№ 784. Solvitur Ambulando

 "It is solved by walking." the problem can be solved by a practical demonstration referring to Diogenes' response to the claim that motion is unreal by getting up and walking.

№ 680. Waking Up to Binary Dreams 5

1949er.org

 

№ 670. Waking Up to Binary Dreams 2023

Max Siedentopf

 

There are many challenges that ChatGPT will bring, particularly when it comes to education, plagiarism, and professional and academic integrity, Altman acknowledged.

“I get why educators feel the way they feel about this, and probably this is just a preview of what we're going to see in a lot of other areas,” Altman said.

OpenAI is already exploring ways in which it can help teachers detect the output of any generative AI like ChatGPT, such as watermarking technologies, but only because “it is important for the transition,” he said.

He added that generative AI is something we just need to adapt to.

№ 663. Password Security

№ 647. Waking Up to Binary Dreams 4

reddit

 

Digital tech doesn’t only erode our attention. It also divides and redirects our attention into separate information ecosystems, so that the news you see is different from, say, the news your grandmother sees. And that has profound effects on what each of us ends up viewing as morally salient.

№ 605. Happy New Year!

It's not the year of the dog. But what the heck, happy new year!

№ 482. Working from Home: Generalists

Brain Pickings

Here an old insight.

My college ed. was steeped in general core subjects on a wide variety of disciplines --- math, science, social sciences, management and other thinking courses like philosophy and theology.

It seems that the debate about specialization and generalization is still alive.

№ 444. Virtual Tours in the Age of Covid

Max Gustafson

Here's a safer and cheaper way to travel while the world is on quarantine: virtual tours.

Soon, I think, we can reinvent the internet and involve the other senses in the virtual tours. For example, we can walk through the tour and touch the exhibits, if allowed. Or smell and taste them, if the curators want us to sample them.

Fast forward to science fiction reality about a hundred years from now. After this 2020 pandemic becomes an uneventful entry in history, I look forward to teleporting directly to any tourist attraction, museum, restaurant, concert on the planet or off.

Teleporting will dispense with a lot of the necessary inconveniences of travel in the present like check-in, immigration, pre-departure wait and baggage carousels. Viruses and other contaminants, like terrorists, can also be safely isolated in the ether before they reach their destinations. Some thought.

№ 431. Black Mirror Reality

Globalization and the internet may have made the world smaller, but now we're experiencing a counterattack, the regionalization of truth.

№ 425. The Social Media Coliseum

The philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke have proposed the useful phrase moral grandstanding to describe what happens when people use moral talk to enhance their prestige in a public forum. Like a succession of orators speaking to a skeptical audience, each person strives to outdo previous speakers, leading to some common patterns. Grandstanders tend to “trump up moral charges, pile on in cases of public shaming, announce that anyone who disagrees with them is obviously wrong, or exaggerate emotional displays.” Nuance and truth are casualties in this competition to gain the approval of the audience. Grandstanders scrutinize every word spoken by their opponents—and sometimes even their friends—for the potential to evoke public outrage. Context collapses. The speaker’s intent is ignored.

Christoph Niemann

№ 357. Waking Up to Binary Dream 9

If this article achieves anything, I hope it teaches you digital mindfulness. This is the act of being careful on the internet and taking precautionary measures to save yourself pain and potential ruin in the future, all because you didn’t install an antivirus or put a little bit of tape over your camera.

№ 355.Waking Up to Binary Dreams 8

As Western nations become wealthier, organized religion plays a smaller role in our lives. But the void between questions and answers remains, creating an opportunity. As more and more people become alienated from traditional religion, we look to Google as our immediate, all-knowing oracle of answers from trivial to profound. Google is our modern-day god. Google appeals to the brain, offering knowledge to everyone, regardless of background or education level. If you have a smartphone or an Internet connection, your prayers will always be answered: “Will my kid be all right?” “Symptoms and treatment of croup. . .” “Who might attack us?” “Nations with active nuclear-weapons programs . . .”

№ 336. Sunday's Best

Sunday's find. Nice. A little emo, but fine.

№ 333. Waking Up to Binary Dreams 4

"If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” But, really, how can you tell? So much of what is happening between the public and Silicon Valley is out of view — algorithms written and controlled by wizards who are able to extract value from your identity in ways you could never do for yourself."

№ 326. Design of the Decades

His proposals:

1. Transparency
2. Accountability
3. Rethink / Redesign

№ 243. Bento Box: Kiwix

Monday's Bento Box: Kiwix

Kiwix is a free and open-source offline web browser created by Emmanuel Engelhart and Renaud Gaudin in 2007. It was first launched to allow offline access to Wikipedia, but has since expanded to include other projects from the Wikimedia foundation as well as public domain texts such as Project Gutenberg.

Kiwix

№ 39. Waking Up to Binary Dreams

"Tanging Ngiti", from Pinto Art Gallery, Antipolo City, Rizal

Two things: faster brains and more sophisticated thought processes. All artificial, all human engineered.

Ergo, hardware + software = awareness? Anytime soon? Maybe. Because of our longer lifespans, maybe even within our lifetime.



Faster Brains

"Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they're getting faster is increasing.

True? True.

So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties." (Time)

 

Magnet Funnies

 

By 2045, the article claims, man can become immortal. By hooking up to a computer and downloading his consciousness into its chips and wires a person will have a more durable home. His will and intellect will permanently reside in a less organic and, maybe, less destructible vessel made of ceramics, plastics, silicon and other metals.

They call the event Singularity. It's the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. And I thought the Fringe series is still sci-fi by most standards in circa 2011.

Complex Thinking

"Kevin Kelly, a founder of Wired magazine, has written that there are at least a trillion Web pages in existence, which means the internet's collective brain has more neurons than our actual gray matter that's stuffed between our ears.

'The Web holds about a trillion pages. The human brain holds about 100 billion neurons,' Kelly writes in his 2010 book "What Technology Want".

Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page on average links to 60 other pages. That adds up to a trillion 'synapses' between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number of links -- but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The global machine is." (CNN)

Awareness

There is already an interconnection, an infrastructure which is getting more integrated and sophisticated. If somebody can hook up to a machine and then gain access and control of this superhighway.... If people hook up and become linked.... will consciousnesses coalesce into a collective mind?

Will the World Wide Web wake up (W x 5!)?

2045, is it? I wonder what seed of human genius will spark this.

That will make humans the likely ancestors of the Borg. At least, until we actually come in contact with other extraterrestrial civilizations, including Borg-like creatures. Meanwhile, back to earth: I hope cybernetic implants are covered by our senior citizen privileges.

Is the internet conscious?