“We are talking to aliens now”

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“We are talking to aliens now, just didn’t come to us the way we thought they would. I don’t think (the film) 2001 anticipated they would think in completely different ways from us, and would not understand the differences. They talk to us as if we were them, the same way your cat thinks you’re just a bigger cat.”

— Dave Winer

Perplexity provides the following analysis:

Winer’s metaphor is doing a few interesting things at once, and it’s sharper than it looks on first read. At the surface, “aliens” refers to AI systems—entities that are clearly intelligent in some sense, but whose internal structure and way of “thinking” are not human-like. The key claim isn’t just that they’re different, but that the difference is opaque in both directions. Continue reading →

Consciousness or Not

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“The biggest benefit from language was not the ability to communicate with others but the ability to communicate with ourselves. Language allowed us access to our own minds. It gave us a way to manipulate our thoughts. To reflect, to operate on memories, to predict. It gave form to ideas.”

“In the next 25 years we’ll learn more about ourselves than in the last 25,000 years. One hundred years from now we will have a very different idea of what we think humans are.”

— Kevin Kelly

The “Godfather of AI” believes AI is already conscious.

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Geoffrey Everest Hinton (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, cognitive psychologist and Nobel Prize laureate known for his work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title “the Godfather of AI”.[8] He is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.

In this interview, he discusses something he rarely says out loud: he believes AI is already conscious. Not eventually. Not theoretically. Already.

Dr. John Middleton

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It was just a few months after I got my Land Rover that I met John Middleton. Someone told me he had a collection of Rovers so I tracked him down and he invited me up to Columbia. In the ensuing years John was an invaluable resource whenever my Land Rover had a problem. Even joined the crew to help me take the top off and on.

Today I took the hoop kit (I used for just one summer) up to John’s farm and to see some of his recent acquisitions. During my brief visit I mentioned the MU vet school where John is a professor. He said something about his duties changing since we last talked so when I got home I asked Perplexity what it could find.

Continue reading →

Magnecord PT6

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The photo above is John Reeder (the news/farm director of KBOA in the 1950s) interviewing Elia Kazan during the filming of A Face in the Crowd in 1957. (more info here)

I think the first time I saw a reel-to-reel recorder like the one in the photo was when my dad brought one to my school for one of those What My Dad Does for a Living things. He set up the recorder and let everyone record a few words. Probably the first time most of us had ever heard a recording of our voice.

In another of my AI experiments, I uploaded the image to Gemini to see what it could tell me about the recorder. Continue reading →