I'd agree with that - the out of order story line always put me off in Use of Weapons. Seemed unnecessary. As for his best, I'd add Look to Windward to your list. That's a beautiful, moving book.
GPT et al are piggybacking on human knowledge in a sense, by using the "predict the next word" method of encapsulating intelligence. But this method of learning imposes a ceiling on the level they can reach - that of the material they are able to train with. They can achieve extraordinary breadth of knowledge from the vast corpus of human written text, but in order to exceed human intelligence in "height", they will need to work directly with nature, as humans do. This, it seems to me, will be where some new ideas will be needed.
Wolfram's thesis seems to hinge on the fact that current AI systems (for example GPT) have no volition of their own. It seems to be in mankind's interest that this remain the case - but there is likely a ceiling beyond which volition of some sort is required (scientific discovery for example). On the other hand, maybe humans can always provide that volition through some kind of prompting. Who knows?
We mean beating humankind at the task, swiftly followed by humankind declaring that task wasn't a sign of proper intelligence anyway, and moving it's goalposts to a different field.
Sure, I wasn't trying to catch you out :-) and I agree that animals should be treated well, of course.
Your mention of speaking just reminded me of a thought I'd had, regarding how we measure where animals' sit on the human-ness scale. I think that metric has a lot of biases in how we weight its constituent factors. I.e. how well an animal can communicate with us - which might be quite orthogonal to its intelligence. (For example an octopus)
Interesting that you point out the fact that they can't speak. I wonder how much of our willingness to mark animals out as, in some sense, lower than us is down to their lack of human vocalisation ability. I sometimes worry that their thoughts are closer to ours than we give credit for.
Roughly analogous process to the temperature parameter in simulated annealing, I think. Low temperature equates to a greedy algorithm (i.e. always take the most likely next word fragment) - higher temps. increase the probability of taking a lower probability fragment.
I've suffered from exactly this. Bought an expensive notebook, imagining that it would cause me to "really do this new thing properly" or some such fool thinking. Opposite is true, every time. Making a purchase can be the opposite of putting in effort, rather than an assistive force if one is not careful.
But dreaming involves the conscious mind - in that while dreaming, your conscious awareness has been switched into operating in another mode, playing back some internally generated scenario, rather than interacting with the external world.
It's certainly unfortunate, but not that weird in my view. People in general don't want to offend, but rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that the acceptable terms for any person who has some "protected characteristic" are an ever-shifting minefield, and any infraction will be unforgivable. This fear is 99% unfounded of course, but due to the disproportionate prominence of such "woke takedowns" in media, has absolutely added to the distance between groups.
When have kids (or any other non-specialist) previously been able to create their own customised blockbuster series, that looks like a professionally made show?
I'm admittedly not a nuclear engineer - but I hear a great deal about how much modern nuclear plant design has advanced since the days of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and that our modern designs would not be susceptible to such catastrophes. Assuming this is somewhat true (I am just assuming that) we are erroneously allowing the ghosts of those terrible old events to stop us from investing in modern, safe nuclear energy.
At least France get a decent amount of base load energy for the strip mined Uranium. And I'm not defining operators of nuclear plants with serious accidents as low IQ - my point is that there are lots of dangerous, complicated industrial plants that are run safely, and there is no reason that the same can't be true for a nuclear power station.
Just build the plants well, in a safe part of the world (no quakes, tidal waves etc), and have some well paid, high I.Q people running them. They'll be fine. Nuclear power is such a gift to humanity. As much power as we need, and comparatively little waste. But no, some people fear it, so we have to build endless bullshit windmills, and strip mine Africa for the elements required for solar panels (branded as "sustainable energy", though both just go into landfill when they reach the end of their life).
As a native English speaker, I think the multiple choices of word are a strength. They usually have subtle differences of style (if not meaning), which can affect the tone of the sentence. In my opinion, this is where English achieves its precision - at the phrase or sentence level, rather than the level of individual words.
This seems to be a version of a lattice gas fluid model. (Or, more precisely, lattice-boltzmann, since it allows for fractional values of fluid occupancy per cell.)
I had a Santa Fe institute monograph on this back in the day, and I seem to recall that they ended up using a hexagonal grid, in order to achieve the required isotropy of fluid behaviour. Might be something to consider.