“Very fine balls on both sides.”

Must be talking about a dwarf Trump pays to wipe his ass.

It’s been said that indecisiveness and perfectionism are liberal weaknesses, and decisiveness and being willing to ignore imperfections for the sake of the team are conservative strengths. I think Michael Moore put it best… Liberals say, “What should we do about dinner? I don’t know… do you want to go out? I dunno, do you? Well, if you do. Okay, where should we go? I dunno, where do you wanna go?” A conservative slams his hand on the table and says, “Get in the car, we’re goin’ to the Sizzler!”

I know it’s not actual “intelligence” - and I complain about this terminology all the time - but for the sake of conversation I use the term AI. Even though all it’s really doing is remixing content it has been trained on to produce something convincingly like what a human can do, it’s often useful enough to replace human output. In practice that’s what’s significant - good enough to replace human labor and much cheaper. I have a software dev friend who uses Claude all the time in his work. During a recent in-person D&D game he had it generate a SQLLite database and scripts to help map some things we were dealing with - without even interrupting the game. I agree that people grossly overestimate AI, especially with wild theories that it’s about to take over the world or that it’s already self-aware - that’s just media-driven and movie-driven fantasy - but there are many routine parts of people’s jobs that the stuff we currently call “AI” can handle at least as reliably as a person.

If you’re brutally honest you’ll probably admit that you do most of your job on autopilot. Unless something interesting happens and you have to make a judgement call, the main thing is just getting through the day without screwing up. AI could almost do the routine parts already, and just nudge you as needed. It could probably do most office jobs that way. Employers will pretty soon realize they could run a 20-person department wtih AI and like 3 consultants to put out occasional fires. This will spread more and more to production jobs as industrial automation catches up. But what does an economy do with all the employees it suddenly doesn’t need? I know the cliche that the goal of capitalism is to make money without employees, but without a certain critical mass of people getting wages they can spend, oligarchs can’t rake in profits and governments can’t rake in taxes. So at that point how do we make the economy work? I think that’s a conversation we’ll be having sooner than we think, and it’s better if we have it before the proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan.

It’s really just a matter of habit and opinion. The only burger places near me are Jack in the Box and McDonalds, and if JitB burned I wouldn’t eat hamburgers anymore.

So many other things are also non-binary, but people insist that not being 100% on their side means you’re a million percent on the extreme opposite hateful wrong side.

Gamer equivalent of getting Linux to run on a toaster.

No, shit for brains, giving up your job is an actual commitment. Virtue signaling is a token gesture that costs you nothing - like throwing a million dollars at an inauguration party when you’re worth billions.

Click, click, clickity-click, click.

I’m in!

My point was only that the Turing Test was not invented by Alan Turing, it was made up based on misunderstood remarks he made. But more than that, the principle is the same as saying a convincing sales pitch means a good product.

Not sure how you define getting “hung up” but there are tons of poorly informed people who believe/fear that AI is about to take over/conquer/destroy/whatever the world because they think LLMs are as smart as humans - or just a few tweaks away. It’s less about the word “intelligence” than about jumping from there to collateral issues, like thinking LLMs are “persons” that deserve rights, that using them without their consent is slavery, and other nonsense. Manipulative people take advantage of this kind of ignorance. Knowledge is good, modern superstition is bad.

Martha Wells… cool, thanks!

Could you stop by my office? Bring your cardkey.

Hard to call any of the various reasons the biggest. Space travel is an evolving discipline that takes vast amounts of money, step-by-step engineering progress, time to learn through acquire practical experience and learn from it, political commitment, and constantly changing public opinion. In theory we already know how to do space mining, it but in practice we don’t know all the challenges we’ll run into, and therefore have not solved yet. The long-term ROI is unquestionably huge but unknown.

For example, platinum is currently worth almost $1000 USD/oz, while aluminum is about 8 cents. If platinum became as available as aluminum this would radically change. We would discover new uses for platinum that haven’t been imagined yet because it’s so expensive - nobody would think of making pie pans or window frames out of it, but physically it might be far superior. Its properties haven’t been explored nearly as fully as the properties of aluminum, but they would be, and nobody knows the result. Maybe there’s an easy way to do antigravity using platinum. Whatever - the point is we don’t know, and that’s just one specific metal. Opening up whole new realms of possibility always creates progress.

If “not have” means abort, I don’t think it’s ever wrong not to have a baby. People should only have kids if they want them and can commit to being good parents for the long haul. “Maybe it will save our marriage” and “God says so” are equally shitty examples of reasons to have kids.

Brilliant thought experiment. I never heard of it before. It does seem to describe what’s happening - if only there were a way to turn it into a meme so modern audiences could understand it.

Yes I think that’s generally what Alan Turing meant - he was careful not to define what “intelligence” means, and was discussing practical perception of machine behavior.

Eliza, a chatbot psychiatry emulator written in the 1960s, convinced many people it was a real person.

Various versions of Eliza are online - including this quaint, retro looking one

That’s essentially the media-generated Turing Test, but in truth no such test was ever defined by Alan Turing. For me the modern takeaway is don’t extrapolate anything about reality from memes.