That’s not a bad thing, to go by the movie.
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Oh sure… I just mean that maybe we’ve reached the limit on what computing can practically do for us. Maybe this is the best it gets and pursuing endless “improvements” is just a fools game?
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I think there’s far more that can be achieved, but like any science, there’s loads more groundwork to be done to have a solid base to build more knowledge. These a-holes think they can skip steps, and it’s going as can be expected…
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I don’t know, maybe… I’m just wondering where we decide that we’ve gotten as much use of this particular technological development as we’re going to get, and think about developing other fields a bit more… part of the problem is that we’ve bent so much of our entire economy around STEM (in the service primarily of a corporate agenda), that we’ve abandoned almost everything else, thinking it can solve all our problems… but can it? Part of this comes from letting self-interested corporations drive our research agenda. I don’t know if this is true, but I’d wager that lots of funding for science ends up computer science now rather than other scientific fields… This would explain things like cutting funding for environmental research or as was posted in another thread, shutting down a whole entire grad program for medical research… I don’t know that people are even wanting to ask these kinds of questions any more - whether or not it’s useful to push for continued “innovation” in computing to the point of starving other scientific fields of study (not to mention the humanities and the arts!). If people have it in their heads that progress only means improving “technology” and not much of anything else, I’d say that’s a problem that needs to be addressed… But you even ask the question, you get shouted down as some kind of anti-technology luddite (not that luddites were bad! they’re just remembered as being bad by most people).
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I would agree with this. There is probably a great deal of development to be done on computing, but putting all our resources into making that happen is like trying to optimize wood-burning steam engines. At some point all the obvious steps are done and innovation has to come from other things. I’ve seen it called “blue sky” research…not the way business people use the phrase, but meaning questions like why the sky is blue that don’t have any immediate practical application. People focused on the next quarter always treat it like a waste of money but in the long run it’s where advancement comes from.
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Oh, there’s no disagreement here. That base I speak of is a more complete understanding of intelligence, and that involves far, far more than computer science. The nice thing is that there’s no need to understand these things solely for AI, and there’s plenty of benefits to be had for humanity in general.
I have the feeling though that I’m (translated from Italian) “kicking down an open door”.
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Right now AI especially is all about building ever bigger Chinese rooms and pretending that’s all consciousness is. Ironically I think it’s experimental proof that it really is possible to make one without the other. 
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And of course, the way they structure games, social media etc is purposely to indoctrinate people with libertarian views surreptitiously. Refine that all you want and the result is still shit.
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My brain hurts
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I think about weird stuff like this with alarming regularity. What lies beyond the event horizon of a black hole? Is matter actually destroyed, or is it compressed as tight as infinite gravity can squeeze it, then spewed into another universe with momentum to expand?
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So we’re on the stupid side of a gravitational sphincter? Checks out.
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When you squeeze particles tight enough their position will become more and more constrained, and at a certain scale that means their momentum will have to be less and less. Eventually the wave function is going to include states with enough energy that they themselves should notably warp spacetime…I think we will need a good theory of quantum gravity to say much more than “out of bounds error”.
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Yeah, but I think a big part of the problem is the role of tech for-profit corporations, too. I think right now, much of funding for science departments are coming from private industry (not all, but lots of it). As such, the type of research being done is shaped by the needs of private industry rather than by people’s imagination and the needs/interests of the public.
Yeah, exactly! The human mind is an amazing thing and can come up with some amazing ideas. But if corporate interests are in the driver seat, or worse, oligarchs out for building their wealth over all other considerations, then we can’t move in creative and interesting directions.
Indeed, but the current direction is a focus on AI rather than other kinds of intelligence.
Yeah, that. Because they are not pursuing knowledge, but seeking ways to grow their wealth.
Absolutely! We know that the DOD was using gaming (specifically modern war games) as a means of seeking out recruits. Of course that’s bounced back to the private sector now. People often forget that the internet came out of the DOD anyway (along with universities, private industry, and thinktanks like Rand).
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Hmmm; “star stuff” eh? Or something a bit more … intestinally based?
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@chenille, I think that very few folks really understand just how much we have no idea what goes past the event horizon. All our current theories just kinda 
“weird shit in there” or “here there be dragons.” There is a whole lot of new physics that needs to be discovered before we even catch a glimmer.
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It’s quite possible that space itself, never mind position, is itself an artifact of particle interaction to begin with, which boils down to ‘simple’ arithmetic. 
Cole Fury’s stuff is heady, in this talk she gives us her “best guess” as to “What is the universe made of? How does it work?” (answer: “It’s all math”.) I freely admit I don’t get it, but it uses some things that are right on the edge of stuff I deal with, so it intrigues me.
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Maybe more it’s all described by math?
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It is my considered option that our universe is something that a bored teenager in some higher dimension cobbled together at the last minute for their school’s science fair.
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When it was math people could easily visualize, people talked about the math as describing those visualizations, and now that it’s all tensors and Fock spaces, people talk about math as the underlying reality. But who knows, maybe someday we’ll get better at visualizing it again. 
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