Machines / gadgets / technology / games
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A first adventure with ChatGPT
It has taken me this long to interact with Chat GPT. I can’t explain why. It hasn’t seemed that interesting to me, in terms of any philosophical questions about consciousness or intelligence. I know many people have found some questions to raise that they and others find interesting; I just haven’t felt the need to Continue reading
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Artificial Einstein
There is a set of interesting discussions posted on Scott Aaronson’s blog among Aaronson, Steven Pinker, and others on whether recent text generators like GPT-3 indicate that artificial intelligence is upon us. The discussion is informed, sensible, and well-mannered: these guys all respect each other’s views, though they disagree, so it’s a model of genuine Continue reading
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Being obducted into other worlds
I have been sucked into the latest game made by the Myst people, Obduction. I’m about a third of the way through, but the premise seems to be that there are four or five worlds existing in the same space in different dimensions, and all are connected to the same tree. Or they are supposed Continue reading
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Brave New World
Reading Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future (Viking, 2016). Kelly is one of the founding editors of Wired, and this book is about the promise of emerging technologies to, well, shape our future. A paragraph early in the book exhibits its general vibe: So, the truth: Right Continue reading
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Brainwashing, the Red Scare, and the Turing Test
I just came across this brilliant lecture, “Imitation Games: Conspiratorial Sciences and Intelligent Machines,” given recently by Simon Schaffer. I’ve noted Schaffer’s work before on early automata. Here he extends his interest in our fascination with automata to post-WWII paranoia. Schaffer illustrates the intelligence backdrop to Turing’s work, and particularly the paranoia among communists and Continue reading
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Star Wars awakens
(No spoilers) Star Wars came out in 1977, and I was 12 years old, which means it hit me the way a T-16 can bull’s-eye womp rats (at least with the right pilot). I remember Nixon resigning, and I remember when I first heard about 9/11, and I remember when that Imperial Cruiser came rolling Continue reading
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What they needed
Then – without warning, without prelude, without even a minute to try to wrap a terrestrial head around the idea – Earth found itself in the middle of a galactic war. It was like neanderthals finding themselves on the beach at Normandy. Alien ships were suddenly surrounding the planet – resistance would have been not just futile, but hilarious – and Continue reading
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The Magical Dimensions of the Globe
There’s a particularly good episode of Doctor Who (“The Shakespeare Code”) wherein the Doctor and Martha visit Shakespeare and save the world from a conspiracy of witches. The witches’ plan is to take possession of Shakespeare and force him to write magical incantations into the (now lost) play Love’s Labours Won. (It’s not really magic, of Continue reading
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Multitasking and multipurposing
The other day was entirely typical, but I paused to consider the wonder of it all. I was trading moves back and forth with a friend playing Civilization. I was the American civilization under Roosevelt, and because of some luck with natural resources, advantages in constructing Wonders, and some devilishly clever economic planning, I was Continue reading
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Automata of our own making
[Currently reading Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: the Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard UP, 2011).] Human beings groove on creating things in which they can see themselves. Mirrors, of course – but also cave paintings, sculptures, plays, poems, music, and robots. Each creation brings on an out-of-body experience, as we can see Continue reading
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The Fermi Paradox, Mass Effect, and Transhumanism
The Fermi Paradox The story is that sometime in the early 1950s, four physicists were walking to lunch and discussing flying saucers. The place was Los Alamos, and the lunch group included Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York. None of them believed in flying saucers, of course, but – and this is Continue reading
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Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner, and a clock to last for the next 10,000 years
In 1671, in some letters exchanged with the French mathematician Pierre de Carcavy, Leibniz mentioned his plans to create a calculating machine. Apparently, he had been inspired by a pedometer, probably thinking that if machines could count, they could then calculate. Within a couple of years, he hired a craftsman build a wooden prototype of Continue reading
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My training to take over the world
I am a great believer in technology’s capacity to build our native skills, and so lately I have been augmenting my talents for world domination through playing Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. (For some reason, Sid Meier thinks it’s important that Sid Meier’s Civilization IV be known as “Sid Meier’s Civilization IV,” but I’m not typing Continue reading
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