they specifically avoid high intensity warfare because the cost could effectively kill a tribe’s agricultural output.
Note though that even in the Mediterranean, routes where most of the enemy was killed were relatively rare.
Sometimes this sort of ritualised combat is a way for young men to show off their bravery without too much chance getting killed. Probably also helps with tribal cohesion. And I assume reduce the chance of full-on, lets kill everyone in the tribe, violence between groups.
"They had had a long battle with what looks to be hundreds of participants and there were a few wounded, but nobody died."
Observe the weapons. Most of them are sharpened sticks and they had a limited supply. Less deadly than swords and no mass manufacturing of weapons either.
The spears would be lucky to penetrate the ribcage. But they could go through the gut or throat, and if they were embedded in a thigh, they could easily cause sepsis.
In the battle footage there is little or no hand to hand conflict, and the spears are thrown by hand (from what I remember): no catapults or sheathes to launch them from. At one point, someone removes a spear from his leg, and while it does look nasty, it doesn't look like a fatal injury unless sepsis etc gets in. I'm sure they did have battle clubs, but those aren't used much in this battle. (This may be partly because the battle is in rough/hilly terrain and it is easier to launch spears at people from a distance than run over to them.)
Guns began to enter the region in the 70s and 80s in large numbers, which apparently changed the dynamic. Today's Port Moresby, the most modern part of the island, is apparently much more dangerous than these areas were.
You’d have to catch them first. If you watch the video there almost zero hand to hand combat. Their arrows don’t seem to have stabilizers either.
Obviously if this was filmed on video someone could have given one side a machine gun. Would’ve they used it or would have they still opted to maintain the tradition and fight the old way. The battle may have other reasons besides 100% dominating or wiping out the opponent.
Sadly, guns have entered these conflicts since that film was recorded, and there have been far more fatalities. They've changed the dynamic and not for the better. Central government doesn't seem to have much control over big portions of PNG. Language and remoteness are two major barriers to that.
To be fair, I wish the whole world was much "worse" at warfare in the same way as they are. We'd probably be a much happier world overall. Or at the very least less destructive.
I'm pretty sure Julian Jaynes' work is entirely hypothetical and is thought if as just an interesting idea rather than actually having any semblance of truth to it... unless you actually believe the Greeks were amongst the first humans to truly emerge with consciousness which seems farfetched to me
> unless you actually believe the Greeks were amongst the first humans to truly emerge with consciousness which seems farfetched to me
To the extent that human consciousness can be described from within itself as something distinct from a pan-consciousness of all things, is it farfetched to consider it as not existing until it did emerge? In what artifacts could someone discern the threshold at which consciousness arose?
The meat of the book is the references, not the extreme interpretation that catches most peoples' attention. No hallucinations please unless something like substances were involved.
The plasticity of the brain whether damaged or not is emphasized, and uneven recovery of language skills gives some clues.
Monkey see, monkey do was certainly a thing before humans arrived and it's not been left behind very completely at all.
In a world where almost everybody starts out in early childhood learning to read & write at the same time, and it is structurally taught largely to right-handed kids from right-handed examples, and this has been going on since like "written history"[0], this can not help but provide an overwhelming mainstream norm about what side of the brain is for what. Especially when it comes to language. You could almost think of it as a force acting to confine language, or more so the writing part of literacy to one side of the brain more so than the other. The bulk of the highest-educated and most respected vocabularies have been largely built through literacy rather than orally for quite some time, it wasn't always like that even with equivalent vocabularies, and that part lasted longer than the part since literacy got popular.
For those where it doesn't perfectly apply, like left-handed people, those who don't read and/or write, those who learned from left-handed people, those that taught themselves, etc, that all adds up to a small minority and of course there is great pressure to conform. But that doesn't mean the same language ends up in the same parts of the brain as the "normal" specimen in the jar.
The most recent development is the way more early writing is accomplished using both hands on a keyboard like never before when it was traditionally penmanship for generations back.
Now some people actually "think" in language more so than others, some not at all, plus often bilingual works too.
I'll go ahead and say it, if you were up there in the highlands where Dolly Parton was born back in the 19th century before they really got to building schools, you could find an "illiterate" culture often having a wider vocabulary than those in places like Boston where they had schools continuously since arriving on the continent. Unlike PNG the hillbillies of the Smokies descended directly from a literate culture, they just didn't bring many books that far up the mountains, and odds are they would be lost to mildew by the mid 1700s.
Sometimes you also get the idea that when they were feuding, they just didn't understand each other and everything was fine among the disagreeable factions as long as everyone stayed on their own mountain. People had lost the ability to read, and when they only had one book that was probably the Bible but they couldn't literally decipher it any more. It was still holy though for the faithful who would pretend to read from it while more or less "lip-syncing" the scriptural quotes that had been passed down orally ever since.
Maybe that's where the saying comes from; "If I had half a brain I'd ." From those who have no history of using less than both halves even for language, so they naturally don't do what the mainstream does? While simultaneously recognizing that they don't even have the same first half that the formally educated (whom they often respect so highly) do possess.
With PNG you've got to figure all the highlanders have language and stuff well-imprinted in their brains like anybody else, "just" not with the pattern recognized as most common to outsiders.
That doesn't mean their superstitions were based on hallucinations of any kind, among different cultures you can expect different parts of different halves of the brain to be doing some of the same things differently. Especially when they have always been isolated from each other.
There might even be a tendency going far back into "modern" literate culture, where the "literate" half of the brain is generally respected most when it is brilliant enough to get by on its own, and that ends up predominating.
Anyone who comes along and has always used all their brain may still have an orthogonal advantage. That could be why professor Diamond attributed the PNG highlanders as perhaps more intelligent than most in general. Or with a cool million of them there's got to be an Einstein or two. What would an Einstein casually having twice as much brainpower than previously imagined be like?
[0] Recent written history, the kind that means the most to a literate culture. Note the way with some traditionally illiterate groups how oral history can easily go back many generations further.
3. Handing a people that can not progress, exponential tech, without which they regress, but which also kills them all when they regress, is a trapdoor function worthy of St.Fermi .
I disagree with the (2). The laws of war are and have been evolving, and there's plenty of evidence in recorded history. The first records we have come from Ancient Babylon and they have been modified and amended multiple times since. Another aspect of this development is the existence of international arbitrage with laws that also keep evolving, something that minimizes the need to go to war.
And there's more: the relationship between the state and its army changed a lot. The role, the rights and the duties of individual soldiers changed a lot. Just to give you some examples: the Lieber Code is the one created during the US Civil War -- it's perhaps the first to mention the concept of unlawful orders, exonerating the soldiers who wouldn't follow such orders. Traditionally, St. Maximilianus is described as the first conscientious objector to draft, a concept that, too, went through multiple iterations... And, really, we didn't even scratch the surface mentioning these. Military history is probably the most eventful and rich sub-field of history.
Agreed. My theory about our "great filter" event is that our technological advancement proceeds so much faster than our genetics, and that will be our ruin.
To put in plain terms, we keep inventing far better "spears" (including kinetic, bio, and chemical) that allow one to kill many, while still behaving like cavemen.
Great filters are how genetics change. When you have two societies, one that kills itself and one that doesn't, that is how the world genetics shift more towards avoiding societal self-killing.
Possibly, but look at modern times. It takes years to build social constructs that might guide us towards cooperation and non-violence. Yet, those can be overturned in an instant by a slick turn of phrase that appeals to our base instincts/caveman brain, which i believe we all have.
I have given this more thought, but too late to edit. I would like to add a very important specific fact of the modern day.
Thanks to the Balkanization of our media landscape, and social media targetting: "a slick turn of phrase that appeals to our base instincts/caveman brain" can be tailored just for you. It has never been easier to make us behave in crazy ways.
I genuinely believe that the existing incarnation of "social media" could lead to the death of billions of humans.
Yes, I think you're overall right on your description of what is happening, but I disagree somehow with your analysis. My reading of that is that social media 'accelerate' culture, and some of it is towards hateful, violent way. It's not that we come 'back' to animal instincts, it's that some new, emergent cultures push towards violence.
To your other point, I have a friend who thinks social media and online porn drive fetishism, and that fetishism drive a lot of the new 'illiterate' political movements. I don't think I totally agree with him on the illiterate part (I mean, Renaud Camus certainly managed to read Maurras before paraphrasing him, in an objectively worse way, sure, but still), but I have trouble arguing against his other points. He also thinks that this fetishism taken too far will push people towards a death cult, and kill millions
They are only modified if there is some form of selection though, like for example some people say of the Dutch and their height.
In modern times it is more likely that culture and education augments genetics such that your violent tendencies are repressed, you are brought up leading a soft and comfortable life, taught to be polite and kind, etc. Contrast to maybe someone brought up in a warzone or some other place.
I mean post apocalyptic shows like the walking dead express this quite well (at least the first few seasons) where once society falls it's just a free for all and back to our roots again.
Yeah, i'm pretty sure observational studies after natural disasters (those who followed up Katerina especially) showed that it wasn't really the case. Yes, you have looters everywhere (Even in Japan), but most people help their neighbours (or even strangers if those looks non-threatening). Only when you have a central authority figure present and a lot of people you see riot and aggression, hence the reason why in most countries that need help, aid distribution is as decentralized as possible nowadays (centralized distribution is a _really_ good way of having people killed in the mass anyway).
And we are not the ones that live in the future...
This two pre-bronze age tribes live in it, the future we all will experience with collapse of our natural world and our civilization.
Probably, actually. “Primitive” societies survived the ice age. Modern societies depend on a relatively fragile system of infrastructure and many of the individuals in modern society are utterly dependent on it. Technology only works within its rightful context, and 99% of it is completely useless after infrastructural collapse.
Meanwhile, premodern societies depend on the ecosystem as a whole which tends to adapt over time; the individuals in such societies are more self sufficient in terms of ability to survive the elements.
So it’s just as likely those not dependent on modern technology will do fine against the vicissitudes of climate change as much as those who are dependent on it. At least in terms of ability to survive. At least, their expectations of survival baseline won’t change nearly as much in the face of natural disaster.
Yeah but because we have so much ressources and people we also have all in all quite some survival nerds, who could learn from all the tribes in the world and have the starting bonus of high tech. Things wpuld be fough with a society collapse, but the knowledge is out and will survive, except mass nuclear holocaust that totally amd drastically changes the climate. But then those tribes would struggle, too, if their sweet potato does not grow anymore.
> To him, the true AI doomer scenario is for all the immense power of frontier AI to wind up in the hands of a single powerful, proprietary provider. “The nightmare scenario, the doomer scenario for AI is that there’s just one company,” he said. “It has the best access to capital. It has the best AI researchers. It runs away with it and suddenly there’s one company that’s monolithic. And that would be bad.
Well yes, as I think I said in a previous comment, on the current trajectory OpenAI and Anthropic will really stop releasing models due to distillation and regulatory pressures. Then, they would eat all knowledge work themselves, which would be the end of YC.
Whether everyone at the labs knows it or not, this it what they are doing to entire industries, starting with software: Embrace, extend, and extinguish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
What a time to be alive!!?
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