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The Japanese. They're the first known group to explicitly represent Emoji, unlike the older Latin derived systems which could only represent emotion through character combinations and thus were lame rather than complete.

>We calculated the Amazon CEO's annual earnings by finding the difference between his 2017 and 2018 net worths

I don't think it's jaded at all. I don't disagree that a sales team is necessary, either. I'm just describing how a business works: it creates a solution and then finds a way to extract value by selling the solution to those for whom value would be created. Creating something and extracting value from it require different skillsets; that's all fine and good.

We view a business as problematic when it's only inserting itself between you and the solution, without actually creating the solution, i.e. rent-seeking. So, it's the relationship between the business and the solution that causes an issue, not the action of putting the business between the solution and the problem. The latter is a given, always.

Think about any software company with a large sales team. The people writing the software are not the people selling the software. Writing software and offering it to people does not sustain a business. Creating IP and then finding creative ways to charge people for it does. The sales team that "inserts themselves between" your problem and the solution the product team has created is a core part of the business, a sine qua non.

The pursuit of growth is the foundation of all life as we know it. Every species (but not necessarily every individual) will seek to produce offspring and grow their "genetic footprint" so to speak. It's a baseline requirement for the continuity of existence. It is not a "weird" idea and we are not "hypnotized" but rather aware of of the fundamental necessity of growth.

Sustainability is a behavior only learned when absolutely necessary, when the constraints of material existence impose themselves on the living. Growth will always happen outside of these constraints.

That is to say, some behaviors will reduce growth now in exchange for stability (i.e. more growth later, or less growth loss later), but those are hard-won and they are not the default. The default is always growth up to capacity, and we don't actually know what that capacity is.

Malthusians have been dooming for centuries. We can accept that at some future point, they might be right, but it is always wrong to assume they are inevitably correct at the present moment. Growth can and will be pursued until it is no longer an option. It's not weird, it's not a fixation, it's not a hypnosis. It's just life.

I'm not sure what your nitpick is supposed to be getting at. Good businesses create a solution to your problem and then "insert themselves" between you and that solution. That's how they make money. If they could not stand in the middle and charge you for access, there would be no incentive to create the solution.

If the Universe is the territory than Knowledge is the map. I'm not at all mistaking the map for the territory: I'm pointing out that the set of maps that can describe a given territory are virtually infinite. Asimov is saying the map is almost complete and I'm saying there are an infinite number of maps left to go.

Cartographers in the 18th centuries were "basically done" mapping out the Earth. In the 20th century we were able to use satellite imagery to get the "full picture". Does that mean we have perfect knowledge of the Earth? Absolutely not. There is never a final frontier of knowledge.

I disagree fundamentally. You may as well ask me to imagine Earth as a disc, with multiple rotating spotlights shining down on it and a giant ice wall around the edges. I understand what the image is trying to convey, I simply do not agree that this is the shape of the thing I experience.

You're right--chess is a decidedly finite game. Even so, we have not "solved" this simple, finite game--not even close! If we're not close to solving such a trivial game, how can we be close to the limit of the knowledge of the universe?

A googolplex is "too big to be contained" in our universe yet here we are talking about it. We can perform operations on this number, compare it to other numbers, and even come up with mathematical proofs showing that it's too big to exist. There are an infinite amount of numbers larger than a googolplex and we could have an infinite amount of conversations about them. The material limit of the universe does not limit our ability to create information, to learn things.

There isn't enough space in the universe for an infinite series, either, yet we can (and do) still use them, we reason about them, we learn from them. We can even reduce some infinite series to a finite number. The material bounds of the universe are not a limit of knowledge.

This leads to a more fundamental question: What is the universe?

Is the optimal move in an a given chess board considered knowledge? If so, can't we create entirely new sets of knowledge from the emergent properties of an arbitrary set of rules called a "game"? If we can create an infinite set of arbitrary combinations of rules and states (games), then knowledge should be infinite. Maybe not all knowledge is scientifically applicable, but we have learned a great deal about science and engineering from studying chess. In fact, we are starting to learn more about learning as a process and not as some magical thing that human beings can do, just from studying the best way to make decisions in this totally-contrived and scientifically-useless game.

Taking this a step further, let's look at the animal kingdom. If learning about the intricacies of the mating habits of birds can help an arbitrary bird increase its impact on the future gene pool, is that knowledge not worth something to the bird? To bird society? Are the things we learn about ourselves knowledge? They certainly have utility. Is there any limit to what we can learn about ourselves, about the stochastic process of life? Is life not part of the universe?

Is computer science even knowledge? It seems if we're more directly concerned with the physical nature of the universe, we ought not to care about what the system of a computer actually does; we only need to care about what it is, about its physical structure. Except, that's not actually how we pursue knowledge or science at all.

In my view, Asimov's sentiment can be reduced to a complete tautology: we're at the point where we know almost everything there is to know about the things we think we can know.

There is no contradiction because there is no limit of knowledge.

The limit of y = e^x is infinity. You can keep increasing x and y will increase exponentially. So you plot the function, let's say with the x axis going up to 10 and the y axis going up to e^10. The graph shows very clearly that, while there was progress before, we have even more progress now. Exponentially more, even! What came before is dwarfed by what we have now; if you look at the range of y for x values 9-10 you can see how little of a difference all those others values (1-8) had between one another, compared to the changes we have now. The rate of change is so high that we're basically in an era of semi-complete knowledge. We must be at some kind of inflection point, this is truly a unique era of understanding.

Then you repeat. Set the x axis to 100, and the y axis up to e^100. Oh wait, it's the same graph. That's because it's always the same graph. It's scale-invariant. The slope at every point is always whatever y is.

We're always at right at the limit of explaining the "essential nature" of the universe because the "essential nature" of the universe can only be (to us) what we can understand it to be. We chose e^10 as the limit of the y-axis in our first exercise because that's all the knowledge we knew about. We chose e^100 as the limit of the y-axis in our second exercise because that, too, was all the knowledge we knew about. Choosing these random values as the limits of our function (i.e. the limit of the "essential nature of the universe") leaks information into the visualization that will always paint a picture showing that we're at the most transformative time there ever was.

When we do it that way, we will always come to the same _wrong_ conclusion. We will always dwarf what came before and be dwarfed by what comes after. To think that we're actually living in an inflection point is hubris, it's wishful thinking, it's the sour grapes of mortality.

As much as I enjoy Asimov, I have to say that he is wrong. The gap between what we know and what is true might have decreased immensely, but it is still infinite. Any quantifiable increase is 0 in relation to infinity. Asimov's counter-argument that we are quantifiably less wrong than we were in the past simply does not overcome this core issue. If there is an infinite amount of knowledge separating what we know from what is true, then we can learn an infinite amount of things and still have an infinite amount of things left to learn.

To feel justified in thinking the universe is "essentially" understood is to be OK with one's concept of the "essential nature" of the universe to be inherently divergent from a future concept, which according to Asimov's own argument is going to be more correct than our own.

To me, it reads as a bitterness towards mortality, a sort of sour grapes: the insights we will have about the universe at some future time must not be very interesting compared to what we know now, because I won't be around to know them.

edit: I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Asimov's perspective is shared here. It's very easy to understand the essential nature of the universe when you define the universe as the parts you understand.

I don't think human beings in 1000 years will look at our current understanding as special in any way. As transformative as our era is, it will be dwarfed by the scale of transformation in future eras. It's just the most transformative era so far. That's temporal bias, nothing more.

Simply look at the career of Van Gogh or any "Bohemian starving artist". Listing only the most popular, most influential artists proves my point: for most people art is an untenable career. In that regard AI, has virtually no impact on those who want to create. They will find a way to make something unique and valuable or they will fail like millions of artists already do in the world we have today.

There are many artists in my family and all of them have day jobs to support their creative passions. Mosts artists fail to make money; it really should go without saying that not everyone can be Helen Mirren or Paul McCartney. If requiring a day job makes you give up art, you probably didn't have the drive to create anything people really wanted. For most artists creation is a need, not something that is pursued for monetary reasons. Everyone tries to make money on their art, but again, even without AI the vast majority of artists fail to do so.

There is a difference between "making money and making art" and "making money by making art". No one is entitled to having other people value their artistic output. I would argue that art created for the marketplace is less creative than art produced by a human's need to create for creation's sake. It's not un-artistic, but it is the kind of art that an AI can make better, faster, and cheaper.

Takes like this confuse me. ChatGPT is not stopping anyone from making art. It may stop you from profiting off of your artistic labors. Though, if you need a profit motive to make art, were you really making anything truly expressive and creative to begin with?

We're seeing the same thing with the actors and writers striking. Sorry folks, if you're making me choose between embracing neoluddism or living with some artsy folks not having their dream job, I'm going to pick you being out of a job. I do not care that background actors are going to be replaced by AI and I do not care that AI is going to let 1 writer do the work of 5. Background acting is not anyone's passion and writing predictable soapy sitcom stories is probably not anyone's passion, either.

AI is going to give us better creative work not because AI will become super creative, but because people who actually have creative thoughts worth expressing will just do that instead of being crowded out by humans chasing the lowest common denominator. Now we have computers chasing the lowest common denominator, something they are very good at, and we have humans who will create when they feel compelled to create, not because they want to make money but because their creativity compels them to act, make, and do.

If a songwriter is being replaced by an AI, their skills are not something we're going to miss. Sorry, not sorry. Artistic sensibilities have arguable never been the driver of what music is popular and I don't see the issue in having AI replace the bubblegum rubberstamp dime-a-dozen trash that the modal artists must produce to make money. Again, now you are totally outmatched by the AI and you can actually focus on creating an authentically human work without being distracted by the needs of industry. If there is no market for that then it is not because of AI but because of our own preferences.

The "human spirit" is just a story we tell ourselves to justify our dominion over everything we see. I'd be more than happy to see it die. Humanism is great if you're a human, but life is moving in other directions and we can either adapt to the notion that our primate brains aren't magical engines of wonder or die alongside our brittle egos.