I have always assumed that Alan Kay compared Lisp to Maxwell's Equations because of the similarity between the interplay of eval and apply in Lisp on the one hand, and the interplay of the electric and magnetic fields in Maxwell's equations on the other.
I'm unsure what to make of the post you're replying to, but the idea that there's a connexion between consciousness and quantum phenomena isn't just a New Age idea. Eugene Wigner wasn't New Agey, and he wrote Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, suggesting that wave function collapse only occurs when the consciousness of an an observer becomes aware of the result of a measurement, not the measuring apparatus, which is entangled with whatever is being measured, records it.
For me the most plausible argument for "quantum consciousness" was made by Roger Penrose. I still don't believe it; we can demonstrate wavefunction collapse using experiments like the delayed-choice quantum eraser without anything conscious being involved (unless you believe in retrocausality or the cosmic conspiracy theory, or in panpsychism, which is really no weirder than the quantum consciousness ideas and also quite fun to contemplate).
It seems like you disqualify everything that doesn’t talk back (LLMs then?). By my account a stone is dormant quantum consciousness and living systems merely animate this. Awareness and sense of self are manifestations of biotechnology.
It's confusing because different people mean different things when using political terms. The political compass (https://www.politicalcompass.org) has two axes: left-right and libertarian-authoritarian. On it, socialists are definitely left wing (and communists far left), regardless of what the left/right wing meant at the time of the French Revolution.
Suffices to say, if we look at politics through a two party, first past the post framework, I still think small letter conservatism vs liberalism is the best frame, simply because it is vague enough to be used generally.
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was in 1956, before I was born. AI itself is even older than that (e.g. William Grey Walter's robots, Elmer and Elsie in 1948), but it was called cybernetics back then. I've been doing symbolic AI, on and off, since the 1980s.
I assume, though, you mean LLMs. I haven't used them first hand, but I have fairly recently implemented a multi-layer artificial neural network in C, mostly as a learning exercise, but as I had previously built a speech spectrogram in Lisp, I thought I'd try to use it to recognize phonemes, with one hidden layer. The Lisp communicated with the ANN via a Unix pipe. It worked reasonably well for just vowels, but when I added other sounds (e.g. l, r, s, z), its performance deteriorated. I think the C is bug free, but I don't know an easy way to train the ANN. I've tried adding to the training set, adding an extra layer, changing the number of neurons in the hidden layer. The usual debugging skills don't seem to help there.
I'm interested in how they work, but building anything like them, given the hardware I have, would be impractical. I've seen others use them, including to answer some questions I had, but the answers they gave were obvious, unhelpful, or wrong.
Even if they become more reliable, I like to understand and work things out for myself, rather than just be given the answer.
It's in the name "Hacker News". Hackers are people who enjoy doing the programming themselves, because they get satisfaction from it. Often they program in their spare time, and sometimes what they develop has little to no practical value, and is done as a learning exercise. Using AI would defeat the purpose for them. If they're forced to use AI in their job, it decreases their job satisfaction.
There are others who just want a problem solved, and it doesn't matter to them how the program which solves it gets written, as long as the program (appears to) work and it's done as quickly as possible, so they outsource the development to AI. That is not hacking.
General Relativity. It explained the anomaly in the precession of Mercury's perihelion, and the bending of starlight by the Sun (double the value predicted by Newton's law).
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