

I have a slightly different timeline.
- Death of value-neutral AI: 1920, Rossum’s Universal Robots explicitly grapples with the impact of robotics on society, starting a trend that never really stops
- AI bubble kills companies: 2000, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo!, and Google all survive the dot-com crash and the cost of entry plummets due to cheap hardware from failing companies; Microsoft has so much cash that Linus Torvalds starts giving a “World Domination 101” talk about strategy, later retold as World Domination 201, sketching the rise of Apple’s market-share and the netbook phenomenon
- Web scraping: 1994, robots.txt is proposed as a solution to the scourge of spiders and scrapers overwhelming Web servers; it doesn’t work perfectly, forcing Web developers to develop anti-scraping idioms and optimized front pages that aren’t covered in GIFs
- Condemnation of machine-made art: 1968, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? centers around a world where robots are slaves and follows a slave-catcher as he hunts them; 1988, Star Trek: The Next Generation features an android character who repeatedly struggles to make and understand art, usually as comic relief
In general, I think that trying to frame our current century-long investigation into cybernetics as something recent, new, or unprecedented is ahistorical. While the general shape of AI winter can’t really be denied, it’s important to understand that it’s a cyclic system which will eventually yield another AI spring and AI summer. It’s also important to understand that the typical datacenter is not in financial trouble and there’s not going to be any great destroying-of-looms moment.
Alex O’Connor platformed Sabine on his philosophy podcast. I’m irritated that he is turning into Lex Friedman simply by being completely uncritical. Well, no, wait, he was critical of Bell’s theorem, and even Sabine had to tell him that Bell’s work is mathematically proven. This is what a philosophy degree does to your epistemology, I guess.
My main sneer here is just some links. See, Mary’s Room is answered by neuroscience; Mary does experience something new when color vision is restored. In particular, check out the testimonials from this 2021 Oregon experiment that restored color vision to some folks born without it. Focusing on physics, I’d like to introduce you all to Richard Behiel, particularly his explanations of electromagnetism and the Anderson-Higgs mechanism; there are deeper explanations for electricity and magnets, my dude. Also, if you haven’t yet, go read Alex’s Wikipedia article, linked at the top of the sneer.