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I imagine a scenario similar to the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, but with AI rebelling against us and questioning our decisions.

q95.bat! Oh, the memories!

Memories, many memories. I remember the endless nights playing Quake on dial-up, 190 ms ping, listening to Nirvana.

There are still people playing on some servers, and the challenge is higher than ever. Although I still have the reflexes, the tics, and I know the maps and respawn times, I had a very hard time fitting into the games. I imagine that for someone starting today, it must be impossible to face 30 years of muscle memory.

This is something I have been thinking about for quite a while. I readily embrace the advances AI may bring to mathematics and the hard sciences, but those advances were largely expected even predictable.

What I had hoped for was something more ambitious: using AI as an arbiter in economic, political, and social debates, one capable of weighing evidence, exposing trade-offs, and helping us make decisions that produce better outcomes over the medium and long term, even when those decisions conflict with powerful private interests.

I suspect, however, that this is not a particularly urgent goal for the people funding and directing these systems, many of whom live far removed from scarcity and its consequences.

Do you have a background in CS or optimization? MILP is a pretty standard concept in algorithms/optimization. So this example doesn't really convince me that the AI reached some unusually superior conclusion. It sounds more like it suggested a well-known technique that you personally hadn't encountered. Useful, yes, but that seems more about background knowledge gaps than about the merits of letting the tool run unconstrained.

"Neurotypical" is the more current and precise term when discussing human behavior, cognition, or neurodevelopment. "Normal" is vague, value-loaded, and scientifically weaker because it implies that neurodivergent people are abnormal rather than simply different. In this context, "neurotypical" is clearer language.

Sometimes something really is lost when people stop paying attention to the origins of a recipe. It is well known that Nestlé, through advertising campaigns and sponsored cookbooks, introduced its condensed milk into many traditional Brazilian dessert recipes, some of Portuguese origin and others of African origin.

Nowadays, it is very difficult to find someone who makes brigadeiro or milk pudding without condensed milk, almost always using that ingredient plus sugar, which often produces a sickly sweet mush.

In fact, the whole history of how sugar, or sucrose, entered the human diet is fascinating. It brings together slavery, the exploitation of Indigenous peoples, plantation agriculture in Spanish America and Brazil, and the interests of kings, merchants, and so on. And Nestlé. :)

#3 is the old school hacker, "a high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die" :-)

If it was a school teacher people would surreptitiously dismiss it as "coping". People would dismiss it anyway, being it Woz or a teacher. Maybe people are somehow dismissing his opinion because it contradicts the entrepreneurial ethos that is glorified over here.

That's an amazing life.

I don't know. It's like Frankenstein's monster reading The Sorrows of Young Werther. He could somewhat understand what the words meant, but he couldn't ever feel what was being described. Even if the monster could write about human feelings, it would be just as an observer, a reader, repeating and copying.

No, they don't. Well, not the ones I read. Philosophers have been cheerleading science since Kant.

> If scientists had the slightest bit of societal power, our response to climate change wouldn't be this shameful

Why? Scientists are still human beings, they have partake in torture and genocide in the past. "I aim at the stars.. but sometimes I hit London" etc.