Looks like there’s also plenty of calligraphy involved.

Maybe you could use an LLM to filter out all the murder threats and curses while also adding all the necessary punctuation.

You’re right that there are many big differences. Launching a rocket into space could be compared with building a major cathedral back in the day. People did both, but not very often, because those projects are very demanding. Ships were also super expensive, but we built those all the time, so obviously the requirements weren’t quite as high.

Also attitudes have shifted quite a lot in the recent centuries, so losing a few sailors isn’t quite the same as losing an astronaut. Nowadays, safety is taken a lot more seriously which makes the project even more expensive.

That’s a very good addition. The old filters are still there and any one of them could still come back and bite us. However, when better technology becomes available, the older filters become less and less of a problem. Let’s take the bioweapons as an example. At the moment, we can develop cures and vaccines, but that technology has its limits. Perhaps one day our biotech is advanced enough that stopping a bioweapon from harming the citizens is as trivial as updating some software and changing a few passwords. Likewise, the climate catastrophe becomes less and less of an issue if the species is no longer bound to a single planet, but can also thrive in space.

Will this antimatter reactor consume the entire planet?

Meh, probably not.

Yep. That’s the Great Filter concept. Certain stages on the evolutionary path may lead to extinction, and only the smartest species are able to pass the filter unharmed. In our case, the discovery of fossil fuels and nuclear weapons may be those kinds of stages.

Imagine what happens if we pass this filter and become an intergalactic species. Maybe one day we’ll start tinkering with technology capable of destroying a star, galaxy or the entire universe. If we are smart enough to squeeze energy out of the very fabric of space, we might also be dumb enough to cause the entire universe to collapse or something like that.

It’s a proposed solution to the fermi paradox. The idea is that we don’t see aliens out there in the stars, because they all nuked themselves to oblivion at some stage. Maybe they never reached the stars, before they destroyed their home planet. Maybe they blew up their own star and didn’t reach another one in time. Maybe their entire galaxy got sucked into a home-made black hole.

Crossing large spans of water was very dangerous, because of storms, getting lost, running out of food etc. Nowadays, crossing large spans of empty space is also very dangerous, but the dangers are a bit different. Regardless, I can see many similarities between crossing the Atlantic ocean in the 1400s and going to the moon 500 years laters.

So… no superposition, entanglement, tunneling or teleportation in macroscopic scale. ☹️

But what about cutting steel with a plasma torch? Could you see macroscopic results of particles doing counterintuitive quantum stuff?

Having seen enough exceptions in biology, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone found a multicellular bacterial species that violates everything we know about bacteria. Biology is completely wild, and it’s really hard to come up with a rule or a category that always works and nobody has any problems with it.

And that’s why you need to figure out what’s the right balance of work and inconvenience vs. the amount of privacy you get in return. Setting up a degoogled android is possible and relatively easy too. Living with that phone and interacting with the real world around you in 2024 is a completely different matter, and it’s entirely understandable if that isn’t your cup of tea.

That’s a good point. “Determining the cause of death” implies that the person is dead. It’s like braiding the hair of a bald guy.

A huge part of global CO2 emissions come from various industries, so they certainly have a lot to improve. We should definitely start with that instead of blaming regular consumers of everything.

Switching to completely renewable energy sources requires grid energy storage, which we don’t really have at the moment. While we’re building renewable energy plants and the facilities to balance out the mismatching nature of energy production and demand, we’re still going to need some sort of energy during the transition period, and that’s when nuclear energy comes in handy. The way I see it, it’s not a long term solution for everything, but a temporary tool for managing the transition period, which is apparently going to take decades.

The private sector does what’s economically attractive and viable, but policies dictate what makes economic sense and what doesn’t. Therefore, I think we should all vote for the local politicians who support renewable energy and grid energy storage.

Building large reactors isn’t economically attractive, so maybe SMRs could help with that. Time will tell. Or maybe we need to make it more expensive to build and run fossil fuel plants, and politics would be the right tool for that.

First, you need to find a place where soup restaurants have some special privileges compared to normal businesses. Then, just start a soup restaurant there and serve cereal and milk instead.

If you can’t find such a place, then maybe you can ask your local politicians to pass a bill like that. Would be nice if soup restaurants had to pay only half the amount of taxes compared to everyone else. Would be good for the owners, and fun for everyone else to see where the resulting legal battles go. Suddenly, you would find lots of companies selling just about anything and everything as soup and claiming they don’t have to pay the usual taxes.

This is the way. If OP doesn’t like olives, that just leaves more for the rest of us. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Our perception of it is also highly distorted due to the bubble we live in. Chinese are living in a different kind of bubble where everyone can more or less understand each other, as long as they stick to the written form. The languages may be different, but they are written using the same system, which makes communication possible. Also, the Great Firewall of China keeps Chinese people inside that bubble and foreigners outside it.

All of this also touches upon an interesting topic. What it really means to understand something? Just because you know stuff and may even be able to apply it in flexible ways, does that count as understanding? I’m not a philosopher, so I don’t even know how to approach something like this.

Anyway, I think the main difference is the lack of personal experience about the real world. With LLMs, it’s all second hand knowledge. A human could memorize facts like how water circulates between rivers, lakes and clouds, and all of that information would be linked to personal experiences, which would shape the answer in many ways. An LLM doesn’t have such experiences.

Another thing would be reflecting on your experiences and knowledge. LLMs do none of that. They just speak whatever “pops in their mind”, whereas humans usually think before speaking… Well at least we are capable of doing that even though we may not always take advantage of this super power. Although, the output of an LLM can be monitored and abruptly deleted as soon as it crosses some line. It’s sort of like mimicking the thought processes you have inside your head before opening your mouth.

Example: Explain what it feels like to have an MRI taken of your head. If you haven’t actually experienced that yourself, you’ll have to rely on second hand information. In that case, the explanation will probably be a bit flimsy. Imagine you also read all the books, blog posts and and reddit comments about it, and you’re able to reconstruct a fancy explanation regardless.

This lack of experience may hurt the explanation a bit, but an LLM doesn’t have any experiences of anything in the real world. It has only second hand descriptions of all those experiences, and that will severely hurt all explanations and reasoning.

I think it is also related to the economy as a whole. While the pandemic was dragging on and on, inflation got much higher and central banks responded by increasing the interest rates. As a result, investors no longer had access to infinite free money.

Turns out, there are lots of companies that relied on constant funding instead of actual revenue. Those companies are undergoing some major changes at the moment.

Really? I should totally give it a go some time. Sounds like the ideal life hack for me.

Had they done it with Xitter, the result would have been a total racist.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist