mcswell

Iceland has the Þingvellir valley, which is an above-sea continuation of the rift valley down the middle of the Mid-Atlantic ridge. It includes the Silfra, which is underwater (fresh water) at the lowest part of the valley. The Great Crack in Hawai'i is of course not such a major rift, but it is the same idea: upwelling magma raises the ground, creating a crack like in a loaf of raising bread.

The Great Rift in Idaho is another volcanic rift valley, which (IIUC) passes through Craters of the Moon National Monument (where the Apollo astronauts trained).

Nuts, I was going to post that FORTRAN (IV) was my first programming language, but that was in 1969. So you have me beat!

True about the media, but I don't know what that has to do with the original post in this part of the thread, which was about Jaynes' "hypothesizing essentially Bronze age peoples did not have conscious thought."

There are plenty of illiterate people (and unwritten languages) in the world today, and they're quite self-aware. So even on this re-reading, Jaynes is wrong.

For the record, I agree entirely with you.

I'll add that as a retired person myself, I have found things to do with my time that seem (reasonably) useful. At the moment that includes writing a computer program, substitute teaching at the high school level, and occasionally writing a sci-fi novel. How much of that the average person could or would do if they had no employment in the post-scarcity world, I don't know---and for that matter, most (maybe all) of these would be replaced by AI. The point: what are people going to do to make their lives seem worthwhile? Which will add to the social upheaval and unrest you rightly predict.

I was replying to your original post, which said nothing about mathematics. Rather it was about knowledge: "There is no such thing as knowledge that has never even been written down a single time by anyone or anything." And there's no evidence one way or the other about pre-writing math knowledge.

And of course Chinese is not written alphabetically, although I'm not clear what your point is about "full alphabets." (Technically, Arabic is not written with an alphabet either, but rather with an abjad--and the Arabs invented algebra. Similarly for most other languages written with Arabic script. But I won't argue that point, which I admit is rather esoteric.)

So you're saying there was no knowledge before the invention of writing?

"Without junior engineers how will there be senior software engineers in the future?" If I were an AI fan, my answer would be this: By that time, AI will have improved enough that it can replace senior software engineers as well.

Disclaimer: I am not a fan of AI, and I am currently writing software without any help from AI, as I prefer.

If the "channels" were radio frequencies, I can see why. I believe the DIP switch in my fan and controller selected a sort of identifier code. If a radioed command did not contain the right identifier, the fan ignored it.

I was never a Smalltalk programmer ((although I did once debug a fairly simple Smalltalk module by looking at the printout of the code). But I did work for awhile in an OOPL built on top of Smalltalk. That project died because it was too slow, but also because the Smalltalk vendor the project used went out of business, leaving an incompatible and expensive Smalltalk as the only one left standing. (At least that's what I was told.)

Today the project is written in C++, which had the advantages of being free and fast (and as far as I can tell, incomprehensible and prone to crashing).

I bet the controller and the fan have a DIP switch for preventing this interference. See my post below (search for "poltergeist".)