That was the question posted by Dave Winer. Which I shared with “my” Claude.
“The interesting question isn’t whether I’m conscious but whether the interaction is producing something neither party could produce alone. Most of the time it is.”
That has been my take-away since Day One.
Something weird happens as you get older, you walk into a room and see a friend but at first you don’t get that this is your friend. Instead you see an old man or lady. Your attention goes away because like everyone you are programmed not to look at old people. Then you instantly realize this is your friend. You put on the virtual colored glasses that let you see them as you remember them, instead of what’s there today.
— Dave Winer
“People with positive self-perceptions of aging live an average of 7.5 years longer than those with negative ones — more than the longevity gained from quitting smoking or exercising regularly.”
— Becca Levy, Yale School of Public Health (2002)
“AI is a feedback loop between mind and machine that is starting to enable a new level of cognition. Machines that understand minds. Minds enhanced by machines.”
— We Are As Gods (Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler)
Slowly but surely, my little AI pals are changing how my mind works. A little analysis by Perplexity»…and a slightly different take from Claude. Gemini calls the quote “classic techno-optimist rhetoric.” Or, bullshit?
“We need someone who’s bitter and funny, like Joan Rivers or Don Rickles. You don’t need to understand government or politics, just show up and be a kind of lovable asshole 24 hours a day.”
Pretend your life ended years ago, and you’ve been living in some sort of agreeable afterlife. You don’t have real problems anymore. There’s no stress, no war, no worries, no shame.
The only downside, if you would call it that, is that you don’t get to live in the world anymore. Despite all the troubles of worldly life, most of your afterlife peers feel a bit of nostalgia about “being in the thick of it again.”
The afterlife community, among other activities, holds a weekly raffle. The prize is kept private – only the winners know what it is, and they must sign a non-disclosure agreement.
One week, you win, and accept the prize. An administrator congratulates you, you sign the papers, and he touches you on the arm.
Instantly your surroundings change. Continue reading
“He’d never wanted kids. Outside of priority boarding on an airline, he couldn’t see the upside to them. They took over your life and filled you with terror and weariness and people acted like having one was a blessed event and talked about them in the reverent tones they once reserved for gods. When it came down to it, though, you had to remember that all those assholes cutting you off in traffic and walking the streets and shouting in bars and turning their music up too loud and mugging you and raping you and selling you lemon cars—-all those assholes were just children who’d aged. No miracle. Nothing sacred in that.”
—Mystic River (Dennis Lehane)
“This IBM machine was the key to WOOC(P)’s reputation, for it enabled us to have files of information around which no one could correlate except with the machine set the correct way. For instance, a list of three hundred names meant nothing, a list of three hundred house numbers meant nothing, a list of three hundred street names, cities, and a pile of photos meant nothing. On the machine and suddenly – each photo had an address. On the machine again and thirty cards were rejected, and only Dalby knew whether those thirty were left-handed pistol shots, Young Conservatives, or bricklayers fluent in Mandarin. Dalby liked it, it was quick, more efficient than humans, and it made Dalby one of the most powerful men in England.”
— The Ipcress File by Len Deighton (1962)
ONISM — the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience
“It’s strange how little of the world you actually get to see. No matter where on Earth you happen to be standing, the horizon you see in the distance is only ever about three miles away from you, a bit less than five kilometers. Which means that at any given time, you’re barely more than an hour’s walk from a completely different world. Alas, even if you lace up your boots and take off for the hills, the circle of your horizon will follow you around like a prison searchlight.”
From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig
“You don’t become cooler with age, but you do care progressively less about being cool, which is the only true way of being cool.”
— WIDDERSHINS SMITH
(Thanks to Dave Morris)
“Zen pretty much comes down to three things– everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.”