"A.I."[1] like "technology"[2] is a term colloquially reserved for things that don't work yet. Once something works, we have to call it something else.

1. "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being called AI; it becomes just computation." - Ray Kurzweil

2. "Technology n. - Something that doesn't work yet." - Douglas Adams

To be clear the root cause of this phenomenon is that the task was solved using methods that obviously have nothing to do with intelligence, so "AI" doesn't apply at all.

Computers will never be intelligent, and by the time we are done, neither will humans.

I actually know a goat rancher who is working to require ag impact studies for data centers in Texas. Sounds like I should give him a call while I can.

(Also CVE-2026-LGTM would be an awesome name for a Culture ship)

Torturer Class ROU CVE-2026-LGTM would absolutely be a member of the Interesting Times Gang.

This is great! Thank you for sharing it. Fun to use and already customizable.

Thanks! And more customizations are coming!

I was thinking the same thing, or even just little minigames and Easter eggs for people to find.

That's definitely coming!

Yes, definitely. Shades of Accelerando, Saturn's Children, and Neptune's Brood. Give me the tentacles any day.

> Democrats US who always love to say “Follow the Nordic Model”

past performance is not indicative of future results

I'm not about to run out and suggest Finnish lunches or buy a tin of Surströmming for breakfast, but it might be nice to have a balanced budget.

Hold on hold on hold on, tell me about Finnish lunches, as from searching they sound pretty innocuous. (Surströmming I know of, no questions there)

Sorry, I conflated Finnish lunches and Norwegian matpakke in my head. Nothing wrong with Finnish lunch.

As I recall, the Dr. knows were programmed to feed that information to runaway mechas who, who were, in turn, programmed to seek out the blue fairy.

Probably a lesson in there somewhere.

But not in any convincing way, which seems like the root of the problem.

I can confirm too. It's empirical, look!

I sometimes wonder if we'd make more progress in understanding ourselves if we gave up the whole concept. More and more, it feels as though "consciousness," like "aether" or "humors," is an insufficient abstraction built on overemphasizing some observations at the expense of others.

We have no data. Is it that we are not like rocks or trees, or is it that we simply 'feel' different than a rock and a tree. Perhaps a tree is aware of itself but is unable / unwilling / unbothered enough to do something. Indeed, some humans, due to chemistry, are unbothered by their own impending doom. Some humans, due to brain chemistry, even choose to off themselves. Thus, 'consciousness' doesn't always look the same and seems very tied to chemical composition and processes. We would thus not expect a rock to be conscious in the same way, if it were conscious at all.

One thought I've had is that, awareness is a common phenomenon, but the brain has learned to exploit that awareness to form a will. It tricks the awareness into being concerned about self-preservation and makes it seem as if the brain is all that exists (perhaps by overwhelming the inputs from other angles). The brain also presents certain desires and beliefs via its processing ability. That is to say, the brain takes inputs and discretizes them. It goes from awareness merely seeing static 'fuzz' due to the sheer amount of data, to the brain taking that data, simplifying it, and presenting simple observations like 'there is a tree there' rather than all the information that would constitute the sensation of a tree existing in that spot. When brains malfunction, the awareness is subjected to poor demonstrations, such as we see in hallucinations, psychosis, schizophrenia, etc.

> Perhaps a tree is aware of itself but is unable / unwilling / unbothered enough to do something

Would you bother to explain yourself to the mosquitoes that swarm in summer and die weeks later? From the perspective of a tree, we are short-lived, fast-moving, relatively small things that fill the place from time to time.

Yes, that's more what I'm saying. There's no aether, but there's a much more interesting and complex world of forces and fields. There are no humors, but anatomy and biological processes are spectacularly complex and full of surprises. Aether and humors just aren't useful abstractions.

Maybe it's the same. Rocks are different, sure, trees, dogs, cows. But why do we assume that the way they are different is somehow related, that there's some overarching concept that contains all the complexities of those differences? It doesn't even make sense when I think of it that way.

> not even like dogs or cows

Interestingly, dogs and cows meet many of ted chiang's requirements for consciousness.

Cats and dogs were recently recognised as sentient in Brazil.

I gave up on Kindles long ago. They wake up and drain their batteries, so they're always dead when I pick them up to read something. Not a problem with Kobo. But I really want to pick up one of these little Xteink readers next. They just seem perfect for pulling out of a pocket and reading. Also, I'm a smaller person, and they look like they would fit my hand. Modern phones feel like tablets to me.