the special effects are really impressive, it’s worth checking out
the special effects are really impressive, it’s worth checking out
You are looking for a Great Man of history to pin this on. You’d rather believe someone nefarious is in charge and pulling the strings from an ocean away, than to see this for what it is; an empire with no real conscious oversight. A pile of self-interested businessmen, politicians, and militarists doing whatever they can to line their pockets, profits above all else.
The US has, per capita, the largest prison population and, outright, the biggest military on the planet. If there’s a road to ‘unfreedom’, we traveled down it a long time ago.
You’d rather believe Trump is result of foreign interference, that our own institutions would never result in this without being sullied from outside. It’s fan fic, it’s Cold War nonsense.
Trump is the consequence of our political systems, of our spiteful culture, of our economics that promises success and leaves people sick, broken, and in debt. So what if the Russians had a few hundred Facebook posts? That “seed” would not have taken if the soil weren’t already fertile. Frankly, I don’t think it made a difference. We were barrelling toward Trump with or without the oh so spooky slavs typing on a keyboard.
On the one hand, you can read it as a parody of late 20th century life - like, haha imagine a caveman clocking into work
but on the other hand, Flinstones and its far future counterpart Jestsons kinda suggest an inability to imagine anything different. Automobile-ized suburban development frequently gets presented an the human ‘default’. As though we just default to this, rather than it being one of many ways cities and society could be organized.
Living, growing, changing cells are pretty damn dissimilar to static circuitry. Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells. The model ignores the fact neurons are constantly growing, shifting, and breaking connections with one another, and flat out does not consider structures and interactions within the cells.
Metaphysics is not required to make the observation that computer programmes are magnitudes less complex than a brain.
I like to think by the time Kirk gets the enterprise, all those spacious crew quarters we see in Strange New Worlds have been eaten up by retrofits and upgrades.
The trouble with phrases like ‘neural structures’ and ‘language parsing’ is that these descriptions still play into the “AI” narrative that’s been used to oversell large language models.
Fundamentally, these are statistical weights randomly wired up to other statistical weights, tested and pruned against a huge database. That isn’t language parsing, it’s still just brute-force calculation. The understanding comes from us, from people assigning linguistic meaning to patterns in binary.
You’re getting surveillance regardless of walkablity. Amazon is happy enough to hand Ring camera footage over to authorities no questions asked.
You worship the stock market and private property like a golden calf.
All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they’re eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I’d rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough…
And your metaphor was a fun oversimplification.
*Kinda hard to have an equal discussion when being a woman entails being sexually harassed and occasionally assaulted by a bunch of men, mostly ones you barely know or don’t know at all, on a regular basis before you even hit puberty.*
genuine question, how do you expect it to get any better if you aren’t being civil?
The decision matrix here isn’t [civil engagement ||or
|| uncivil engagement], but rather:
[civil engagement and
incur non-zero risk of uncivil retaliation ||or
|| do not engage]
Non-participation is the safer option, broadly speaking. If your speaking with a stranger, it’s better to let a minor slight slide, than to engage civilly. As you get to know someone better, as you become more familiar with conditions, this chart becomes a secondary consideration or even unnecessary. But with strangers, you never know if you’re dealing with an outlier.
Desertification has increased
Local flora has decreased
Rabbit populations have octupled
Deer populations have doubled
And there certainly wasn’t a neighborhood where your highway on-ramp currently is.
almost like our property codes were written for an era that is more than a century gone
squatters rights take entirely too long to kick in these days
If i were gonna write the Borg going forward, I’d have the queens be a failed experiment to elevate one drone to the role of tactician specifically to deal with the Federation. It didn’t work, so they don’t do it anymore.