wildiris

Nested pushdown automata and context free grammars (1/n). I am one of those people that needs to build something before I feel I understand how it works. In an effort to take a deeper dive into the Theory of Computation I’ve put together a nested stack machine in a FPGA. At this point the hardware seems to be working. Now the journey ahead is to start programming this bad boy and see how such an alternate processor architecture will work out in real world applications such as robotics.

Reading the encyclical, I am reminded that the Vatican is fundamentally a city-state on the continent of Europe, and that its elites, which of course include the Pope himself, cannot resist the myopic preoccupations of the Eurocrat. This document would be much improved if it were less enamored of the traditional academia/civil society talking points on AI (“The apparent objectivity of the responses and suggestions these systems provide can lead us to overlook the fact that they reflect the cultural assumptions of those who designed and trained them” woah! really???) and more engaged with where AI is headed. But instead of doing that, the encyclical dodges in the deepest sense, denying that AI “really thinks” or “really learns” and all that typical strain of cope that amounts to magical thinking: “when a computer does it, it is ‘data processing,’ beep boop, but when a human does it, it is ‘actual learning’” It is probably actively bad for global understanding of AI that the Pope endorsed this viewpoint as late as 2026. In the end, this encyclical reads to me as though ghost written by the blob of Western civil society, the same people whose feckless and incoherent preaching we have heard blanketing our media for decades now. And, in a very important sense, it was written by them; after all, who forms the peer group for the elites of a European city-state? Like that blob, the encyclical is intellectually flaccid at its core, no matter how well intentioned it may be. This document is a missed opportunity to advance global understanding of AI, and yet another blow to the legitimacy and sanctity of storied Western institutions. As if you needed one more.

Regarding humanoid form-factor robots: • A critical issue, completely lost in the current hype and rush to market, is that the people who will be selling, operating, servicing and maintaining field-deployed robots in the future, will by necessity be the same people that are doing those jobs now as regards to farm, construction, marine, oil-field, logging, or mining equipment. • In other words, any robotic system deployed in the field, that requires the additional technical support of a team of Stanford University engineering graduate students, is a commercial nonstarter. • Or to put it another way, the current crop of humanoid robots are completely neglecting the questions of design for manufacturing, operation, service, and maintenance. All absolutely critical elements for any robotic system to ultimately be commercially viable in the field. • What a field-deployed robot needs to be is modular. Its mechanical construction needs to be based on interchangeable subassemblies. • And its computational architecture should come in the form of pre-programmed bricks or modules connected together using a single shared serial interface to form a system of distributed intelligence. • This form of construction allows for easy manufacture, easy maintenance, and easy service. Programming is not part of this paradigm. If one wants to change some functionality in a robot, just swap in a different module. • The upside of this kind of construction is that this is the level of service, maintenance, and rebuild competency that already exists within the workforce currently employed in the industries of farming, construction, marine, oil-field, logging, and mining.

A lot of confusion could be avoided if we replaced the overloaded word “consciousness” with a simpler word: “feeling”. Every child knows what you mean when you ask whether a bug or a rock or computer can feel anything. That’s what the fuss is about, not the other stuff.