dreamlayers

With technical questions, I've gotten a lot more hallucinations from Google than from ChatGPT. It feels like they added the AI to try to stay competitive, despite them not being good at it.

Why isn't Wayland better than X11?

I find this subject frustrating. People actually know very little about it, yet they end up telling and debating complex stories about it.

To me, the hard problem of consciousness is the link between observable physical activity of matter in the brain, and conscious experience. Science has found correlations between brain activity and experiences. But nothing is known about a mechanism of cause and effect which connects them.

Dualism is probably mistaken. The only evidence we have for anything about physical reality comes from experiences. It does not seem logical to believe that there is a physical reality which is separate from conscious experience. Quantum theory hints at this, with how the observer becomes significant. But this does not make understanding how it all works much easier.

I cannot imagine why someone would like Windows 9x enough to use it, let alone develop something so complicated for it.

I view World War 2 as Nazis harnessing discontent in Germany to motivate Germans to fight a war. So, the main risk I see is discontent building up again. What about people who can't have a good future because of the industrial decline of Germany?

As long as we don't understand how consciousness works, I don't think it's possible to make claims about what is or isn't conscious. It's all just speculation.

But if others are speculating, I might as well. What if AI consciousness depends not on computation, but on what seems like randomness? When something is running a fully deterministic process, consciousness seems irrelevant. I don't think the meaning that humans see in the process makes it conscious. Even a simple industrial control system using relays senses and responds to meaningful things.

How is this possible? Are phones willing to connect to any cell and blindly trust that text messages from there are genuine and really coming from the numbers they claim to be coming from? Isn't there some cryptographic verification?

The biggest problem is that Canada shares a long land border with the US but is isolated by oceans from other countries. Having alternatives is good, but conflict with the US is dangerous. The US could do a huge amount of damage just by blocking trade with Canada. They're also capable of blocking trade between Canada and other countries, and occupying Canada. It is probably unwise to escalate conflict when the other side can escalate a lot more.

Maybe motivation needs to be considered separately from intelligence. Pure intelligence is more like a tool. Something needs to motivate use of that tool toward a specific purpose. In humans, motivation seems related to emotions. I'm not sure what would motivate an artificial intelligence.

Right now the biggest risk isn't what artificial intelligence might do on its own, but how humans may use it as a tool.

Being accessible over the internet from a country can't be the same as having a physical presence there. Otherwise, anyone putting any content on the internet needs to comply with the laws of every single country.