tom sarbeck

I remember reading an article about Florence Shinn. From what I remember he writings were equal parts interesting life advice and total supernatural nonsense (especially the: the world wants you to succeed and you can do anything if you just believe in it). She was a pioneer in life advice (that can be a good thing) but also one of the people who…[Read more]

You can point out a lot of silly stupid things that new atheists like Dawkins, Harris and Boghosian have said (not their critique of religion but outside of that)…but it’s hard to think of examples of this when it comes to Hitchens. He was a snarky dick a lot of the time but that’s a personality trait, not a failing. Hitchens was actually pretty…[Read more]

Glen D wrote:
Seems there’s an assumption that sentience for AI is inevitable.  No convinced that is the case.  However, I’m most interested in learning the basis for such an assumption.

Same here, at east for a while. Meanwhile AI could “appear” to be sentient, and be sold to buyers as such. And then the inevitable R&D on trying to dupli…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
It isn’t just paranoid looney-tunes who are warning us about AI, it’s some of our best and most creative thinkers.

Hmm yeah I expected Pinker to give the optimistic “it won’t necessarily naturally evolve” badly for us [paraphrase]. Thing is, all AI won’t be designed or owned by the same people, so there will be “variation in the spe…[Read more]

I read the Old Testament, which to be honest is a fairly fascinating read. There are a few adventure stories, a kind of strange historical chronicle, the schizophrenic insanity of a murderous God doing cruel barbaric things to entire cities, lists of really disturbing laws and in a couple books a singular obsession with the sexual lives of others.…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
The series “Humans” is worth a watch on Netflix – not sure if available in USA though.

I like the series, but hope they’ll add more (“realistic”, imo) bad-guy AI, eventually. (It’s on Amazon here, as Unseen mentioned.)

Blade Runner was ahead of its time on a similar theme, as are some of the time travel themed serie…[Read more]

No unseen. As stem fields are slowly (hardly there yet) becoming less hostile to women entering stem fields, the enrolment of women in STEM university courses are over all reaching parity with men (in some fields surpassing them). Sexual harassment and discrimination against women in STEM fields is still rampant to the point that it is seriously…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:

A plea to PopeBeanie and all who want to enumerate points: Do not use the n. format (1., 2., 3., …) because to someone like me wanting to embed responses in the original text, it becomes heck on Earth as the software thinks it’s being called on to repair the numbering. Instead, use this format: 1), 2), 3)… to make it easy on respo…

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Uhhh…Unseen I wasn’t disagreeing with you in any way nor challenging you nor trying to twist your words. While you have in the past made gender generalisations that I believe are informed by stereotypes I didn’t claim you had in this case. I was talking about something that was similarly related. Please don’t jump to conclusions that you are…[Read more]

In fact Unseen, one of the few generalisations about men and women per differences in attraction that actually stands up to empirical testing is how far more likely men are to be attracted or even turned on by facsimiles of people (a mannequin or cartoon or even an animal character such as a highly sexualised cat character in a comic). Sexuality…[Read more]

Wow that guy went from making cheesy top 10 videos to something a little more substantive. I enjoyed watching the recent series “Star Trek Picard” which deals with the problem of artificial intelligence in the last half of the series. It dealt,  to some extent with a self-fulfilling prophecy. The belief that it was inevitable that AI would one…[Read more]

I watched it. I was disappointed with the drama injected about 3/4 of the way through, and have seen some (techie) people totally turned off by it to the extent of calling the whole production a fraud. If they had just not added that drama, I think the rest of the production would be taken more seriously, as it should be.

Minor note as I watch the video: I think he’s only partly correct that we care more for dogs than (say) flies because dogs are more intelligent. We relate to dogs/cats and other animals not just with intelligence, but with empathy, and sharing of feelings with each other. Cognitive intelligence plus emotional intelligence, if you will. This point…[Read more]