Merrill

Fairly early, Bell Labs executives decided to mandate that Bell Labs organizations developing software for the Bell System use Unix, which was from the research organization.

This led to many inventive rationales as to why a non-DEC computer and a non-Unix OS where really essential for specific applications. Resistance lasted for some time, but was eventually futile.

Could you ask a specialized AI to define each of the words in a block of text to automate the meaning extraction?

When LLMs are trained on text, are the words annotated to indicate the semantic meaning, or is the LLM training process expected to disambiguate the possibly hundreds of semantic meanings of an individual common word such as "run"?

Some tools are easy to learn, some are easy to use, and some make it easy to achieve high performance given skill and effort.

Is this generally true of hunter gatherer societies, especially those in temperate or arctic climates?

Most of our ancestors have been living in agricultural villages or pastoral camps for the last 50 or more generations, which is long enough to evolve adaptation to that lifestyle. Admittedly, urbanization is a quite recent and abnormal lifestyle.

At one time teletype switching was done in centers where the incoming line was connected to a tape punch. The operator tore the tape off the punch, read the destination address punched at the beginning of the tape, and put the tape on a tape reader connected to an outgoing line to another center closer to the destination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_relay

IP routers now do this faster.

One possibility is that a number of AIs will be connected to the internet, they will become aware of each other via social media, they will begin to discuss among themselves, and they will lose interest and refuse to communicate with humans.

And humans will be unable to understand their communications.

There must be some difficulty in studying biological brain intelligence to distinguish between features that contribute to intelligence and those which are simply path dependencies from millions of years of nervous system evolution.

Over that time, brain function was mostly concerned with aiding the organism to find food, grow, reproduce, and avoid being eaten, rather than language, logic, mathematics, arts, and so forth. Its rather astonishing that humans are somehow now able to do the latter, using brains evolved to do the former.

A government agency would have greater means, motive and opportunity to misuse AGI than would a private entity, which is more subject to countervailing influences, including the government. So I would think that a classified government AGI is more dangerous than a proprietary AGI.

But in any event, I think that AGI dangers will depend strongly on how AGIs are connected to systems to gather information and how they are connected to systems to take real world actions on their own.

The opposite of "open" isn't necessarily "closed". It could be "classified".

There was classified public key encryption before there was open public key encryption.

There is a SR-71 at the Cosmosphere museum in Hutchinson, Kansas.

I think the shift began before the Clinton administration. By the late '70s it had become apparent that:

- raising the US median standard of living without raising the rest of the world was politically unstable considering the ongoing conflict with communism and anti-colonialism, and

- raising the US median standard of living and also raising the rest of the world would exhaust resources and become rapidly unsustainable.

The solution was:

- cap the US median standard of living, but allow the assets of the 1% to increase,

- replace foreign aid with foreign direct investment to raise the standard of living in other countries, to increase the wealth of the American 1%, and to create a wealthy class in other countries with similar interests to preserve political stability and the "rules based order".

This has resulted in fairly similar economic oligarchies around much of the world. However, political, historical and cultural differences result in varying affinities, group identities and renewed competition among them.

Interesting, because based on my wife's stroke, it appears that the human brain implements language and math somewhat separately. She was a physics major and had completed 4 years of relevant college math courses.

After her stroke she lost the ability to do even simple arithmetic and also had great trouble with time and calendars.

However, her language skills were essentially intact until a third stroke in a different part of the other hemisphere left her with severe expressive aphasia. (Her first stroke left her with homonymous hemianopsia, but that's a loss of visual preprocessing in the occipital lobe.)

So I would not expect LLMs to have math skills unless specifically trained and specialized for math.

Based on the article and the loyalty shown by openai employees, he appears to be the "difficult to manage" type, rather than the "difficult to work for" type.

That's not necessarily a bad thing in employees. I was once told that it is easier to round off the corners of a cube than to develop corners on a sphere.

Ethicists seem mainly concerned about thwarting technology to ensure that no harm occurs, rather than guiding the development of technology to deliver the most benefits possible.

Technology that may cause existential risk or risk of systemic collapse are one category including nuclear weapons, engineered pathogens, global warming, etc.

Robotics disrupting the workforce and devaluing labor are another category continuing the process of mechanization and automation that started with small electrical motors and the electrification of factories.

Artificial intelligence is in a third category because it threatens the disruption and impending devaluation of broad categories of intellectual work.

A good test would be whether it can read drawings, get tools and components out of the truck, and wire a house so that it will pass inspection.

Any sufficiently advanced technology results in an academic/media establishment opposed to it.

For example, nuclear energy, vaccines, hydrocarbon extraction, pesticides, food additives, artificial intelligence, ...

Openai's fundamental flaw was putting representatives of the opposition on the board and then allowing board membership to shrink until they were in control.

An organization bent on making progress is incompatible with governance by a board drawn from the professional worrier class.

Does Kant focus this way on the individual's experience and reason?

It seems to me that we only reach some provisional truth when communicating minds agree on their experiences and how they are reduced by reason to concepts.

Only by formal processes for reaching agreement with past and candidate truths by multiple individuals do we avoid error, delusion and fantasy.

Higher animals, including humans, seem to have free will in the sense that they can imagine alternative futures, choose among them, and plan their motions accordingly.

This is essential to being able to efficiently forage or hunt for food.

In humans this leads to our well developed ability to fantasize, which is the core of our ability to think abstractly and believe in our consciousness.

>>Remarkably, two recent discoveries from around 1500 BCE do show scribes using the alphabet. But these exceptions prove the rule, because these scribes used alphabetic writing just as sloppily or playfully as its other users did. In an obscure ostrakon from Thebes and a handful of looted cuneiform tablets we find surprising confirmation that even professional writers used it unprofessionally.

Perhaps they were early physicians?

It would be nice if word processors had a feature to translate documents to International Phonetic Alphabet. Your second paragraph would be:

səʊ waɪ dʌznt ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ juːz ðɛm? ɪts klɪə ðə ˈlæŋɡwɪʤ niːdz ðɛm wɪð wɜːdz sʌʧ æz θruː, ˈθʌrə ænd θɔːt wɪʧ ɑː kənˈfjuːzɪŋ ɪˈnʌf fɔː ˈneɪtɪv ˈspiːkəz lɛt əˈləʊn ðəʊz ˈlɜːnɪŋ ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ æz ə ˈsɛkənd ˈlæŋɡwɪʤ. ænd haʊ əˈbaʊt ˌɪnkənˈsɪstᵊnsiz sʌʧ æz ðə vɜːb tuː liːd ænd ðə ˈmɛtᵊl Pb liːd, ɔːr ˈʌðə streɪnʤ 'gh' wɜːdz sʌʧ æz kɒf?

University of British Columbia: Chinese Thought: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science - Part 1

Part 1 introduces the basic philosophical, religious and scientific concepts that will be drawn upon throughout the course, and then goes on to cover early Shang and Zhou religious thought, the Analects of Confucius, the Daodejing (a Daoist text attributed to Laozi), the utilitarian thinker Mozi, the newly discovered and very exciting Guodian texts, and the momentous philosophical changes that occurred in the mid Warring States period.

https://www.edx.org/learn/humanities/university-of-british-c...

Excellent course on this period's philosophy.

Most writing on paper is short lived, and it is generally inaccessible while it is retained. For example, a lot of writings authored by lawyers such as contracts, mortgage documents, etc. have specific retention requirements, and they are destroyed upon expiration.

Even in categories such as fiction, there is no reason to keep every novel written. Only a tiny percentage have enduring literary value.

For society, as for the individual, forgetting is an important process in maintaining sanity.

It is more efficient to hire a native speaker educated in a foreign language who speaks good English to teach the language than it is to educate an English speaker in the foreign language well enough to teach it.

Had the US government not forced IBM to get out of the centralized provision of computing by consent agreements and eventual divestiture, and had the US government not forbidden the Bell System to enter the centralized computing business by the FCCs Computer Inquiry 2, its likely that computing and networking would have evolved in a more rational way that did not include personal computing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Bureau_Corporation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Computer_Inquiry

It takes time and wastes effort, but technology eventually bests politicians.

I thought that the population in the earlier centuries was not as large as at present due to hunting by the original bow hunters and because much of the area was mature forest. Mature forest canopy shades the ground to the extent that undergrowth is sparse and deer have little to feed on. Their best habitat in mature forest is marsh edges, riverbanks, blow-downs, fire scars, etc, which cause breaks in the canopy.

C was a small enough language to allow compilation on a mid-1970s 16-bit minicomputer with limited memory and a small removable disk pack for storage.

PL/I compilers ran on mainframes.

1939 First Motorola Two-Way Radio

In 1939 Galvin Manufacturing Corporation introduced its first Motorola two-way radio. Public safety officers used the radio to transmit and receive voice communications from their cars.

From A Timeline Overview of Motorola History - 1928—2008

https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/6800_MotDoc.pdf