Richard 🐎

Aurora was so bright the ground turned green.

In another year, or two years, or five years, or ten years, when AI has not destroyed the economy, and there’s been no “jobs apocalypse”, and people are just living better and healthier, will the current doomsayers come back and admit on chat shows “you know, I was wrong there, I regret having panicked everyone”? Evidence from the past says that it’s unlikely. Paul Ehrlich never retracted his claims about imminent overpopulation.

Given that we all could probably use a bit of lighthearted humor right now, and since it’s been quite some time since my last “News from Romania” thread, here’s an all time best of collection of the funniest and most absurd real bits of news I’ve collected over the years. 🧵

If you read the Guardian three years ago, you would have learnt from Britain's most famous rail historian that driverless cars on public roads would never work. If you read the FT yesterday, you would learn that Addison Lee believe that it will work so well that they will quickly kill the existing cab trade unless punitive regulation is introduced.

Microsoft CEO: The biggest obstacle to expanding artificial intelligence is persuading people to change the way they work.

David Chalmers on why consciousness is science's greatest unsolved problem: Science has mapped subatomic particles, distant stars, the chemistry of life yet it remains almost completely silent on the one thing we know most directly: our own conscious experience. In a rare early interview, philosopher David Chalmers explains why: "Consciousness is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. Consciousness is what we start with when it comes to knowing the world. I know that I exist. I know that I'm conscious. Everything else is secondary." And yet, despite this intimacy, consciousness sticks out like a sore thumb in the scientific picture. Chalmers points to a deep irony: science has made extraordinary progress on phenomena that are extraordinarily remote: subatomic particles, distant galaxies, the molecular machinery of biology while making almost no progress on the one thing closest to us. Why? Because science, by design, eliminates the subjective. "To do proper science, you have to be objective. You have to eliminate anything subjective from the picture." He uses heat as the perfect example. Physics gives us a complete account of heat molecules in motion, energy transfer, temperature gradients. It explains every objective aspect of the phenomenon. But it never explains what hotness actually feels like. "Science doesn't actually give a theory of the conscious feeling of hotness." This is what Chalmers calls the Hard Problem of Consciousness. You can trace every neural signal from your heat sensor along your nerves into your brain and still have explained nothing about the subjective experience of feeling warm. As interviewer Jeffrey Mishlove puts it: you can't even do science without a conscious mind to observe, interpret, and make meaning of data. Consciousness is the precondition for science itself and yet science has no framework to account for it. Chalmers' conclusion is striking: The methods of science may need to be expanded. Consciousness might not be something science explains away. It might be something science has to learn to start with.

“The best answer to the question, ‘Will computers ever be as smart as humans?’ is probably ‘Yes, but only briefly.’” --Vernor Vinge. We are in the briefly.

The invisible Glass experiment Scientists once placed a transparent glass barrier inside an aquarium. On one side was a fierce pike, and on the other side were several smaller fish swimming freely. When the hungry pike saw the smaller fish, it immediately rushed forward to attack. Bang. It slammed straight into the glass and bounced back. Confused, the pike kept trying again and again, but every attempt ended the same way. The repeated collisions injured its head and knocked off some of its scales. Eventually, the pike became frightened and retreated to a corner of the tank. After some time, the scientists quietly removed the glass barrier. The smaller fish now swam freely throughout the aquarium, even brushing against the pike’s mouth. But the pike never tried to eat them again. Even though it was hungry, it refused to attack. In its mind, the invisible wall was still there. A few days later, the pike reportedly died of starvation, surrounded by food. This phenomenon is often referred to as the Pike Effect or Pike Syndrome. It’s often used as a metaphor for how repeated failure can create invisible limits in the mind.

This is fine.