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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Science writer Philip Ball observes,

    Just watched Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) say “We believe as an industry… that within 3-5 years we’ll have AGI, which can be defined as a system that is as smart as [big deal voice] the smartest mathematician, physicist, [lesser deal voice] artist, writer, thinker, politician … I call this the San Francisco consensus, because everyone who believes this is in San Francisco… Within the next year or two, this foundation gets locked in, and we’re not going to stop it. It gets much more interesting after that…There will be computers that are smarter than the sum of humans”

    “Everyone who believes this is in San Francisco” approaches “the female orgasm is a myth” levels of self-own.





  • I’ve noticed the occasional joke about how new computer technology, or LLMs specifically, have changed the speaker’s perspective about older science fiction. E.g., there was one that went something like, “I was always confused about how Picard ordered his tea with the weird word order and exactly the same inflection every time, but now I recognize that’s the tea order of a man who has learned precisely what is necessary to avoid the replicator delivering you an ocelot instead.”

    Notice how in TNG, everyone treats a PADD as a device that holds exactly one document and has to be physically handed to a person? The Doylist explanation is that it’s a show from 1987 and everyone involved thought of them as notebooks. But the Watsonian explanation is that a device that holds exactly one document and zero distractions is the product of a society more psychologically healthy than ours…