yogthos

I would imagine that the biological phase for intelligent life is rather short, and I expect that in the long run intelligence will transition to post biological substrates.

I'd argue that inventions of language and writing are the landmark moments in human development. Before language was invented the only way information could be passed down from ancestors to offspring was via mutations in our DNA. If an individual learned some new idea it would be lost with them when they died. Language allowed humans to communicate ideas to future generations and start accumulating knowledge beyond what a single individual could hold in their head. Writing made this process even more efficient.

When language was invented humans started creating technology, and in a blink of an eye on cosmological scale we went from living in caves to visiting space in our rocket ships. It's worth taking a moment to really appreciate just how fast our technology evolved once we were able to start accumulating knowledge using language and writing.

Our society today is utterly and completely unrecognizable to somebody from even a 100 years ago. If we don't go extinct, I imagine that in another thousand years future humans or whatever succeeds us will be completely alien to us as well. It's pretty hard to predict what that would look like given where we are now.

With that caveat, I think we can make some assumptions such as that future intelligent life will likely exist in virtual environments running on computing substrates because such environments could operate at much faster speeds than our meat brains, and what we consider real time would be seem like geological scale from that perspective. Given that, I can't see why intelligences living in such environments would pay much attention to the physical world.

I also think that we're likely to develop human style AIs within a century. It's hard to predict such things, but I don't think there's anything magic regarding what our brains are doing. There are a few different paths towards producing a human style artificial intelligence.

The simplest approach could be to simply evolve one. Given a rich virtual environment, we could run an evolutionary simulation that would select for intelligent behaviors. This approach doesn't require us to understand how intelligence works. We just have to create a set of conditions that select for the types of intelligent behaviors we're looking for. This is a brute force approach for creating AGI.

Another approach could be to map out the human brain down to neuron level and create a physics simulation that would emulate a brain. We aren't close to being able to do that technologically yet, but who knows what will happen in the coming decades and centuries.

Finally, we might be able to figure out the algorithms that mimic what our brains do, and build AIs based on that. This could be the most efficient way to build an AI since we'd understand how and why it works which would facilitate rapid optimization and improvement.

My view is that if we made an AI that had human style consciousness then it should be treated as a person and have the same rights as a biological human. While we could never prove that an AI has internal experience and qualia, I think that morally we have to err on the side of trusting the AI that claims to have consciousness and self awareness.

I expect that post biologicals will be the ones to go out and explore the universe. Meat did not evolve to live in space because we're adapted to gravity wells. An artificial life form could be engineered to thrive in space without ever needing to visit planets. This is the kind of life that's most likely to be prolific in space.

One of the best sci fi novels I've read on the subject would be Diaspora by Greg Egan. It seems like a plausible scenario for the future of humanity.

I'm not sure what's so special about react.js being made by a capitalist company. Saying that Mastodon uses a popular library that happened to come out from a commercial company is some kind of gotcha is frankly incoherent.

Right, pretty much all the basic research is publicly funded everywhere because it's the only way it can work. Of course, thanks to decades of brainwashing, a lot of people in the west now think that real innovation comes from the private sector.

I think another aspect we can look at is the type of technological we see happening in the west with it being mostly around software, and frivolous things like ChatGPT. Meanwhile, in China, a lot of the technological development is very practical like bullet trains, nuclear power, and so on. It's just another example of how state directed research ends up producing more meaningful results than the private sector.

And yeah sure, send a link that sounds like a fun read.

What are you doing trolling on this site then?

Simply, the central bank can play the role of a VC where people with great ideas apply for loans or grants.

Capitalism is a system of capital accumulation with the people who own the means of production hiring workers to operate them. Co-ops are a market economy, but they're demonstrably not capitalism because capital is distributed fairly amongst the workers doing the work. Learn the difference between markets and capitalism.

That's right, real freedom is being able to scream into the void without actually having the power to improve your material conditions. :)

This is a great example of how real progress happens outside capitalist relations. Developing something genuinely new takes a lot of false starts, and it's hard to predict when it's going to become profitable. No capitalist wants to invest money into an idea indefinitely without knowing whether they're going to get a return on it. This can only be done at state level when technological advancement is pursued outside the profit motive.

Imagine taking the time to write this comment.

No, I don't work at state media, and it's pretty weird to assume that anybody who sees China favorably must work at Chinese state media to be honest.

Calling whataboutism is a logical fallacy used to justify having different standards for yourself and your adversaries. Anybody using whataboutism in place of an actual can be safely dismissed as a troll. Meanwhile, western media is certainly no less biased than CGTN and has been caught lying about China repeatedly.

I think perhaps you meant to reply to the parent comment, I certainly did not suffer in USSR and the dissolution of USSR was a great tragedy in my view.

USSR obviously wasn't the ideal of socialism. In fact, it would be pretty surprising if the first ever attempt at building a socialist society didn't have problems. Obviously we can learn from USSR and do better going forward. However, I do think that despite all its problems, USSR did manage to achieve many positive outcomes for the majority of the people. It provided everyone with education, housing, healthcare, jobs, and all the necessities of life. This was done despite USSR having been under duress during its whole existence and it's something that current capitalist regimes are unable to achieve.