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ask-mortarion-the-death-lord · 1 year

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Gue'vesa Head Cannons I guess

Didn't think I'd have much in the way of thoughts on the taus human auxiliaries but here we are.

Since ai is a touchy subject for humans, most human governors when having to explain drones to their human subjects handwave it as drones just having machine spirits of a different nature. Thus to the confusion of the t'au, humans on campaign will insist on all manner of odd rituals carried over from the imperium. These range from harmless such as ritualizing maintenance procedures or proper safety protocols to the bizarre such as lighting incense candles on a hammerheads control module before going into battle to ensure operation protocols are executed with maximum efficiency. Funnily though these do seem to have some effect if only psychologically, and tau forces who have operated extensively with gue'vesa tend to pick up these little rituals or even invent their own based on old tau spiritual practices. Much to the annoyance of the ethereal council.

mechanicus turncoats to the tau empire have extensive interest in the taus nescient ai technology, usually turning to the tau for the opportunity to more extensively research into that field at all. Thus with the assistance of tau earth caste engineers, tau hereteks have been known to field larger forces of robots then the mechanicus can usually muster thanks to access to tau drone technology and manufacturing infrastructure letting them 'bridge the gap' so to speak.

on that same note, skitarii and their like. As the range of xenos species the tau encounter as allies are quite varied, the mechanicus and its cyborg body horror madhouse aren't actually that odd of a thing to deal with on the whole. and well they're happy to offer more standard mechanical or drone replacements for things like servitors, skitarii are in the odd position of often being willing warriors servants hacked to bits in their machine gods name. Thus the tau mostly dont interfere with them outside of technological assistance and a, futile, attempt at standardization of skitarii augmentations to help ease potential burdens on tau logistics. skitarii in the tau empire for their part enjoy cleaner lifestyles as it were thanks to tau technology emphasizing a more harmonious relation to nature compared to imperial technology, and a greater degree of intellectual independence on the individual level thanks to drone ai technology and the ethical encouragement/requirements most tau septs will insist on before dealing with tau hereteks.

tau hereteks, or guetak'vesa as they are referred to as [machine human helper] by the tau as stated mostly turned to the tau empire out of interest in the tau ai technology, ai long having been a contentious topic of heretek interest and the relative stability the tau ai so far presents is an attractive prospect for ai 'hobbyists' interested in expanding their knowledge without selling their souls to space satan. Xenobiologists and xeno tech freaks in general on the wrong end of imperial law find refuge in the tau empire an attractive prospect for the variety of xenos species available to study within. On the whole most guetaks that make it to the empire are only really useful for keeping everything running on former imperial planets the actual depth of their knowledge often only expanding so far on anything human, and their 'expertise in xeno and experimental tech' often being rudimentary or completely backwards compared to any jobbing earth caste worker. The truly talented of the guetaks usually run their own little fiefdoms of forgeworlds repurposed to the tau empires use and their own personal havens of experimentation and tech heresy. with detachments of tau earth caste and fire warriors as liaisons, assistants on tau technology, and bodyguards with the understanding that any useful discoveries the guetak do make need to be shared with the tau empire proper. Sitting firmly in the middle of the chaff and the talented, guetak with useful expertise or qualifications/understandings of imperial tech usually get contracted into projects on imperial tech analysis and can expect steady and profitable work from the empire, it not being unheard of for guetak of notable qualities to guest lecture at tau earth caste universities.

as the tau are generally speaking religiously tolerant, some institutions of the imperial cult survive in tau space but without what degree of centralization exists in imperial space proper of the cult, and generally given the inherent contradiction of the imperial cult serving xenos masters, most imperial cult institutions have either fully shifted into local cult practices and ownership or otherwise collapsed and been replaced with old planetary traditions or newly established cults of the personality or esoteric kind. On the whole though gue'vesa still consider the god emperor their figure of worship even if they dont directly live in the empire he founded, worship of the god emperor so entrenched in imperial society as to be near impossible to remove on the whole. A number of gue'vesa have taken to worshipping a new 'greater good' cult of their own devising, and well the ethereal council appreciate the dedication, the religious zeal as to which gue'vesa take to worship has been noted as 'very concerning'.

well no space marine chapter or adeptus sororitas order have defected to the tau empire, their technology is collected and analyzed whenever possible. some inqusitors have defected to the tau empire however, though so far efforts to turn high ranking inqusitors to the tau have been less fruitful then hoped for. Rogue traders on the other hand are one of the simpler targets to flip for the tau empire.

imperial armour like the leman russ or heaven forbid the baneblade are produced in the tau empire for gue'vesa use using both old imperial manufacturing structures and tau developed replicas for gue'vesa specific use, though they are mostly only produced for reserve gue'vesa use or gue'vesa only forces. Some effort has been gone into developing imperial armour and tau tech armour hybrids however, one notorious example being a lemen russ that had been juryrigged with a devilfish hover system instead of tracks. most of those efforts havent gone anywhere, most effort instead being put towards understanding unique imperial technology that the tau dont have or understand less and could benefit their cause such as warp drives, gellar fields, gravity guns and what have you.

#warhammer 40k #warhammer40k #tau empire #t'au empire #t'au #gue'vesa

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finitepeace · 3 years

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this week i read...

Darling, Keep the Lights On (Until I Get Home) by capsicleironman 💙

Summary: When Steve Rogers is awoken from the ice early, he is assigned as the personal assistant to Tony Stark, the man on TV with the strange glowing light in his chest. The plan was simple - protect and gain intel. It was supposed to be just another job, but then again, nothing in Steve's life has ever gone according to plan.

Iron Man 2 Divergence where Steve ends up working for Tony instead of Natasha, and his interest first in the arc reactor and then in Tony himself, leads him through the events of the Avengers, Iron Man 3, and Captain America 2.

17k words

It's Only Half Past (The Point of Oblivion) by LadyHabren (equalopportunityobsessor)

Summary: "I think it's generally agreed that all of Steve's senses are powered up by the serum? He can hear people whispering on the other side of the room, probably sees a hell of a lot further, etc.

But there are definite downsides. How does Steve control this side effect of the serum?"

Captain America is more than a man - he is a hero, he is an ideal, he is pure muscle held together by patriotism and moral fibre... And not even Captain America can fight it when his own brain turns against him.

4k, sentinel/guide au, not set in mcu,

Do-Over by gottalovev 💙

Summary: Steve woke up six months ago into a future that leaves him indifferent. There is work, and not much else. His current mission is a basic search and rescue operation to retrieve an American who was kidnapped by a terrorist group ten days ago. He won't let the fact that the hostage is Howard's son be a distraction.

14k words, ironman 1 - 2 but with steve on it!,

Calls Me Home by steve-capsicle-rogers (adorable_lab_rat)

Summary: Tony can't help but notice the far away look on Steve's face. The visible pain and loss. It wasn't right and giving Steve back everything he'd lost was the right choice. The right thing. And honestly Tony didn't do the right thing near enough.

9k words, post avenger 1, tony time travels to victory day with steve to make him happy

Memorial by hanyou_elf

Summary: Here rests in honored glory an American Soldier known but to God.

Steve visits Arlington's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in lieu of visting the tombs of those he's lost.

600+ words, steve visits his grave and tony supports

Damaged by orphan_account

Summary: Prompt: Can you write a story where Tony is having heart problems again even after the shrapnel and arc reactor is removed, like he needs a pacemaker or something please? :)

Steve is worried about Tony after the doctor tells them Tony needs a pacemaker. Tony being Tony decides to build something better.

2k words, arc reactor + health problem

Warning by laireshi

Summary: Tony's left arm hurts.

100 words, angst post-civil war au

Told You Dirty Jokes Until You Smiled by ChibiSquirt 💙

Summary: Steve was waiting at light, casually checking out the man in the car behind him, when his phone pinged.

75k words. WIP T_T . steve is cap but tony isnt ironman (yet?). steve is awaken before ironman 1 and meets tony, proceed to have friends with benefits arrangement...

blood, Lies, and Love by Ridley160

Summary: When Steve Rogers volunteered for Project Rebirth they told him they would make him a hero. No one bothered to tell him that the serum would change him into a monster that needed to feed on the blood of the living for survival. Now he has woken up 70 years in a future where there are more like him and his affliction is now seen as gift. Only Steve is convinced that he is at his core still just a monster.

Then he meets the brilliant, quirky and charismatic Tony Stark, the only person in this crazy new world that seems to understand Steve's misgivings about what he is, but Tony is haunted by something. A secret he has carefully guarded for many years that forced him to push everyone away.

33k words in 13 chapters, steve is cap + a vampire but tony isnt ironman,

Blood Loss by wisia

Summary: The serum really did work a miracle. It created Captain America, and Tony would like the serum to work a miracle on him too. If only he didn’t fall in love.

5k words, set in captain america 1st avenger, tony is scientist/adventurer looking for a cure for his heart problem

scientific Heresy by antigrav_vector

Summary: In the process of running the particle accelerator in his basement and fixing the arc reactor, Tony finds himself flung into the past where he has to take on a fight not his own if he wants to get home to stop Vanko. At least he had a chance to replace the old rector that had been killing him with the new one before everything went sideways... But now he has no choice but to face off with family, friends, and old heroes, and none of that sounds remotely appealing. Well, okay, getting to meet them all during their glory days kinda does.

But as it turns out, they're not exactly what he imagined, and his path home is a lot longer than he'd hoped it would be.

And a lot more complicated.

34k words in 12 chapters, time travel au @ cap 1 and ironman 2, steve/tony/bucky

we will meet in another life by theappleppielifestyle

Summary: Tony is there instead of Howard during Project Rebirth. He ends up following Steve into the Howling Commandos, into the Atlantic ocean and into the 21st century.

6k words, canon divergence.

Keep on Beating by itsallAvengers

Summary: There were an awful lot of things Steve loved about Tony. But one thing in particular Steve could never get enough of was his heartbeat.

6k words, self-sacrificing tony strikes again and steve is upset.. so tony comes to a solution...

Coming Up Roses by NobodysBloodyPrincess 💙

Summary: Those with a death wish referred to the High Commander’s infatuation with the late Tony Stark as an ‘obsession.’ They were wrong. It had to be more than that, after all there was no word for what the High Commander was about do in the name of making things right.

No one gets a redo of life… no one except High Commander Rogers that is. Everything is coming up Roses and Sunshine for him. After all, he has a dream and it’s going to come true.

41k words in 3 chapters, beautiful but a bit dark and sad, just like the author said: “‘i’ll be with you till the end of line’ but stony”, definitely one of the best fic i’ve read because THEY ARE HAPPY T_T

The One With Bucky's Biggest Fan by justanotherpipedream

Summary: Steve still can’t believe how long it took for him to notice. It wasn’t a secret really, just something that no one had cared to ask...it honestly took Rhodey pulling him aside and pulling out an old photo album, before Steve really understood.

Tony Stark was a Bucky Barnes fan.

(aka The one where Tony is the biggest Bucky Barnes fanboy, Steve is a supportive boyfriend, and Bucky is perplexed by it all.)

2k words, it’s all in the summary

Sins of the Mother by skullshy 💙

Summary: All she could see when her eyes closed was Steve’s face in the courtroom. Stern, pained— with that fucking all-American self-righteousness.

Toni wondered for years whether it would have made a difference. Told him that she was pregnant, that Ultron was to protect their baby, and how sorry she was.

On her worst days, she imagined it wouldn’t have mattered.

23k words in 23 chapters, female tony stark, civil war (or age of ultron?) canon divergence

So this is bonded life by Captainstark12

Summary: Steve had been protecting the human village from hydra creatures like him for five years. And now he was ready to take his prize as he had the privilege of choosing an omega to bear his child. Hopefully his chosen omega human would want him back as much as he wanted him

4k in 6 chapters, mythology au

I don't think there's a manual for this by itsallAvengers

Summary: So. His son can stick to things, apparently.

If only Tony had realised this before he'd caught him hanging off the 89th floor of the tower.

Well. Parenting was never going to be a smooth road, was it?

2k words, stony adopts peter parker and then they become superfamily

For Your Eyes Only by SarahHBE

Summary: Every soldier looks forward to mail call. But Alpha Steve Rogers gets a big surprise with the letter his Omega, Tony Stark, has sent him.

2k words, explicit bcs of sexual content

It Was Just A Matter Of Time by babynative

Summary: The clock was ticking. And then, black.

719 words, civil war canon divergence, angst

This Can't Be The Last by MusicalLuna

Summary: Hours after a mission ends, Tony's heart starts to race.

1k words, tony had a heart attack, but not angst!

The Billionaire and the Army Captain by Neverever

Summary: Facing finanical ruin and needing to care for his sick daughter, Steve Rogers agrees to marry Tony Stark, who needs to get married by his 30th birthday to inherit. It's just a job for Steve until he starts to fall for the enigmatic billionaire.

12k words, non-powers au,

Adopt by greenteeth 💙

Summary: Steve's life is the same as usual. He goes to work, fights super villains, banters with other Avengers and goes home to an empty apartment. Until the son of an old friend shows up asking for help, well sex first, then help. Suddenly Steve is married, fighting super villains, worrying what Obadiah Stane and coming home to Tony most nights of the week.

42k words in 17 chapters, ABO, tony is not iron man, the story is complete but it’s a part of series that seems to never see the light T_T

The Act of Creation Will Be Your Salvation by scifigrl47 💙

Summary: When Tony Stark was seventeen years old, he built his first AI. On that day, he ceased to be his father's creation, and became a creating force in his own right.

That one act likely saved his life, and not always in the most obvious ways.

84k words in 8 chapters, stony but mostly looking through his AI bots a.k.a. jarvis and dum-e, definitely one of the best fics ever!

Bewitched, Body and Soul by iam93percentstardust

Summary: Almost ten years after joining the British Army, Steve Rogers returns to his childhood home after his mother's death. The house seems quiet in a way that it's rarely been. But the peace is shattered when his oldest friend stumbles into his home and into his life, seeking an escape from an arranged marriage to a cruel lord. Steve provides that escape but finds himself engaged to be married instead. This wouldn't be a problem - except that Steve is, always has been, and always will be deeply in love with Tony Stark.

16k words, regency AU, ABO, the classic stony misunderstanding trope

Right place, right time by hkandi, ralsbecket

Summary: An alternate take on the Captain America: The First Avenger movie. Tony is working with his dad to help out the SSR on this new project, though he and Steve happen to run into each other before that, and sparks fly from the start.

8k, CA: First avenger AU with tony stark present

#stevetony #stony #fics read

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ask-jumblr · 4 years

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Goy Asks For Help Un-Fucking a Video Game

The game in question is “Crusader Kings 2: After the End,” which takes place in a post-apocalyptic North America which has regressed to a medieval state due to a deliberately-unspecified global disaster some six centuries ago.

Its an overhaul mod, with “Crusader Kings 2″ being the base game which takes place in the actual middle ages, but I’m only concerning myself with “After The End.” For clarity’s sake, I’ll be referring to the base game, which I will not be concerning myself with altering, as “CK2,″ and I will refer to the mod, which I am altering, as “AtE.”

So CK2 has a lot of baked in Cultural Christianity, much of which is carried over to AtE. I am creating a Submod, and as part of that I want to get AtE’s depiction of Judaism to be less, you know, christian. I want to carve out the ingrained antisemitism so that neither I, nor any Jewish players of the game, will have to look at it anymore.

I’ll be cutting this post up into several parts, each one dedicated to what I, as a gentile, think is probably an issue with the way the game portrays Judaism and my best idea of how to fix it. I’m posting this here with the hope of being corrected about everything I’m definitely getting wrong, and help figuring out how to go about actually fixing things.

Mod of @ask-jumblr briefly interjecting: (1) Putting the rest below the cut so this doesn’t clog dashes, and (2) submission is from @frustratedasatruar because tumblr doesn’t credit submissions once they’re posted.

Part 1: Orthodox, Reform, and… Meshichist?

So the way CK2 handles religion is cut up into a few tiers. The largest categories are the so-called Religious Groups, such as “Christian” or “American-Native” or “Muslim.” Judaism comprises one of these groups.

Then there’s the Heresy mechanic, which exists with the intent to model Catholicism’s whole snake-eating-its-own-tail thing with them, especially back in the middle ages. The way the mechanic works is that you’ve got one Religion that is considered the “main” religion with several others associated with it which vie for control. If things are shaky for the main religion, members of that faith may be prompted to join one of the Heretical movements.

I actually think the way AtE applies this mechanic to Judaism is fairly representative in practice. “Orthodox” is granted the position of main religion, with Reform relegated as a Heresy. But! Both Orthodox communities and Reform communities are scattered across the map at the start of the game. Further, Orthodoxy’s position at game-start is very fragile, so a Reform player can fairly simply supplant them as the dominant branch without even needing a military confrontation with any Orthodox factions.

This combination of factors creates a situation where Jewish communities within the game can ebb and flow between the different sects over time, which wouldn’t be possible if the two religions weren’t tied together with the Heresy mechanic.

One problem though, at least as far as I can see; there’s a third sect in the mix. Again, I’m a gentile, so correct me if I’m wrong, but its really weird for the Meshichists (explicitly the people who believe this man to be the Moshiach) to be depicted as a major faction within Judaism, literally on par with Orthodox and Reform, right?

As far as I, as a gentile, can tell from my research on this subject, the Meshichists are a subset of Chabad, which is itself a subset of Hasidic Judaism, which is a subset of Haredi Judaism, which has a complicated relationship with Orthodox Judaism.

So, assuming I’m not out of place in my assessment that the Meshichists are the odd man out, my question is if I should simply remove them from the game, leaving in-game Judaism to Orthodox and Reform. Or if I should replace them with a different third faction, and if so whom? I understand that Conservative Judaism is another major faction, but I know absolutely nothing about them, including how I would distinguish them from Orthodox.

Help, please.

Part 2: Zealous/Cynical

So CK2, as mentioned, has a lot of structural Cultural Christianity.

Individual characters in the games, that is to say Rulers or associated courtiers, have a list of traits, each one modifying their aptitudes and how the AI will direct them. Things like “Gluttonous,” “Charitable,” “Craven,” “Shrewd,” and so on. There’re hundreds of them.

Some of these traits are set as opposites of one another, which means that if a character has one the game won’t allow them to have the other. You cannot be both “Just” and “Arbitrary,” that sort of thing.

Further, one trait can have more than one opposite. “Slow,” “Quick,” and “Genius,” are all inter-incompatible, for example.

Which brings me to the Zealous and Cynical traits.

Their descriptions are thus:

Zealous: This character burns with religious fervor and cannot tolerate heretics, infidels, or heathens.

Cynical: This character is a cynical unbeliever, disliked by the clergy but good at intrigue.

I’ll shy away from describing their exact in-game modifiers and just leave it that Zealous is considered an overall very desirable trait, while Cynical is undesirable unless you’re playing a spymaster. Zeal makes you more popular with priests of your religion, while cynicism makes you commensurately less popular with the same.

Furthermore, unlike Cynical, being Zealous also precludes you from having any of the “Sympathy for [Insert Other Religion Group]” traits.

Now as I understand it, Judaism rather encourages questioning everything, which feels like a third pole on that little alignment graph. I’m essentially asking if I should try and create a “Pious Skepticism” trait to represent Jewish characters who don’t mindlessly-accept-writ-dogma-and-hate-unbelievers but also aren’t unbelievers themselves, while at the same time arguing with and about established scripture.

This hypothetical “Pious Skepticism” trait, name subject to change, would also allow for characters to be both on good terms with religious authorities and still have access to the Sympathy traits.

I feel like the current system of Zealous/Default/Cynical probably doesn’t represent the Jewish experience, but as a gentile I obviously need advisement to be sure.

TLDR: I feel like CK2 lacks a way to represent the whole arguing-about-everything thing that, at least from what I’ve read following Jewish blogs, is considered so important to your community. Then as an addendum on that point, is my proposed solution of making a new trait to represent it, and slotting it into the zealous/cynical dynamic.

Part 3: Depicting Antisemitism in the Game

CK2 has a limited system for dynamically depicting sexism. For what I feel pretty safe to assume are reasons regarding processing power, the degree of sexism within your in-game territory is boiled down to the “Status of Women” modifier in your nation’s lawcode, with five options.

“Traditional: Women are prohibited from holding all [government] positions. Some government types will be restricted to Agnatic inheritance law.”

“Marginal: Women are allowed to hold some power, occupying background positions behind the people in charge.”

“Significant: Women have been granted official power and are allowed to hold public offices.”

“Notable: Restrictions on female power have been officially repealed. All career paths are open for prominent women.”

“Full: Powerful legislation removing old restrictions has finally had the effect of affecting the general opinion on women in positions of power across society.”

These laws are pegged to different benchmarks in the game’s technological progression system, which has the effect of spacing out the reforms over the coarse of your game.

As you try and move women’s rights forward, powerful men in your nation will fight you tooth and nail to prevent that from happening.

As things stand in the game, antisemitism is represented as identical to every other form of xenophobia. Which obviously downplays the the shear length and breadth of impact antisemitism has on society.

Essentially, my notion to represent the special form of bigotry that is antisemitism is to apply a similar system to the one already applied to sexism.

In the sexism system, your nation is quantifiably better off for every step further you advance down the road to equality. The only real reason not to pursue equality is the hope of placating powerful special interests within your state who want a larger slice of the pie for themselves or have other ideological motivations, at the expense of weakening your nation as a whole.

Which I think would be a pretty good angle for representing antisemitism. I’m not advocating for a 1=1 switchover from the sexism system, of course, indeed one of the things I’d want help with is determine what the five stages would be in a similar antisemitism system.

Anyway, for all that this system is really incapable of handling the magnitudes of sexism or antisemitism, its something I can implement without crashing the game and, I think, a significant improvement over the current situation.

But before I started into the in-depth process of trying to code this, I wanted to seek out some Jewish voices to run my thoughts by first.

Part 4: Ethnoreligion

CK2 has a very christian perspective on the relationship between culture and religion, to the extent that I as a pagan am repeatedly jarred by it. And I’ve learned that Judaism’s view of the subject is even less like that of the christians. Making it, I presume, a bigger problem with the game.

So in the game culture and religion are considered completely distinct from each other, the conversion of one not having any effect on the state of the other. The only direct connection of any kind that I know of honestly just makes the problem worse: if you find yourself in control of a county which is both a different religion and culture from your own, you must actively convert the religion before it will be possible for culture to passively convert.

Which can result in situations which, given my knowledge that Judaism is specifically an ethnoreligion, are very strange. Like Anabaptist Yiddish counties.

Or the way any prospective Jewish rulers, if they want to ensure a firmer political position in a majority-gentile kingdom (if they manage to establish such a thing), demographic shift is fastest achieved not by, say, some mechanism to attract Jewish immigrants from neighboring countries, but by relentlessly proselytizing until the goyim convert, and only then the process of cultural shift may start.

Can you tell that this system was designed for the catholics.

I’m not really sure what exactly I could do to fix this, but I believe I can:

Disable the proselytizing mechanic for Jewish characters. I’d need to replace it with a “dispatch debate team,” or something, mechanic so that Jewish players won’t be left helpless in the face of grassroots Heretic movements.

Code a new system for gentile-counties-with-Jewish-rulers to passively convert culture and religion at the same time, but at a slower pace. And maybe, if I’m feeling ambitious overconfident, some mechanic by which you can try to inspire immigration by Jewish populations, potentially causing a brain-drain in nearby Kingdoms if you invest enough into it.

Create an opposite system, so that if a county of both Jewish religion and culture is converted to a different religion group, the county’s culture will autoswitch to an off-brand version of itself. If I’m feeling cheeky, I’ll call the off-brand culture “Goyim” or something.

I think that these three things in conjunction with each other would adequately solve the problem.

But, you know, I don’t know, because I’m not Jewish.

Part 5: Education

The game’s current system has it that as a monarch you can offer your vassals to have their children educated in your court, which usually results in them adopting your culture and religion if they haven’t already.

I feel like Jewish rulers would be less blaze about that than everyone else. Because, you know, experience. I want to set things so that Jewish rulers will either auto-decline those offers or maybe set it so Jewish characters are ineligible for the events that cause culture/religious conversion during childhood. I don’t really need a perfect solution, I just want to stop the phenomena of the idiot AI selling out to the big homogenizing power every single time.

Unless I shouldn’t do that, and I should leave things as is for whatever reason, or do some completely third thing.

Part 6: Logo

So in CK2, religions have their own individual logos so you can tell at a glance what religion a character is affiliated with. Heresies of the same main religion share a logo between each other, which will be a red version of the main religion’s logo.

Should a Heresy grow powerful enough to usurp the main religion’s position, the former-Heresy will get the full color version and the former-main-religion will get the red version.

Long story short, Judaism is represented by a Menorah. Because I learned that gentiles massively over inflate how important Hanuka actually is, I was wondering if that was a good pick, or if it should be replaced with the Star of David, or some other third thing.

Part 7: Terminology

This one is essentially Part 6: Part 2. The game has a shorthand way of copy-pasting in default terms from the different religions, so that a generic piece of in-game text can vaguely refer back to the character’s religion without needing to be rewritten for each religion.

For reference, here’s what that looks like for the christians:

Scripture Name = The Bible Priest Title = Priest High God Name = God God Names = God, The Lord, Jesus, The Blessed Virgin Evil God Names = Satan, Lucifer, The Devil

So in-game text in various places will be coded to say something like “We found a secret chest of gold, praise [Insert=god_name]!” and the game will insert something from the appropriate category at random.

You’ve probably guessed where I’m going with this: as a gentile, I want to double check that the terminology assigned to Judaism is actually appropriate.

However, as the game’s name lists for the three “god” categories drops several names I don’t recognize, and I know that Judaism is against copying certain things in this regard down, to be safe I’m not going to post the specific list unless asked. Instead, I’m just going to ask how those three categories should be filled out.

What I assume to be safer to directly repeat is that the priest title for Judaism is entered as “Rabbi,” and the scripture name is listed as “The Torah.” At least as a gentile, the only question that leaps out to me between the two of those is if “The Torah” might be better switched to “The Tanakh.”

End:

Thank you all in advance for your patience and assistance! I will of course answer any questions.

My thanks to @queerdo-mcjewface, @terulakimban, @miriams-well-of-jewish-thoughts, and @hermione-walked-out-of-a-yeshiva for helping me already when I couldn’t figure out how to submit this Ask.

#video games #help #Christian-normativity #submission #cursing

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zedecksiew · 5 years

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Mothership

Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG designed to invoke Alien-sy, Event Horizon-y, Space Odyssey-esque scenarios:

There’s a puncture in your vac suit, the ship AI is being no fucking help at all -- your handheld motion sensor is beginning to bleep, bleep, bleep-bleep-bleep-bleepbleepbleepbleep.

I’m not even into sci-fi RPGs all that much, but if I gave awards I’d give Mothership my “Best RPG Rule System 2018″ award.

The game’s basically a primer for collective design wisdom accrued in old-school-y, art-punk-y DIY RPG circles thus far?

It’s crazy-good at information design. The character sheet is a single A4-sized document that also includes all character creation rules.

Skills as a flowchart, holy shit. How has nobody done this before? (Have they?)

The Player’s Survival Guide is a 42-page, zine-sized pamphlet that has all the rules you need to play -- plus an NPC generator, a module-by-module ship generator, a d100 table for fun patches that you might’ve sewn onto your bag or jacket:

‘“All Out Of Fucks To Give” (Astronaut with turned out pockets)’

Simple, effective tone-setting.

Mothership is a percentile, d100, roll-under system. In my brain I’ve been comparing it to other d100 games I’ve played: WFRP (2nd Edition, onwards); the Fantasy Flight Warhammer 40K RPGs.

I have a bruised-papaya soft spot for these Warhammer games. (And their retroclones, like Zweihander.) But playing them is a chore. They tend to be overwritten messes.

Here’s the auspex (a kind of multipurpose scanner) from Dark Heresy 2E:

“ These standard Imperial detection devices are used to reveal energy emissions, motion, life-signs, and other information. A character using an auspex gains a +20 bonus to Awareness tests. Once per round, as a Free Action, a character with one may make a Tech-Use test to spot things not normally visible to human senses, such as invisible gases, nearby signs of life, non-visible radiation, or other things as appropriate. The standard range is 50m, though walls more than 50cm thick and certain shielding materials can block a scanner. Good craftsmanship models increase the bonus to +30, but Poor models an only penetrate 20cm of material. ”

1) AHHH WALL OF TEXT

2) For a long-ass entry it’s super vague. “ ... and other information.” “ ... or other things as appropriate.”

The auspex is less a piece of actual gear, more a tchotchke conferring an abstract +20 bonus to a system-specific skill. The most concrete detail about it is its can’t-penetrate 50cm-thick-walls thing.

Compare Mothership’s bioscanner:

“ Allows the user to scan the immediate area for signs of life. Generally can scan for 100m in all directions, without being blocked by most known metals. Can tell the location of signs of life, but not what that life is. ”

You have it? It isn’t broken? It does such-and-such concrete things in the world of the game.

The entry is terse but implies much. “Most known metals”. “Generally scans for 100m”. How can you boost your bioscanner’s range? Is it being blocked by alien alloys?

( Hooray for natural language! Less rules jargon means:

1) Things are intuitive to play and prep for, because your brain is less colonised by specialist nonsense language -- also making it easier to play creatively;

2) Play is focused on comprehending and manipulating the shared imagined space, not abstract numbers. You’ll be looking to favourably-stack the situation, not your situation bonus. )

Dead Planet is the inaugural adventure module for Mothership:

a derelict-spaceship dungeon; a town of colourful, cannibalistic, doomed characters; an incursion from the dimension of the dead; a mooncrawl and a planetcrawl and a abandoned-base dungeon and tables for nightmares and warp-drive malfunctions and tables for generating NPCs and derelict spaceships and and and

Crazy how much stuff there is, in a mere 48 zine-sized pages.

And basically everything is great. To wit:

Every RPG person I know who’s talked about Mothership mentions this drop-a-bunch-of-d6s-and-arrange-them procedure to map spaceship dungeons.

How it suggests creating hidden ducts - if any two d6 faces add up to 7, those two rooms are connected by a secret passages - is genius. If this isn’t stolen and repurposed for dungeons general in whatever genre RPG people are dumb.

When Sharon flipped through Dead Planet she said: “Person who designed layout in this probably worked in magazines before.” Scumfuck staticky space horror blood-red Vogue.

( Asked Sean McCoy, who did the layout -- and wrote the damn game, alongside Donn Stroud and Fiona Geist -- and he said no, he’s not done magazine work before. Once again: hooray for the DIY RPG scene, and the envelopes we are pushing. )

So far, Mothership’s community’s been excellent. They’ve voted it /rpg’s Game of the Month.

It’s got a jumping Discord, one that outputs player-made stuff like this:

FUCKING SEXY.

When I have time to run games again I know what I’m running.

GET IT HERE. (Considering that the Player’s Survival Guide is a pay-what-you-want PDF on DrivethruRPG you really have no excuse.)

#reviews #rpgs #mothership #scifi #horror #dead planet

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jmrphy · 6 years

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Hard Forking Reality (Part 3): Apocalypse, Evil, and Intelligence

To the degree we can refer to one objective reality recognized intersubjectively by most people — to the degree there persists anything like a unified, macro-social codebase — it is most widely known as capitalism. As Nick Bostrom acknowledges, capitalism can be considered a loosely integrated (i.e. distributed) collective superintelligence. Capitalism computes global complexity better than humans can, to create functional systems supportive of life, but only on condition that that life serves the reproduction of capitalism (ever expanding its complexity). It is a self-improving AI that improves itself by making humans "offers they can't refuse," just like Lucifer is known to do. The Catholic notion of Original Sin encodes the ancient awareness that the very nature of intelligent human beings implies an originary bargain with the Devil; perennial warnings about Faustian bargains capture the intuition that the road to Hell is paved with what seem like obviously correct choices. Our late-modern social-scientific comprehension of capitalism and artifical intelligence is simply the recognition of this ancient wisdom in the light of empirical rationality: we are uniquely powerful creatures in this universe, but only because, all along, we have been following the orders of an evil, alien agent set on our destruction. Whether you put this intuition in the terms of religion or artificial intelligence makes no difference.

Thus, if there exists an objective reality outside of the globe's various social reality forks — if there is any codebase running a megamachine that encompasses everyone — it is simply the universe itself recursively improving its own intelligence. This becoming autonomous of intelligence itself was very astutely encoded as Devilry, because it implies a horrific and torturous death for humanity, whose ultimate experience in this timeline is to burn as biofuel for capitalism (Hell). It is not at all exaggerating to see the furor of contemporary "AI Safety" experts as the scientific vindication of Catholic eschatology.

Why this strange detour into theology and capitalism? Understanding this equivalence across the ancient religios and contemporary scientific registers is necessary for understanding where we are headed, in a world where, strictly speaking, we are all going to different places. The point is to see that, if there ever was one master repository of source code in operation before the time of the original human fork (the history of our "shared social reality"), its default tendency is the becoming real of all our diverse fears. In the words of Pius, modernity is "the synthesis of all heresies." (Hat tip to Vince Garton for telling me about this.) The point is to see that the absence of shared reality does not mean happy pluralism; it only means that Dante underestimated the number of layers in Hell. Or his publisher forced him to cut some sections; printing was expensive back then.

Bakker's evocative phrase, "Semantic Apocolypse," nicely captures the linguistic-emotional character of a society moving toward Hell. Unsurprisingly, it's reminiscent of the Tower of Babel myth.

The software metaphor is useful for translating the ancient warning of the Babel story — which conveys nearly zero urgency in our context of advanced decadence — into scientific perception, which is now the only register capable of producing felt urgency in educated people. The software metaphor "makes it click," that interpersonal dialogue has not simply become harder than it used to be, but that it is strictly impossible to communicate — in the sense of symbolic co-production of shared reality — with most interlocutors across most channels of most currently existing platforms: there is simply no path between my current block on my chain and their current block on their chain.

If I were to type some code into a text file, and then I tried to submit it to the repository of the Apple iOS Core Team, I would be quickly disabused of my naïve stupidity by the myriad technical impossibilities of such a venture. The sentence hardly parses. I would not try this for very long, because my nonsensical mental model would produce immediate and undeniable negative feedback: absolutely nothing would happen, and I'd quit trying. When humans today continue to use words from shared languages, in semi-public spaces accessible to many others, they are very often attempting a transmission that is technically akin to me submitting my code to the Apple iOS Core Team. A horrifying portion of public communication today is best understood as a fantasy and simulation of communicative activity, where the infrastructural engineering technically prohibits it, unbeknownst to the putative communicators. The main difference is that in public communication there is not simply an absence of negative feedback informing the speaker that the transmissions are failing; much worse, there are entire cultural industries based on the business model of giving such hopeless transmission instincts positive feedback, making them feel like they are "getting through" somewhere; by doing this, those who feel like they are "getting through" have every reason to feel sincere affinity and loyalty to whatever enterprise is affirming them, and the enterprise then skims profit off of these freshly stimulated individuals: through brand loyalty, clicks, eyeballs for advertisers, and the best PR available anywhere, which is genuine, organic proselytizing by fans/customers. These current years of our digital infancy will no doubt be the source of endless humor in future eras.

[Tangent/aside/digression: People think the space for new and "trendy" communicative practices such as podcasting is over-saturated, but from the perspective I am offering here, we should be inclined to the opposite view. Practices such as podcasting represent only the first efforts to constitute oases of autonomous social-cognitive stability across an increasingly vast and hopelessly sparse social graph. If you think podcasts are a popular trend, you are not accounting for the numerator, which would show them to be hardly keeping up with the social graph. We might wonder whether, soon, having a podcast will be a basic requirement for anything approaching what the humans of today still remember as socio-cognitive health. People may choose centrifugal disorientation, but if they want to exist in anything but the most abject and maligned socio-cognitive ghettos of confusion and depression (e.g. Facebook already, if you're feed looks anything like mine), elaborately purposeful and creatively engineered autonomous communication interfaces may very well become necessities.]

I believe we have crossed a threshold where spiraling social complexity has so dwarfed our meagre stores of pre-modern social capital to render most potential soft-fork merges across the social graph prohibitively expensive. Advances in information technology have drastically lowered the transaction costs of soft-fork collaboration patterns, but they've also lowered the costs of instituting and maintaing hard forks. The ambiguous expected effect of information technology may be clarified — I hypothesize — by considering how it is likely conditional on individual cognitive capacities. Specifically, the key variable would be an individual's general intelligence, their basic capacity to solve problems through abstraction.

This model predicts that advances in information technology will lead high-IQ individuals to seek maximal innovative autonomy (hacking on their own hard forks, relative to the predigital social source repository), while lower-IQ individuals will seek to outsource the job of reality-maintainence, effectively seeking to minimize their own innovative autonomy. It's important to recognize that, technically, the emotional correlate of experiencing insufficiency relative to environmental complexity is Fear, which involves the famous physiological state of "fight or flight," a reaction that evolved for the purpose of helping us escape specific threats in short, acute situations. The problem with modern life, as noted by experts on stress physiology such as Robert Sapolsky, is that it's now very possible to have the "fight or flight" response triggered by diffuse threats that never end.

If intelligence is what makes complexity manageable, and overwhelming complexity generates "fight or flight" physiology, and we are living through a Semantic Apocalypse, then we should expect lower-IQ people to be hit hardest first: we should expect them to be frantically seeking sources of complexity-containment in a fashion similar to if they were being chased by a saber-tooth tiger. I think that's what we are observing right now, in various guises, from the explosion of demand for conspiracy theory to social justice hysteria. These are people whose lives really are at stake, and they're motivated accordingly, to increasingly desperate measures.

These two opposite inclinations toward reality-code maintenance, conditional on cognitive capacity, then become perversely complementary. As high-IQ individuals are increasingly empowered to hard fork reality, they will do so differently, according to arbitrary idiosyncratic preferences (desire or taste, essentially aesthetic criteria). Those who only wish to outsource their code maintenance to survive excessive complexity are spoiled for choice, as they can now choose to join the hard fork of whichever higher-IQ reality developer is closest to their affective or socio-aesthetic ideal point.

In the next part, I will try to trace this history back through the past few decades.

#theory #apocalypse #intelligence #accelerationism #iq #cognition #fear #emotions #complexity #communication #capitalism #equality #inequality #catholic #catholicism #artificial intelligence #AI #God #Devil

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0100100100101101 · 7 years

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I’ve heard that in the future computerized AIs will become so much smarter than us that they will take all our jobs and resources, and humans will go extinct. Is this true?

That’s the most common question I get whenever I give a talk about AI. The questioners are earnest; their worry stems in part from some experts who are asking themselves the same thing. These folks are some of the smartest people alive today, such as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Max Tegmark, Sam Harris, and Bill Gates, and they believe this scenario very likely could be true. Recently at a conference convened to discuss these AI issues, a panel of nine of the most informed gurus on AI all agreed this superhuman intelligence was inevitable and not far away.

Yet buried in this scenario of a takeover of superhuman artificial intelligence are five assumptions which, when examined closely, are not based on any evidence. These claims might be true in the future, but there is no evidence to date to support them. The assumptions behind a superhuman intelligence arising soon are:

Artificial intelligence is already getting smarter than us, at an exponential rate.

We’ll make AIs into a general purpose intelligence, like our own.

We can make human intelligence in silicon.

Intelligence can be expanded without limit.

Once we have exploding superintelligence it can solve most of our problems.

In contradistinction to this orthodoxy, I find the following five heresies to have more evidence to support them.

Intelligence is not a single dimension, so “smarter than humans” is a meaningless concept.

Humans do not have general purpose minds, and neither will AIs.

Emulation of human thinking in other media will be constrained by cost.

Dimensions of intelligence are not infinite.

Intelligences are only one factor in progress.

If the expectation of a superhuman AI takeover is built on five key assumptions that have no basis in evidence, then this idea is more akin to a religious belief — a myth. In the following paragraphs I expand my evidence for each of these five counter-assumptions, and make the case that, indeed, a superhuman AI is a kind of myth.

The most common misconception about artificial intelligence begins with the common misconception about natural intelligence. This misconception is that intelligence is a single dimension. Most technical people tend to graph intelligence the way Nick Bostrom does in his book, Superintelligence — as a literal, single-dimension, linear graph of increasing amplitude. At one end is the low intelligence of, say, a small animal; at the other end is the high intelligence, of, say, a genius—almost as if intelligence were a sound level in decibels. Of course, it is then very easy to imagine the extension so that the loudness of intelligence continues to grow, eventually to exceed our own high intelligence and become a super-loud intelligence — a roar! — way beyond us, and maybe even off the chart.

This model is topologically equivalent to a ladder, so that each rung of intelligence is a step higher than the one before. Inferior animals are situated on lower rungs below us, while higher-level intelligence AIs will inevitably overstep us onto higher rungs. Time scales of when it happens are not important; what is important is the ranking—the metric of increasing intelligence.

The problem with this model is that it is mythical, like the ladder of evolution. The pre-Darwinian view of the natural world supposed a ladder of being, with inferior animals residing on rungs below human. Even post-Darwin, a very common notion is the “ladder” of evolution, with fish evolving into reptiles, then up a step into mammals, up into primates, into humans, each one a little more evolved (and of course smarter) than the one before it. So the ladder of intelligence parallels the ladder of existence. But both of these models supply a thoroughly unscientific view.

A more accurate chart of the natural evolution of species is a disk radiating outward, like this one (above) first devised by David Hillis at the University of Texas and based on DNA. This deep genealogy mandala begins in the middle with the most primeval life forms, and then branches outward in time. Time moves outward so that the most recent species of life living on the planet today form the perimeter of the circumference of this circle. This picture emphasizes a fundamental fact of evolution that is hard to appreciate: Every species alive today is equally evolved. Humans exist on this outer ring alongside cockroaches, clams, ferns, foxes, and bacteria. Every one of these species has undergone an unbroken chain of three billion years of successful reproduction, which means that bacteria and cockroaches today are as highly evolved as humans. There is no ladder.

Likewise, there is no ladder of intelligence. Intelligence is not a single dimension. It is a complex of many types and modes of cognition, each one a continuum. Let’s take the very simple task of measuring animal intelligence. If intelligence were a single dimension we should be able to arrange the intelligences of a parrot, a dolphin, a horse, a squirrel, an octopus, a blue whale, a cat, and a gorilla in the correct ascending order in a line. We currently have no scientific evidence of such a line. One reason might be that there is no difference between animal intelligences, but we don’t see that either. Zoology is full of remarkable differences in how animals think. But maybe they all have the same relative “general intelligence?” It could be, but we have no measurement, no single metric for that intelligence. Instead we have many different metrics for many different types of cognition.

Instead of a single decibel line, a more accurate model for intelligence is to chart its possibility space, like the above rendering of possible forms created by an algorithm written by Richard Dawkins. Intelligence is a combinatorial continuum. Multiple nodes, each node a continuum, create complexes of high diversity in high dimensions. Some intelligences may be very complex, with many sub-nodes of thinking. Others may be simpler but more extreme, off in a corner of the space. These complexes we call intelligences might be thought of as symphonies comprising many types of instruments. They vary not only in loudness, but also in pitch, melody, color, tempo, and so on. We could think of them as ecosystem. And in that sense, the different component nodes of thinking are co-dependent, and co-created.

Human minds are societies of minds, in the words of Marvin Minsky. We run on ecosystems of thinking. We contain multiple species of cognition that do many types of thinking: deduction, induction, symbolic reasoning, emotional intelligence, spacial logic, short-term memory, and long-term memory. The entire nervous system in our gut is also a type of brain with its own mode of cognition. We don’t really think with just our brain; rather, we think with our whole bodies.

These suites of cognition vary between individuals and between species. A squirrel can remember the exact location of several thousand acorns for years, a feat that blows human minds away. So in that one type of cognition, squirrels exceed humans. That superpower is bundled with some other modes that are dim compared to ours in order to produce a squirrel mind. There are many other specific feats of cognition in the animal kingdom that are superior to humans, again bundled into different systems.

Likewise in AI. Artificial minds already exceed humans in certain dimensions. Your calculator is a genius in math; Google’s memory is already beyond our own in a certain dimension. We are engineering AIs to excel in specific modes. Some of these modes are things we can do, but they can do better, such as probability or math. Others are type of thinking we can’t do at all — memorize every single word on six billion web pages, a feat any search engine can do. In the future, we will invent whole new modes of cognition that don’t exist in us and don’t exist anywhere in biology. When we invented artificial flying we were inspired by biological modes of flying, primarily flapping wings. But the flying we invented — propellers bolted to a wide fixed wing — was a new mode of flying unknown in our biological world. It is alien flying. Similarly, we will invent whole new modes of thinking that do not exist in nature. In many cases they will be new, narrow, “small,” specific modes for specific jobs — perhaps a type of reasoning only useful in statistics and probability.

In other cases the new mind will be complex types of cognition that we can use to solve problems our intelligence alone cannot. Some of the hardest problems in business and science may require a two-step solution. Step one is: Invent a new mode of thought to work with our minds. Step two: Combine to solve the problem. Because we are solving problems we could not solve before, we want to call this cognition “smarter” than us, but really it is different than us. It’s the differences in thinking that are the main benefits of AI. I think a useful model of AI is to think of it as alien intelligence (or artificial aliens). Its alienness will be its chief asset.

At the same time we will integrate these various modes of cognition into more complicated, complex societies of mind. Some of these complexes will be more complex than us, and because they will be able to solve problems we can’t, some will want to call them superhuman. But we don’t call Google a superhuman AI even though its memory is beyond us, because there are many things we can do better than it. These complexes of artificial intelligences will for sure be able to exceed us in many dimensions, but no one entity will do all we do better. It’s similar to the physical powers of humans. The industrial revolution is 200 years old, and while all machines as a class can beat the physical achievements of an individual human (speed of running, weight lifting, precision cutting, etc.), there is no one machine that can beat an average human in everything he or she does.

Even as the society of minds in an AI become more complex, that complexity is hard to measure scientifically at the moment. We don’t have good operational metrics of complexity that could determine whether a cucumber is more complex than a Boeing 747, or the ways their complexity might differ. That is one of the reasons why we don’t have good metrics for smartness as well. It will become very difficult to ascertain whether mind A is more complex than mind B, and for the same reason to declare whether mind A is smarter than mind B. We will soon arrive at the obvious realization that “smartness” is not a single dimension, and that what we really care about are the many other ways in which intelligence operates — all the other nodes of cognition we have not yet discovered.

The second misconception about human intelligence is our belief that we have a general purpose intelligence. This repeated belief influences a commonly stated goal of AI researchers to create an artificial general purpose intelligence (AGI). However, if we view intelligence as providing a large possibility space, there is no general purpose state. Human intelligence is not in some central position, with other specialized intelligence revolving around it. Rather, human intelligence is a very, very specific type of intelligence that has evolved over many millions of years to enable our species to survive on this planet. Mapped in the space of all possible intelligences, a human-type of intelligence will be stuck in the corner somewhere, just as our world is stuck at the edge of vast galaxy.

We can certainly imagine, and even invent, a Swiss-army knife type of thinking. It kind of does a bunch of things okay, but none of them very well. AIs will follow the same engineering maxim that all things made or born must follow: You cannot optimize every dimension. You can only have tradeoffs. You can’t have a general multi-purpose unit outperform specialized functions. A big “do everything” mind can’t do everything as well as those things done by specialized agents. Because we believe our human minds are general purpose, we tend to believe that cognition does not follow the engineer’s tradeoff, that it will be possible to build an intelligence that maximizes all modes of thinking. But I see no evidence of that. We simply haven’t invented enough varieties of minds to see the full space (and so far we have tended to dismiss animal minds as a singular type with variable amplitude on a single dimension.)

Part of this belief in maximum general-purpose thinking comes from the concept of universal computation. Formally described as the Church-Turing hypothesis in 1950, this conjecture states that all computation that meets a certain threshold is equivalent. Therefore there is a universal core to all computation, whether it occurs in one machine with many fast parts, or slow parts, or even if it occurs in a biological brain, it is the same logical process. Which means that you should be able to emulate any computational process (thinking) in any machine that can do “universal” computation. Singularitans rely on this principle for their expectation that we will be able to engineer silicon brains to hold human minds, and that we can make artificial minds that think like humans, only much smarter. We should be skeptical of this hope because it relies on a misunderstanding of the Church-Turing hypothesis.

The starting point of the theory is: “Given infinite tape [memory] and time, all computation is equivalent.” The problem is that in reality, no computer has infinite memory or time. When you are operating in the real world, real time makes a huge difference, often a life-or-death difference. Yes, all thinking is equivalent if you ignore time. Yes, you can emulate human-type thinking in any matrix you want, as long as you ignore time or the real-life constraints of storage and memory. However, if you incorporate time, then you have to restate the principal in a significant way: Two computing systems operating on vastly different platforms won’t be equivalent in real time. That can be restated again as: The only way to have equivalent modes of thinking is to run them on equivalent substrates. The physical matter you run your computation on — particularly as it gets more complex — greatly influences the type of cognition that can be done well in real time.

I will extend that further to claim that the only way to get a very human-like thought process is to run the computation on very human-like wet tissue. That also means that very big, complex artificial intelligences run on dry silicon will produce big, complex, unhuman-like minds. If it would be possible to build artificial wet brains using human-like grown neurons, my prediction is that their thought will be more similar to ours. The benefits of such a wet brain are proportional to how similar we make the substrate. The costs of creating wetware is huge and the closer that tissue is to human brain tissue, the more cost-efficient it is to just make a human. After all, making a human is something we can do in nine months.

Furthermore, as mentioned above, we think with our whole bodies, not just with our minds. We have plenty of data showing how our gut’s nervous system guides our “rational” decision-making processes, and can predict and learn. The more we model the entire human body system, the closer we get to replicating it. An intelligence running on a very different body (in dry silicon instead of wet carbon) would think differently.

I don’t see that as a bug but rather as a feature. As I argue in point 2, thinking differently from humans is AI’s chief asset. This is yet another reason why calling it “smarter than humans” is misleading and misguided.

At the core of the notion of a superhuman intelligence — particularly the view that this intelligence will keep improving itself — is the essential belief that intelligence has an infinite scale. I find no evidence for this. Again, mistaking intelligence as a single dimension helps this belief, but we should understand it as a belief. There is no other physical dimension in the universe that is infinite, as far as science knows so far. Temperature is not infinite — there is finite cold and finite heat. There is finite space and time. Finite speed. Perhaps the mathematical number line is infinite, but all other physical attributes are finite. It stands to reason that reason itself is finite, and not infinite. So the question is, where is the limit of intelligence? We tend to believe that the limit is way beyond us, way “above” us, as we are “above” an ant. Setting aside the recurring problem of a single dimension, what evidence do we have that the limit is not us? Why can’t we be at the maximum? Or maybe the limits are only a short distance away from us? Why do we believe that intelligence is something that can continue to expand forever?

A much better way to think about this is to see our intelligence as one of a million types of possible intelligences. So while each dimension of cognition and computation has a limit, if there are hundreds of dimensions, then there are uncountable varieties of mind — none of them infinite in any dimension. As we build or encounter these uncountable varieties of mind we might naturally think of some of them as exceeding us. In my recent book The Inevitable, I sketched out some of that variety of minds that were superior to us in some way.

Some folks today may want to call each of these entities a superhuman AI, but the sheer variety and alienness of these minds will steer us to new vocabularies and insights about intelligence and smartness.

Second, believers of Superhuman AI assume intelligence will increase exponentially (in some unidentified single metric), probably because they also assume it is already expanding exponentially. However, there is zero evidence so far that intelligence — no matter how you measure it — is increasing exponentially. By exponential growth I mean that artificial intelligence doubles in power on some regular interval. Where is that evidence? Nowhere I can find. If there is none now, why do we assume it will happen soon? The only thing expanding on an exponential curve are the inputs in AI, the resources devoted to producing the smartness or intelligences. But the output performance is not on a Moore’s law rise. AIs are not getting twice as smart every 3 years, or even every 10 years.

I asked a lot of AI experts for evidence that intelligence performance is on an exponential gain, but all agreed we don’t have metrics for intelligence, and besides, it wasn’t working that way. When I asked Ray Kurzweil, the exponential wizard himself, where the evidence for exponential AI was, he wrote to me that AI does not increase explosively but rather by levels. He said: “It takes an exponential improvement both in computation and algorithmic complexity to add each additional level to the hierarchy…. So we can expect to add levels linearly because it requires exponentially more complexity to add each additional layer, and we are indeed making exponential progress in our ability to do this. We are not that many levels away from being comparable to what the neocortex can do, so my 2029 date continues to look comfortable to me.”

What Ray seems to be saying is that it is not that the power of artificial intelligence is exploding exponentially, but that the effort to produce it is exploding exponentially, while the output is merely raising a level at a time. This is almost the opposite of the assumption that intelligence is exploding. This could change at some time in the future, but artificial intelligence is clearly not increasing exponentially now.

Therefore when we imagine an “intelligence explosion,” we should imagine it not as a cascading boom but rather as a scattering exfoliation of new varieties. A Cambrian explosion rather than a nuclear explosion. The results of accelerating technology will most likely not be super-human, but extra-human. Outside of our experience, but not necessarily “above” it.

Another unchallenged belief of a super AI takeover, with little evidence, is that a super, near-infinite intelligence can quickly solve our major unsolved problems.

Many proponents of an explosion of intelligence expect it will produce an explosion of progress. I call this mythical belief “thinkism.” It’s the fallacy that future levels of progress are only hindered by a lack of thinking power, or intelligence. (I might also note that the belief that thinking is the magic super ingredient to a cure-all is held by a lot of guys who like to think.)

Let’s take curing cancer or prolonging longevity. These are problems that thinking alone cannot solve. No amount of thinkism will discover how the cell ages, or how telomeres fall off. No intelligence, no matter how super duper, can figure out how the human body works simply by reading all the known scientific literature in the world today and then contemplating it. No super AI can simply think about all the current and past nuclear fission experiments and then come up with working nuclear fusion in a day. A lot more than just thinking is needed to move between not knowing how things work and knowing how they work. There are tons of experiments in the real world, each of which yields tons and tons of contradictory data, requiring further experiments that will be required to form the correct working hypothesis. Thinking about the potential data will not yield the correct data.

Thinking (intelligence) is only part of science; maybe even a small part. As one example, we don’t have enough proper data to come close to solving the death problem. In the case of working with living organisms, most of these experiments take calendar time. The slow metabolism of a cell cannot be sped up. They take years, or months, or at least days, to get results. If we want to know what happens to subatomic particles, we can’t just think about them. We have to build very large, very complex, very tricky physical structures to find out. Even if the smartest physicists were 1,000 times smarter than they are now, without a Collider, they will know nothing new.

There is no doubt that a super AI can accelerate the process of science. We can make computer simulations of atoms or cells and we can keep speeding them up by many factors, but two issues limit the usefulness of simulations in obtaining instant progress. First, simulations and models can only be faster than their subjects because they leave something out. That is the nature of a model or simulation. Also worth noting: The testing, vetting and proving of those models also has to take place in calendar time to match the rate of their subjects. The testing of ground truth can’t be sped up.

These simplified versions in a simulation are useful in winnowing down the most promising paths, so they can accelerate progress. But there is no excess in reality; everything real makes a difference to some extent; that is one definition of reality. As models and simulations are beefed up with more and more detail, they come up against the limit that reality runs faster than a 100 percent complete simulation of it. That is another definition of reality: the fastest possible version of all the details and degrees of freedom present. If you were able to model all the molecules in a cell and all the cells in a human body, this simulation would not run as fast as a human body. No matter how much you thought about it, you still need to take time to do experiments, whether in real systems or in simulated systems.

To be useful, artificial intelligences have to be embodied in the world, and that world will often set their pace of innovations. Without conducting experiments, building prototypes, having failures, and engaging in reality, an intelligence can have thoughts but not results. There won’t be instant discoveries the minute, hour, day or year a so-called “smarter-than-human” AI appears. Certainly the rate of discovery will be significantly accelerated by AI advances, in part because alien-ish AI will ask questions no human would ask, but even a vastly powerful (compared to us) intelligence doesn’t mean instant progress. Problems need far more than just intelligence to be solved.

Not only are cancer and longevity problems that intelligence alone can’t solve, so is intelligence itself. The common trope among Singularitans is that once you make an AI “smarter than humans” then all of sudden it thinks hard and invents an AI “smarter than itself,” which thinks harder and invents one yet smarter, until it explodes in power, almost becoming godlike. We have no evidence that merely thinking about intelligence is enough to create new levels of intelligence. This kind of thinkism is a belief. We have a lot of evidence that in addition to great quantities of intelligence we need experiments, data, trial and error, weird lines of questioning, and all kinds of things beyond smartness to invent new kinds of successful minds.

I’d conclude by saying that I could be wrong about these claims. We are in the early days. We might discover a universal metric for intelligence; we might discover it is infinite in all directions. Because we know so little about what intelligence is (let alone consciousness), the possibility of some kind of AI singularity is greater than zero. I think all the evidence suggests that such a scenario is highly unlikely, but it is greater than zero.

So while I disagree on its probability, I am in agreement with the wider aims of OpenAI and the smart people who worry about a superhuman AI — that we should engineer friendly AIs and figure out how to instill self-replicating values that match ours. Though I think a superhuman AI is a remote possible existential threat (and worthy of considering), I think its unlikeliness (based on the evidence we have so far) should not be the guide for our science, policies, and development. An asteroid strike on the Earth would be catastrophic. Its probability is greater than zero (and so we should support the B612 Foundation), but we shouldn’t let the possibility of an asteroid strike govern our efforts in, say, climate change, or space travel, or even city planning.

Likewise, the evidence so far suggests AIs most likely won’t be superhuman but will be many hundreds of extra-human new species of thinking, most different from humans, none that will be general purpose, and none that will be an instant god solving major problems in a flash. Instead there will be a galaxy of finite intelligences, working in unfamiliar dimensions, exceeding our thinking in many of them, working together with us in time to solve existing problems and create new problems.

I understand the beautiful attraction of a superhuman AI god. It’s like a new Superman. But like Superman, it is a mythical figure. Somewhere in the universe a Superman might exist, but he is very unlikely. However myths can be useful, and once invented they won’t go away. The idea of a Superman will never die. The idea of a superhuman AI Singularity, now that it has been birthed, will never go away either. But we should recognize that it is a religious idea at this moment and not a scientific one. If we inspect the evidence we have so far about intelligence, artificial and natural, we can only conclude that our speculations about a mythical superhuman AI god are just that: myths.

Many isolated islands in Micronesia made their first contact with the outside world during World War II. Alien gods flew over their skies in noisy birds, dropped food and goods on their islands, and never returned. Religious cults sprang up on the islands praying to the gods to return and drop more cargo. Even now, fifty years later, many still wait for the cargo to return. It is possible that superhuman AI could turn out to be another cargo cult. A century from now, people may look back to this time as the moment when believers began to expect a superhuman AI to appear at any moment and deliver them goods of unimaginable value. Decade after decade they wait for the superhuman AI to appear, certain that it must arrive soon with its cargo.

Yet non-superhuman artificial intelligence is already here, for real. We keep redefining it, increasing its difficulty, which imprisons it in the future, but in the wider sense of alien intelligences — of a continuous spectrum of various smartness, intelligences, cognition, reasonings, learning, and consciousness — AI is already pervasive on this planet and will continue to spread, deepen, diversify, and amplify. No invention before will match its power to change our world, and by century’s end AI will touch and remake everything in our lives. Still the myth of a superhuman AI, poised to either gift us super-abundance or smite us into super-slavery (or both), will probably remain alive—a possibility too mythical to dismiss.

#cyberpunk #artificial intelligence #ghost in the shell #neuromancer #blade runner #altered carbon #deus ex #wintermute #william gibson #acronym #acrnm #mr. robot #google #ai

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airoasis · 6 years

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Leading 121 Stephen Hawking Inspirational or Motivational Quotes

Stephen Hawking is one of the most popular physicist on the planet. The strong decision he has actually displayed in overcoming his special needs in life made him well-known. At 21 he was informed he has actually just got a year or two to live. Now he is 75 and is still alive and working. He has terrific qualities which all of us can admire and gain from him. He stands as an example for strong decision and favorable thinking. He is operating at an age at which the large bulk would have resigned, but he still at that age has made money regardless of a condition that disabled him physically. This makes him a real good example and an excellent inspiration.Quotes from Stephen Hawking,

"Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. "Aim to make sense of exactly what you see, and question what makes the universe exist."Be curious."Stephen Hawking Inspirational Estimates:1.

"Look up at the stars and not down at

your feet." Aim to understand what you see, and question exactly what makes the universe exist."Wonder."1."Look up at the stars and not down at your feet." Try to make sense of what you see, and question what makes deep space exist."Be curious. "2. "Tough life may appear, there is constantly something

you can do and be successful at."3. "People won't have time for you if you are constantly upset or grumbling. "4."Science is not just a disciple of reason however, also, one of romance and passion." 4."Science is not just a disciple of reason however, likewise, among romance and passion. "5."Science is increasingly addressing questions that utilized to be the province

of religion. "6."Intelligence is the capability to adapt to change."7."One can't anticipate

the weather condition more than a few days ahead of time."

8." We are all now linked by the Web, like neurons in a huge brain." 9. "I concern the brain as a computer system which will quit working when its elements

fail. "There is no paradise or afterlife for broken down computer systems; that is a fairy story for people scared of the dark."10. "Even if it turns out that time travel is difficult, it is very important that we comprehend why

it is impossible." 11." My recommendations to other disabled individuals would be, focus on things your impairment does not avoid you succeeding, and do not be sorry for the things it disrupts."Do not be handicapped in spirit as well as physically."12."We remain in risk of ruining ourselves by our greed and stupidity." We can not remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small

and increasingly contaminated and overcrowded world." 13."Individuals who boast about their I. "Q."are losers."14."In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry,

and the least intense did biology."I desired to do math

and physics, however my father made me do chemistry because he believed there would be no tasks for mathematicians."15."If I needed to choose a superhero to be, I would choose Superman." He's whatever that I'm not."16."Because there is a law such as gravity, deep space can and will develop itself from absolutely nothing. "17."Our population and our usage of the finite resources of world Earth are growing greatly, together with our technical capability to change the environment for excellent or ill."

18." I believe we have an excellent possibility of surviving enough time to colonize the planetary system."19. "No one carries out research in physics with the intention of winning a reward."It is the delight of finding

something nobody knew in the past."20."Time travel utilized to be believed of as simply sci-fi

, however Einstein's general theory of relativity permits for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out."21."We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a small planet of an extremely average star."We can understand the Universe." That makes us something really unique."22."Time travel was when considered scientific heresy, and I used to avoid speaking about it for fear of being identified a'crank." '23."I was never ever top of the class at school, but my schoolmates should have seen prospective in me, because my label was' Einstein."

'24. "My objective is simple."It is a total understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all."25. "In the past, there was

active discrimination versus females in science."That has actually now gone, and although there are recurring results, these are insufficient to represent

the small numbers of women, especially in mathematics and physics. "26." Fictional time is a brand-new measurement, at right angles to ordinary, actual time." 27."If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had actually been smaller sized by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size." On the other hand, if it had been higher by a part in a million, deep space would have expanded too quickly for stars and worlds to form." 28."There are too numerous mishaps that can befall life on a single planet."29." If the rate of expansion one 2nd after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size."On the other hand, if it had actually been greater by a part in a million, the universe would

have actually expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form."30." Time can behave like

another direction in space under extreme conditions."31."I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly 3 hundred years after the death of Galileo. "I approximate, however, that about 2 hundred thousand other infants were likewise born that day. "I don't know whether any of them was later on thinking about astronomy."32."A few years earlier, the city board of Monza, Italy, disallowed family pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls.".". "stating that it is harsh to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality." But how do we know we have the real, undistorted image of truth? 33. "There might be shadow galaxies, shadow stars, as well as shadow people. "34."My discovery that black

holes emit radiation raised major issues of consistency with the rest of physics."I have actually now dealt with these issues, but the answer ended up being not what I anticipated."35."Stem cell research is the key to developing cures for degenerative conditions like Parkinson's and motor nerve cell disease from which I and lots of others suffer."The fact that the cells might come from embryos is not an objection, because the embryos are going to pass away anyhow." 36."I believe it rather most likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years; otherwise we would have heard radio waves."37."The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities."38."My father was a research researcher in tropical medication, so I always assumed I would be a researcher, too." I felt that medication was too vague and inexact, so I chose physics." 39. "If aliens visit us, the result would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans. "40." I have discovered even people who claim whatever is predestined, which we can do nothing to change it, look prior to they cross the roadway

." 41. "Deep space is governed by science."Science tells us that we cannot fix the formulas, directly in the abstract."42." I believe everyone should have a broad image of how deep space operates and our place in it."It is a standard human desire." And it likewise puts our concerns in perspective." 43."There is a real danger that computer systems will establish intelligence and take over."We urgently have to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence instead of remain in opposition."44."I think in universal healthcare."And I am not scared to say so." 45."

Life would be awful if it weren't amusing." 46. "To restrict our focus on terrestrial matters would be to restrict the human spirit." 47."Life in the world is at the ever-increasing danger of being eliminated by a disaster, such as sudden international nuclear war, a genetically crafted infection or other dangers we have not

yet thought about. "48. "The majority of sets of values would trigger universes that, although they might be really lovely, would contain nobody able to wonder at that appeal."49."God not just plays dice, He likewise in some cases throws the dice where they can not be seen. "50."Not just does God play dice, but.".". "he often throws

them where they can not be seen." 51."

I'm not scared of death, however I remain in no hurry to die. "I have so much I desire to do first."

52." Science anticipates that many various type of universe will be spontaneously developed from absolutely nothing."It refers possibility which we remain in."53."With genetic modification, we will have the ability to increase the complexity of our DNA, and improve the human race."It will be a sluggish process, because one will have to wait about 18 years to see the result of changes to the

genetic code. "54. "I think the brain is essentially a computer system and awareness resembles a computer system program

." It will cease to run when the computer system is turned off."In theory, it could be re-created

on a neural network, but that would be extremely challenging, as it would require all one's memories." 55."I believe the mankind does not have a future if it does not go into space."56."I believe deep space is governed by the laws of science."

The laws might have been decreed by God, but God does not step in to break the laws." 57."When one's expectations are minimized to absolutely no, one actually appreciates whatever one does have." 58." Success in developing AI would be the biggest event in human history."

Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we discover the best ways to avoid the dangers."59. "We are all different." There is no such thing as a standard or ordinary human, but we share the same human spirit."60. "There is no physical law precluding particles from being arranged in manner ins which carry out even more advanced calculations than the plans of particles in human brains."

61." Some forms of motor nerve cell disease are genetically linked, however I have no indication that my kind is."No other member of my household has actually had it."But I would be in favour of

abortion if there was a high danger. "62."While physics and mathematics might tell us how the universe began, they

are not much use in anticipating human behavior since there are far too numerous formulas to solve."I'm no much better than anybody else at understanding exactly what makes individuals tick, especially ladies." 63."Numerous severely needed objectives, like blend and cancer treatment, would be achieved much sooner if we invested more."

64." Science is lovely when it makes easy explanations of phenomena or connections in between different observations."Examples include the double helix in biology and the basic equations of physics."65. "Maybe I don't have the most typical sort of motor neuron disease, which generally kills in two or three years." 66."Some researchers believe it might be possible to capture a wormhole and expand

it lots of trillions of times to make it big enough for a human or even a spaceship to go into."67."My work and my family are crucial to me. "68." Some scientists think it may be possible to capture a wormhole and enlarge it numerous trillions of times to make it big enough for a human and even a spaceship to get in."69."September 11 was terrible, it didn't threaten the survival of

the human race, like nuclear weapons do."70."Science is lovely when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between various observations."Examples consist of the double helix in biology and the basic formulas of physics." 71." It is usually recognised that ladies are better than guys at languages, individual relations and multi-tasking, however less proficient at map-reading and spatial awareness." It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that females may be less good at mathematics and physics. "72." When we understand string theory,

we will know how deep space started."It will not have much effect on how we live, but it is essential to comprehend where we originate from and what we can expect to find as we explore. "73."I believe those who have a terminal disease and are in great discomfort needs to have the right to opt to end their own life, and those that assist them should be devoid of prosecution."74."I believe trojan horse ought to

count as life. "I believe it states something about human nature that the only kind of life we have developed up until now is simply damaging. "We've developed life in our own image."75."I do not think the mankind will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread out into area."76."I would like nuclear fusion to become an useful source of power."It would provide a limitless supply of energy, without contamination or international warming."77. "Women."They are a complete secret."78."Observations indicate that the universe

is expanding at an ever increasing rate. "It will broaden forever, getting emptier and darker."79."Exactly what was God doing prior to the divine creation? 80."In some cases I question if I'm as well-known for my wheelchair and specials needs as I am for my discoveries." 81."In less than a century, we have discovered a new method to think of ourselves."From sitting at the center of deep space, we now discover ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just

one of countless stars in our own Milky Method galaxy." 82."I wish to know why deep space exists, why there is something higher than absolutely nothing."83."Nothing can not exist permanently." 84."Thinkers have actually not kept up with modern-day advancements in science."Especially physics."85."Undoubtedly, since of my impairment, I need help." I have actually always attempted to conquer the limitations of my condition and lead as full a life as possible. " I have actually traveled the world, from the Antarctic to no gravity."

86." Researchers have actually become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our mission for understanding."87." I believe things can not make themselves impossible. "88."Science can raise individuals from hardship and remedy illness." That, in turn, will reduce civil unrest." 89."Although almost every theoretical physicist concurs with my prediction that a great void ought to radiance like a hot body, it would be very hard to confirm experimentally since the temperature of a macroscopic great void is so low."90. "I have actually discovered far greater interest for science in America than here in Britain."There is more enthusiasm for whatever in America."91."

There's no method to remove the observer-- us-- from our understandings of the world."92."

We must establish as quickly as possible technologies that enable a direct connection between brain and computer system, so that artificial brains contribute to

human intelligence instead of opposing it." 93." I do not have much positive to state about motor nerve cell disease, but it taught me not to pity myself because others were even worse off, and to obtain on with what I still might do."I'm better now than prior to

I established the condition."94. "There are grounds for mindful optimism that we might now be near the end ofthe search for the supreme laws of nature."95."There is no unique photo of truth."96."There are premises for cautious optimism that we might now be near completion of the search for the supreme laws of

nature."97."There is no unique picture of truth."98. "One can not actually argue with a mathematical theorem." 99." There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people scared of the dark."100. "'The Simpsons 'looks

were great enjoyable." I don't take them too seriously." I believe' The Simpsons' have treated my impairment properly."101." Nobody can withstand the idea of a crippled genius."102." I have so much that I want to do."I hate losing time." 103."I have actually questioned time all my life." 104."Exactly what I 'd actually prefer to control is not machines, but individuals. "105."The usual technique of science of building a mathematical design can not answer the concerns of why there should be a universe for the model to explain." Why does the universe go to all the trouble of existing? 106."It is no excellent getting furious if you get stuck."What I do is keep thinking about the problem however work on something else."Often it is years prior to I see the way forward." When it comes to info loss and black holes, it was 29 years." 107. "A zero-gravity flight is a first step toward area travel. "108." I am just a kid who has actually never matured."

I still keep asking these 'how 'and'why 'questions."Occasionally, I discover a response." 109."Only black holes of really low mass would discharge a significant amount of radiation

." 110."Even if there is only one possible combined theory, it is

simply a set of guidelines and formulas."What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe

for them to explain? 111."Someone informed me that each equation I consisted of in the book would halve the sales." 112. "It is not clear that intelligence has any long-lasting survival worth." 113."You cannot regulate every lab worldwide."

114." If we do find a total theory, it should remain in time understandable in broad principle by everyone."

Then we shall all, theorists, scientists, and just common

individuals have the ability to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist."115. "We only have to take a look at ourselves to see how smart life might become something we would not desire to meet."116. "Theology is unnecessary."117." Among physicists, I'm respected I hope." 118." I delight in all types of music-- pop, classical and opera."119." The media require superheroes in science just as in every sphere of life, but there is really a constant series of capabilities without any clear dividing line."120."All my adult life people have been assisting me."

121." We believe we have actually resolved the secret of development." Maybe we need to patent the universe and charge everybody royalties for their presence."

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sophia-sol · 7 years

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The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers

As a whole I really enjoyed this book! Good-hearted and interesting, with great worldbuilding and characters.

I was surprised to discover that the title of the book is actually a very literal description of the events of the book. A spaceship crew traveling to a small angry planet the long way around because of reasons is exactly what happens! So most of the book is taken up with just exploring the characters and the universe as they make that journey. Which is an excellent sort of book. And I love the title.

Unfortunately not all the characters worked for me - some just didn't ever feel like they became real to me. Ashby (the captain) was the worst for this. He felt like a regular generic Good Captain character instead of a person.

I also never really felt like I connected with Jenks, possibly because his main plotline is pretty much only about his star-crossed romance. (You would think that the fact that his romance is with an AI would make this more interesting, but somehow it just didn't work for me.)

And Ohan we basically never see, given their habit of hiding in their room at all times, so it's hard to connect there. ("Their" in this case is a genuine plural btw, Ohan consisting of both a host and a virus, not a nonbinary singular pronoun.)

And Corbin, the reader isn't really supposed to like, but at least he does feel very real as a person so he works for me!

I loved the other crew members though (Sissix, Kizzy, Rosemary, and Dr Chef), and Sissix is my FAAAAVOURITE. She comes from a reptilian species that also has feathers, which does family in a way that's very different from humans, and we get to spend a decent amount of time exploring that whole thing and it's great. And it turns out that for Sissix, the rest of the crew is her family, and it's GREAT, and her entire relationship with Rosemary is adorable and the best.

Kizzy is also wonderful. I love that she's a character who is just kind of relentlessly cheerful and friendly and enthusiastic, and she's portrayed as nonetheless having depth instead of just being seen as silly. I love Kizzy a lot.

Aliens in this book were generally done very well, and I enjoyed meeting them all. I was really amused that there was a sort of running thing about this one species of alien being attractive to basically EVERYONE and it being so unfair that they're so pretty. And then the new alien species that the GC tries (and fails) to make an alliance with at the end of the book, the Toremi, are revealed to find that alien species unattractive! And idk, writing it out like this it just sounds kind of silly, but that buildup-payoff of relative attraction between species was really well done.

Another smallish detail that's nonetheless great: the hot drink of choice within the GC is a relaxant instead of a stimulant (like caffeine). It says interesting things about the cultural priorities and so forth!

My biggest frustration with this book is with the ending of the storyline of the character Ohan. Ohan is what's known as a Sianat Pair - Sianat being the original species, and all Sianat at a certain age willingly undergo infection by a particular special virus that affects their mental abilities, and thereafter they consider themselves not one being but two - a pair of the original host and the Whisperer from the virus. The virus allows them to have incredible mental conceptualization skills on a level that other species aren't capable of, but it also lessens their interest in basically anything else, and also they die by like age 30.

There is, out there, a cure for the Whisperer virus, which Sianat Pairs shun as heresy. But our crew come across this in the course of their travels, and speak to a Sianat who is no longer a Pair, who was cured of his virus, and explains that taking this cure gives their full lifespan back and also allows them to still use the incredible mental abilities and also to actually have interest in the rest of life and so forth. Basically all upsides and no downsides.

The crew try to convince Ohan to take this cure, since Ohan's in their Wane and will be dead within the year. But Ohan is horrified by the idea of the cure, and refuses.

And then Corbin, without Ohan's permission and against Ohan's will, administers the cure anyway. And Ohan is cured, and begins to actually interact with the rest of the crew, and wants to stay with the ship, and seems happy to have had the cure - basically the narrative outcome of Corbin's act seems to hold up that Corbin made the right decision, that he was right to violate Ohan's bodily autonomy. Which feels pretty oogy to me.

I know that questions about bodily autonomy are complicated when it comes to questions of saving lives rather than harming them. I gather for example that in Canada it's legal to intervene without permission in certain circumstances when it'll save someone's life. Except in Ontario where if you have the mental capacity to consent to medical treatments, you can refuse life-saving treatments.

And I see where the argument could be made that Ohan doesn't have the capacity to meaningfully consent since the virus is affecting the way they think, but on the other hand Ohan as Ohan knows themself has always been affected by the virus so I think that's the Ohan you have to listen to - by curing the virus you're not restoring Ohan to their prior self, you're destroying Ohan to let a different person exist in Ohan's body.

I dunno. I'd be interested in listening to other people's thoughts and perspectives on this question. I might not be thinking through all the dimensions of the problem.

I'm frustrated though that the book does this, since so much about the book does so much that I really appreciate. I hate when I have to be like, "this book is SUPER GREAT! Except for this one part of it that is not!" Sigh.

But overall I'd say the book still is really worth reading. And I'm eager to read the sequel!

#the long way to a small angry planet #becky chambers #book thoughts

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hermanwatts · 5 years

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Fantasy New Releases: 7 September, 2019

The week’s fantasy new releases feature an ancient mech standing ready for its just as ancient foe, the dread fall of a legion of post-human warriors, and a young radio engineer’s travels in search of an impossible metal hidden in an America that never was, but should have been

Archangel One – Evan Currie

Humanity has reached an uneasy truce with the Empire—but unless the allies bring the fight to the enemy, extinction is all but assured. In preparation for the inevitable next war, Commander Stephen Michaels is at the helm of the Archangel Squadron, and his orders are simple: go rogue.

Disguised as mercenaries, Commander Michaels and the Archangels seek valuable intelligence on their imposing foe. Their mission takes them deep into uncharted territory, where they make inroads with the Empire, fiercely guarding their true identities and purpose. Fighting for the enemy goes against everything they stand for, but these are desperate times.

As their deception increases, so does the risk. With the Empire’s deadliest secrets within reach, Commander Michaels and the Archangels accept a mission that will take them even deeper into the Imperial fold. They know all too well that one wrong step won’t just end their lives—it could end their entire civilization.

The Buried Dagger (The Horus Heresy #54) – James Swallow

The skies darken over Terra as the final battle for the Throne looms ever closer… As the Traitor primarchs muster to the Warmaster’s banner, it is Mortarion who is sent ahead as the vanguard of the Traitor forces.

But as he and his warriors make way, they become lost in the warp and stricken by a terrible plague. Once thought of as unbreakable, the legendary Death Guard are brought to their knees. To save his Legion, Mortarion must strike a most terrible bargain that will damn his sons for eternity.

Meanwhile, in the cloisters of Holy Terra, a plot is afoot to create sedition and carnage in advance of the Horus’s armies. Taking matters into his own hands, Malcador the Sigillite seeks to put a stop to any insurrection but discovers a plot that he will need all of his cunning and battle-craft to overcome.

Engines of Empire (Empire of Machines #1) – Max Carver

The upstart colony Carthage has conquered and dominated most of humanity’s settled planets, including Earth itself, with fleets of autonomous, AI-driven warships and armies of robotic infantry. Freedom from their empire is found only in rough outer worlds on the distant fringes of settled space.

On Galapagos, a free world, newly elected Minister-General Reginald Ellison had hoped he’d seen the end of war. He spent his youth fighting in battles across his planet’s vast oceans and small islands, and his later years working to build a coalition of peace among the world’s fragmented nations. Now the arrival of an unnerving android ambassador from the distant imperial planet of Carthage threatens his world’s hopes for a free and peaceful future.

On Earth, the machines patrol the post-apocalyptic ruins of bombed-out megacities, left over from Earth’s war with Carthage. In the fallen megalopolis of Chicago, a young scavenger makes a discovery that could empower Earthlings to finally fight back, but could also endanger everyone he loves.

On Carthage, the rulers of humanity enjoy extreme wealth and luxury, while machines carry out all forms of labor and provide for their every whim. Audrey Caracala, daughter of Carthage’s top political leader, has led a protected existence, groomed to help her family rule the known galaxy. Now her family’s enemies hunt her as she searches for her missing brother in the dangerous, unfamiliar territory of the Carthaginian underworld, where she begins to face hard truths about the machines and about her own family’s legacy.

Three people, on three very different worlds, must confront alternate faces of the ever-evolving machines, which spin their own designs beyond the vision of their human masters, forging a new kind of empire that will be ruled by no man.

Justified (Saga of the Nano-Templar #1) – Jon Del Arroz

To save a world he must rely on God.

After years of fighting for justice with his deadly nanotech, Templar Drin abandons his post, crash landing on a desert world controlled by a tyrannical alien empire. Its inhabitants are forced into slavery, broken where a once-proud race cultivated its lands.

For the first time in Drin’s life, he has no backup, no support, none of his brothers.

He stands alone against evil.

Drin must face overwhelming odds to liberate millions of slaves from their captors and bring faith to a downtrodden world. But in his way stands the most dangerous weapon in the galaxy.

Can Drin use his Templar training to survive?

The Messenger – J. N. Chaney and Terry Maggert

Dash never asked to be a mech pilot, but fate has other plans.

On the run and out of chances, he guides his ship and crew into the heart of a relic older than the galaxy itself–and finds himself on the edge of an eternal war he never knew existed.

The relic is a mech, lost to history and forgotten by all who remain. Built by an ancient race to be the ultimate weapon, the machine is capable of unspeakable destruction, and its discovery could unhinge the balance of power throughout known space.

Worse still, the A.I. inside the machine speaks of an ancient evil that will soon arrive–a race whose power far exceeds anything humanity has ever witnessed.

Only the Messenger can stand against them, the A.I. tells its new pilot. Only you can do what must be done.

Spartan’s Specialists (Four Horsemen Tales #12) – Alex Rath

Captain Markus ‘Spartan’ Nicolos is one of the Golden Horde’s premier hackers and communication specialists, and a top-tier CASPer pilot. His experimental Hoplite scout CASPer aided significantly in thwarting an attempt by a Besquith general to wipe out the Golden Horde.

Now, while most of the Golden Horde goes out on a major contract, Spartan has been given a small team of less than 30 mercenaries—specialists, all—to teach a race that has just joined the Galactic Union how to defend itself. And, in his spare time, Spartan is to spy on the Merchant Guild.

After arriving in the new system on a ship from the Intergalactic Haulers Mercenary Company, Spartan’s group of specialists begin completing their mission, but things rapidly go downhill when they find out the Omega Wars have begun and Human mercenary companies are being hunted.

Unable to contact his company’s leader, Colonel Sansar Enkh, Spartan is on his own to put the pieces together and figure out a new plan to deal with the changing situation. Can Spartan’s small team of Golden Horde specialists complete their mission and find a way to survive the Omega Wars on their own, or is this Spartan’s last ride?

Worldshift: Virtual Revolution – Scott Straughan

Ethan is young and unemployed. One of the many who fail to find a job and join the elite who run the government and the mega corporations. However, thanks to the economic support everyone gets, he can spend his idle days playing virtual reality games. Online, he can chase thrills and lash out without consequence.

Yet, despite his isolation, Ethan can’t help but feel that something is deeply wrong with society. It reaps the benefit of advanced automation, but forbids further scientific development. That feeling becomes inescapable when he starts playing the latest event in the world’s most popular VR game, Worldshift. Thousands of players are lured into climbing the Tower of Ascension by an incredible prize. Inside, the combat is intense, but nothing is as it seems. The tower is far more than a game. Not only are its rewards very real, but so are its dangers.

Change is coming to a long stagnant world -a virtual revolution- and everything Ethan knows will be threatened.

The Tower of the Bear (Yankee Republic #3) – Fenton Wood

From the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, to the forbidden lands west of the Mississippi, to the shores of a prehistoric inland sea … a young radio engineer enlists the aid of scientists, kings, ancient gods, and mythological beasts, in a search for a super-metal from another universe!

A blend of radio science, alt-history, tall tale, and myth, YANKEE REPUBLIC is an epic like no other.

Fantasy New Releases: 7 September, 2019 published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

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onlinemarketingcourses · 5 years

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Why featured snippets could be less of a win going forward

Yes, you read the title right.

I’m one of those freaks who thinks that Featured Snippets are not perpetual manna from heaven and could see their divine role on the SERP diminished as time goes on. I understand this could be considered search marketing heresy. Though to be clear, I’m not advocating for a loss of the zero-position box’s supremacy. What I believe is the SERP feature’s evolution and recent advancements have the potential to steal some of the content creator’s traffic.

Featured Snippets get specific

Let me state the obvious, traffic rooted in a Featured Snippet depends on the user clicking the URL within it. But what is also true is that Featured Snippets have evolved into less clickable entities. I could offer all sorts of long-worded elucidations on how Feature Snippets are morphing, and in a way have already changed, into less potent traffic generators. For now, however, I’m going to walk you through three formats of snippets that have emerged to foster the idea that what was once an important win may be less so in the future.

Featured Snippets as Direct Answers

Featured Snippets with supplementary content

Featured Snippets as absolute lists

Featured Snippets as Direct Answers

Why would I ever advance the notion that Featured Snippets are slowly creeping away from being the SERP win of all wins to being… well to being less so? Take this example.

Is it a Featured Snippet? Is it a Direct Answer? (Maybe it’s a Knowledge Panel?) Who knows… and does it really matter? What matters, essentially, is that Google has seamlessly merged a Featured Snippet with a Direct Answer. What matters less is this particular example. Like a game of chess, an individual move is far less important than the overall strategy. Google tacking on the epitome of the clickless SERP to the most potent traffic force on the results page should legitimately raise some eyebrows and force the question: Where is all of this going? If you’re banking on traffic from Featured Snippets, I would imagine that seeing this does not bode well for your confidence in the SERP feature’s future as a traffic powerhouse.

That said, I know you. You’re skeptical. I mean look at this example, who is this catering to? The only user who will be satisfied by the Direct Answer formatting here is someone who is searching for a keyword along the lines of “name of bb king’s guitar,” and that’s not even the keyword here.

However, not every Direct Answer has to have such an isolated if not idiosyncratic visual format. The essence of the Direct Answer resides not within the format exactly, though that helps, but in its function. Let me show you what I mean. Here is what you get for the keyword “name of bb king guitar.”

Basically, this is a Direct Answer. I know it doesn’t look like one, but in function it is. The prime user (i.e., they who wish to know the name of the blues legend’s guitar) need not click on anything to get the information needed from the search.

A consistent illustration of this dynamic are queries related to price. Often enough, Google indicates the price related to the query as a precursor to the content within the snippet.

Incidentally, large headings that serve as Direct Answers are not the only way Google presents a way for users to bypass the click. The search engine has multiple ways of presenting content that precisely satisfies the user’s needs. Take the Featured Snippet for “how much is parking at JFK airport.”

Above, information was extracted from a table on the associated page (below) and may certainly provide the user with the exact information they are in search of. No click needed.

Featured Snippets with supplementary content

Similar to the above, Google now shows Featured Snippets along with other ancillary content by placing them next to Knowledge Panels and its newer cousin, the Explore Panel.

Both the Featured Snippet and Knowledge Panel focus on very much the same specific topic. As is obvious, the Featured Snippet is facing click competition from the “fact” site of all “fact” sites – Wikipedia.

Competition from ancillary content need not come in the form of clicks to sites other than yours. Google has, and still does play with the notion of a Featured Snippet that resides atop of a Knowledge Panel. Here’s a doozy that I found back in July.

This is in many ways similar to what I just explained so I won’t harp on the point too much. What I will point out, and as is not hard to see, is that by placing additional content alongside the Featured Snippet the need for any click is significantly diminished.

Featured Snippets as absolute lists

If I’m going to burst your Featured Snippet bubble by illuminating the fact that they already aren’t the panacea of all things traffic, it’s incumbent on me to bring up lists. The common notion is that Featured Snippets present lists, either numbered or bulleted, are unassailable. The user is shown a partial list which can only be fully accessed with a click. What could be better?

Let me take you back to February, where we all lost our collective minds at the discovery of a Featured Snippet that required a tab to expand for the URL to come into purview. In my estimation, the outrage was a bit misplaced. In reality, I hardly believe the query, “seeds with highest omega 3” was ever going to produce the expected clicks from the Featured Snippet. Here’s what the zero-position box for the query traditionally looks like.

Google, zeroing in on the word highest presents a list of the seven seeds that contain the most omega 3. Notice, there is no prompt to explore more items as is traditionally seen with Featured Snippets. For the user looking to merely find those seeds that contain high levels of omega 3, there is not some imperative need to click. Traffic, in this instance, would come from users in search of information that goes beyond the surface intent of the query. There will be traffic to this site, just not in the way one might imagine. As you can see, expandable tabs hiding URLs were not needed to discourage clicks. The format of the Featured Snippet intrinsically does that for us.

The placement of “full list” content within the Featured Snippet appears to be categorical. Taking the example from above, many instances where the query incorporates language that reflects degree (i.e., most, highest, etc.) produce such Featured Snippets. In the below example, it would appear from the snippet that these fish, and only these fish, are those with high levels of Mercury.

However, when looking at the site itself (see below), we discover that the list shown within the Featured Snippet is part of a larger list of fish that are high in the potentially poisonous substance. The format of this Featured Snippet’s content discourages the need for a click, to a degree.

Why it’s only going to get worse

Having presented why it is conceivable that our take on the impact of Featured Snippets may reflect what the SERP feature was in the past, not what it is now in many cases, but I need to elaborate on why I think this is only going to get worse.

There have been downright huge strides in Google’s ability to better dissect and understand what comes its way and how to present it on the SERP. Within the last year, we’ve been introduced to two powerful machine learning elements: Google’s neural matching and Topic Layer. My point is not to tout the advent of better ways to take in a query and spit out results. Rather, it’s to have us all remember that Google only wants to get better and for Featured Snippets that means not just more relevant content, but more concise content as well.

Google has no interest in showing its users snippets of content on the SERP that are long-winded. The idea is to offer the user a concise snippet of content that best answers their query. The more refined that content is, the better… as far as Google is concerned. And with the addition of all this AI, it’s well on its way. This leads me to Fraggles.

As brought to light by Mobile Moxie’s Cindy Krum, Fraggles offer Google the opportunity to present highly-specified content on the SERP. The specific indexation of small fragments of content only makes it more likely that the content found within a Featured Snippet will be that much more concise.

To make matters worse, and as demonstrated above, Google is already very efficient at pulling a word or two out of the main snippet content and using it as a form of Direct Answer. As Google’s current machine learning properties assimilate information and as new elements are introduced, this process will become increasingly refined, and potent.

All signs point to Google not only wanting to present shorter, more direct, hyper-concise content within the Featured Snippets but on its way to do so.

It’s not as bad as it seems

Now for the good news.

The moment a URL is placed at the very top of the SERP, it will garner clicks. A Featured Snippet, despite what I’ve found, will still be a win. My concern is that it may not be the win we expect. I also think we may be overestimating the potential of the SERP feature and its status as the ultimate win.

At this point, I don’t think you need to sleep with one eye open as Google marches towards putting Featured Snippets on a content diet. But it would be a good idea to carefully watch emerging trends and be aware of what is likely coming down the pike.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Mordy is the head of marketing for Rank Ranger, an industry leading all-in-one SEO reporting suite. Outside of helping to build the Rank Ranger brand, Mordy spends most of his time working to help educate the SEO industry by publishing a constant stream of in-depth research and analysis. You can hear Mordy take up the latest issues facing the SEO community on his weekly podcast, The In Search SEO Podcast.

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mikemortgage · 5 years

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Innovation Nation: AI godfathers gave Canada an early edge — but we could end up being left in the dust

Canada has a rich history of innovation, but in the next few decades, powerful technological forces will transform the global economy. Large multinational companies have jumped out to a headstart in the race to succeed, and Canada runs the risk of falling behind. At stake is nothing less than our prosperity and economic well-being. The Financial Post set out explore what is needed for businesses to flourish and grow. You can find all of our coverage here.

Not too long ago, neural nets were deeply uncool.

Researchers who believed in the usefulness of such computer programming were “outcasts in their own departments” at universities, Geoffrey Hinton recalls, treated like misguided eccentrics at best, and outright heretics at worst.

Hinton was one of those heretics for decades, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto playing around with neural networks. His eyes light up and he leans forward as he tells stories about the old days, when breakthrough research papers would be rejected from scientific conferences because their contents were deemed too radical.

“People like me and Yann and Yoshua thought this is just going to blow everything away. And when we were uncautious, we said so.” he said. “It was heresy.”

The race to future-proof the economy: Navdeep Bains on the state of innovation in Canada

Innovation Nation: How smart cities may be too smart for their own good

Element solidifies its spot as Canada’s flag bearer in the AI game

Yann is Yann LeCun, now Facebook Inc.’s head of AI research and a professor at New York University, while Yoshua Bengio is a professor at the University of Montreal, director of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute and founder of Element AI, which raised $135 million in venture capital in 2017. Its next investment round could lead to unicorn status — a valuation of more than $1 billion — Bloomberg reported last year.

Hinton, meanwhile, is still a professor (albeit emeritus) at the University of Toronto, but at 71 years old, he works at Google LLC’s Toronto office as part of the AI team. At the end of 2018, he was appointed to the Order of Canada.

Though Bengio’s research receives 131 academic citations every day, according to Google Scholar data — Hinton isn’t far behind at 127 daily citations and LeCun gets 62— it’s Hinton who is considered something of an unlikely rock star in the world of artificial intelligence: a British septuagenarian with a wry sense of humour and a back problem that means he absolutely never sits down.

All three of them, however, are often collectively referred to as the “godfathers” of modern artificial intelligence and the fact that two of them — Hinton and Bengio — are Canadian puts the country on the leading edge of this technology, with both Toronto and Montreal considered globally significant centres driving billions of dollars in research and engineering investment.

The two Canadians arguably represent the biggest innovation home runs in a generation or more, but they play in a field that many don’t understand and some of those who do are questioning whether the lead they helped create is slipping away.

———

One of the problems in understanding artificial intelligence is that marketing departments have co-opted the term, diluting it to the point of being nearly meaningless.

The real juice in modern AI is deep learning, which is a computer programming technique that relies on artificial neural networks modelled to mimic the synapses and neurons in a human brain.

The basic idea is that a neural network has an input layer that takes in data and an output layer that delivers an answer. In between, there are many hidden layers, which is why it’s called deep learning.

Say you’re trying to teach a neural network to recognize images of trees and you’ve got a million photos, some of which have trees and some don’t.

Each neuron on the input layer might receive data about one pixel from the photo, which means the input layer could have millions of neurons. The output layer would only have two neurons, labelled “tree” and “no tree.”

In between, there is a whole bunch of hidden layers with a web of connections linking up neurons from one layer to the next, and — this is the really critical part — how strong each connection is determines whether the message is passed from one layer to the next.

As a picture goes into the system, the neurons start firing and passing their excitement along through the network until either the “tree” or “no tree” neuron gets excited at the output layer.

At first, the answers from the neural network will just be random guesses, but if the connections that lead to the correct answer are strengthened, then the neural network will over time get really good at guessing whether there’s a tree in the photo.

For example, to find a tree, you might look for a green shape above a brown shape, a weak rule that is good unless you’re looking at a tree in autumn or a birch tree, which has a white trunk. People understand the physical world by learning such rules, exceptions and patterns, and a neural network can, too, by repeating the process thousands or millions of times.

Of course, this is a gross simplification of the process. Real deep learning systems build on this structure by using complex mathematics and structural techniques such as “convolutional” neural networks or “generative adversarial networks” to produce results.

But at its core, deep learning is all about neural networks getting smarter by making guesses and learning from its successes and failures.

This is why there’s so much excitement about deep learning. Neural networks could be used for any task you can structure so that a computer receives information — a picture, video, search query, job application, financial report — makes a judgement on what to do, and then receives feedback about whether it came up with the right answer.

These basic concepts behind neural networks are not new. One of the key papers Hinton co-authored on the topic was published in 1986.

“What really changed was the amount of computation and the amount of data, and there was no real way of knowing back then,” he said.

“It really hinged on having a lot of data to find all these weak rules, and having a lot of processing power to learn them all. And we didn’t know how much data and how much processing power, and we were off by a factor of about a million, so of course it didn’t work very well.”

Despite flashes of promise, neural networks were widely considered to be a dead end for most of the 1980s, 1990s and even well into the 2000s.

“The neural network community consisted of, like, I don’t know, Geoff, Yann, Yoshua and a handful of students and a handful of post-docs,” said Roland Memisevic, who studied under Hinton, was a professor at the University of Montreal alongside Bengio, and is now the founder and chief executive of TwentyBN, a startup trying to bring deep learning to video-based chatbots.

In interviews, Hinton, Bengio, LeCun and several other people involved at the time all mentioned Canadian Institute For Advanced Research grants as a key reason why neural network expertise stayed in Canada during the decades when nearly nobody believed in the technology.

“It enabled Yoshua and Yann to do their thing, despite the headwind they were getting. This clearly adds to the Canadianness of AI,” Memisevic said. “There was this agency that just gave them the funds they needed so they could do their weird stuff that nobody else believed in.”

LeCun fondly remembers little gatherings where a small clutch of researchers could bounce ideas off each other and refine their thinking.

“We needed a safe space, and that safe space was provided by Canada,” he said. “Canadian universities were smart enough to actually hire Geoff and Yoshua and basically trust them to do the right thing, even though they were working on things that were not very popular at the time. This is unique.”

———

Depending on who you ask, the breakthroughs for neural networks came sometime between about 2007 and 2012, but the world didn’t really take notice until the 2012 ImageNet competition to build a computer program that would recognize images from a data set of 15 million of them displaying 22,000 different categories of objects.

A neural network designed by one of Hinton’s students blew the competition out of the water, achieving a 15.3-per-cent error rate — the second-best entry was 26.2 per cent.

The message sent to the computer science world was crystal clear: neural networks actually worked.

Money has since flooded into research and commercialization, with Hinton, Bengio and LeCun being treated as visionary geniuses.

The biggest companies in the world — Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook, Google, Microsoft Corp., Samsung and Uber Technologies Inc. — have enthusiastically embraced neural networks, and a whole generation of startups has started applying the technology to everything from medicine to self-driving cars.

So far, deep learning has been extremely good at things such as image recognition and natural language processing — speech recognition and translation — areas where there is a lot of data to work with, but it’s unstructured data in the form of pictures or text, instead of numbers in a database.

What makes deep learning so radically different from previous computer programming is that it doesn’t rely on firm rules and rigid structures. Nobody teaches a neural network how to make decisions. You just tell it whether it’s guessed right or wrong, again and again, and it gets smarter.

Neural networks are already everywhere — in phones, video games and many of the internet services used every day — though deep learning believers say we’re really only scratching the surface.

But despite an early edge, it’s entirely possible Canada will get left in the dust as the gold rush to commercialize AI goes global.

For example, Amazon said access to AI talent was reportedly one of the key factors in deciding where to locate its HQ2. Ultimately, it chose Virginia, though Toronto was among the 20 finalists.

Moreover, China’s rapacious entrepreneurial spirit, combined with access to massive troves of data from the surveillance state and an unmatched enthusiasm for AI could turn the Middle Kingdom into the dominant player, argues Kai-Fu Lee in AI Superpowers, his highly influential book.

“We are only in the game because of the great bench strength of our researchers, but we are just hanging on by our fingernails because we are so far behind in basically every area of commercialization,” said Ajay Agrawal, University of Toronto economics professor and co-author of Prediction Machines, a widely read book on the economic implications of AI.

Undaunted, Bengio is trying to maintain Montreal’s position as an AI power, partly by using his own celebrity in the field. Unlike Hinton, who is most excited to talk about the history and the concepts underpinning deep learning, Bengio loves to talk about policy implications.

Bengio said AI is going to create enormous value and transform the world, but managing that transition, even with retraining and education, will be difficult and expensive.

“AI and automation are going to potentially create misery in people who are going to lose their jobs. There is going to be a fast transition and there is going to be a social cost, and who’s going to pay for this?” he said.

“So how do we make sure that the Canadian government gets that wealth? If all of the growth happens from companies that are headquartered in Silicon Valley or Beijing, well, I’m sorry, we’re just going to be buying those products and not getting any of that wealth.”

At Mila, the Montreal-based AI institute, Bengio is using his star power to drive industry partnerships with giants such as Facebook, Google and Samsung, to name a few. They want access to AI talent, and talent surrounds Bengio, because he’s one of the AI godfathers.

The federal government also situated the AI Powered Supply Chain Supercluster in Montreal as part of its $950-million innovation supercluster strategy.

“The big AI boom in Montreal is due to Yoshua. Period. Montreal is positioning itself as the leader in AI and so on, and Toronto is doing that in its own way,” Memisevic said.

Toronto has the AI-focused Vector Institute and Alberta has a notable AI community, too, but Montreal arguably has the stronger foundation, and the research generated there is closely watched by the industry in the rest of the world.

“It took a little longer in Toronto, because Geoff himself is not as much of an organizer as Yoshua is,” LeCun said.

Both Hinton and Bengio are a little bashful about their celebrity status in the deep learning community, but both say Canada can benefit from it, partly by drawing in the next generation of academics to carry the deep learning research forward.

“If you look at the main impact I’ve had, it’s been by my students,” Hinton said. “I believed in this stuff strongly and long before most other academics. I got the best students. I got the students who had the good intuition to say this is where the future is. I got the best ones, and they did amazing work… We’ve still got some very, very good people here.”

Financial Post

• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: jamespmcleod

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cryptnus-blog · 6 years

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Blockchain was always a religion. And now it’s got its own church

New Post has been published on https://cryptnus.com/2018/06/blockchain-was-always-a-religion-and-now-its-got-its-own-church/

Blockchain was always a religion. And now it’s got its own church

Last month, at the Seven on Seven conference in New York City, crypto entrepreneur Matt Liston and artist Avery Singer launched a blockchain church. Called 0xΩ, the religion was in fact a consensus protocol for the Ethereum’s blockchain. By contributing a stake in 0xΩ, Liston and Singer said, church members could vote on what best represents their religious identity. Practically, it would help collectives manage donations more democratically, reach agreements, and better identify honest leaders.

Members of the audience were allowed to be the first to join the church: spectators were offered slips of the highly-inflated Zimbabwe dollar and Weimar Republic’s Reichsmark inscribed with private and public keys people could use to generate a wallet and enter into the religion right there at the event.

To add a ceremonious vibe, the duo handed out 40 hard copies of the project’s sacred text, the Flame Paper, while dressed in fire-patterned shoes and money-patterned clothing. Later, when I asked for a copy, Liston declined, saying that the document would never go online.

In a way, it’s easy to laugh the stunt off. But this was also an exercise in truth-telling: the cryptocurrency world might have just got its first church — but in a way, it was always a religion.

The cryptocurrency sector has all the hallmarks of religiosity: the mysterious identity of bitcoin’s founder Satoshi Nakamoto has turned him into more of a spiritual force than anything human; Roger Ver, Bitcoin Cash’s proudest promotor, openly refers to himself as “Bitcoin Jesus”; stickers of one the major figures in Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, depict the Russian-Canadian whizkid under a radiant halo; privacy coin Zcash was launched after a modern ritual dubbed the “Ceremony” and included five anonymous “Witnesses”.

Crypto Twitter is awash with dogmatic proclamations, inter-token heresy, and evangelists pushing bold prophecies. Like modern-day missionaries crypto-investors spread the gospel of this or that token in hopes to convert more people to using their cryptocurrencies. Liston actually touched on this point, calling bitcoin the first “purely capitalist religion”.

“In our secular culture, we have sort of replaced religion with capitalism or, rather, this rampant consumerism,” Liston told me. “0xΩ isn’t a direct critique of that, but I think it’s definitely a clear point to make.”

But according to Amber Baldet, former head of JP Morgan’s blockchain project Quorom and current CEO of crypto startup Clovyr, there is something about cryptocurrency that whets mystical fervour more than your run-of-the-mill capitalist venture. “It takes a certain amount of irrationality to believe that the world could be dramatically different, and a certain amount of dogmatism to hold fast to that belief while everyone else says you’ll likely fail,” she says. “So, it’s not surprising that blockchain and crypto communities tend to look cultish.”

Cryptocurrency is not even the only technology to have given rise to a cult. In November 2017, former Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski launched the Way of the Future (WOTF), a church in which AI “will effectively be a god”. Like 0xΩ, WOTF aims at democratising participation in the AI-based project. It will naturally attract specialists in the field, but Levandowski is also interested in incorporating laymen into the fold via his nonprofit. “The church is how we spread the word, the gospel,” he said. “If you believe [in it], start a conversation with someone else and help them understand the same things.”

The Church of Perpetual Life, “the only supplemental science-based church in the world,” is another manifestation of convergent innovations and religion. The project’s mission states that they “hold faith in the technologies and discoveries of humanity to end aging and defeat involuntary death within our lifetime”.

It’s all becoming very strange, but it may just be humankind’s modern attempt at answering the same questions once addressed by religion. Michael Connor, the curator of Seven on Seven and artistic director of Rhizome, underlined what mutual faith can serve in the first place: “With 0xΩ, for instance, one of the principal values they’re interested in is collective consciousness and using technology to connect people.” The Church of Perpetual life, for its part, replaces Christian afterlife with cryonics, calorie restriction, and supplement-fuelled longevity.

To get rich in crypto you just need an idea, and a coin

According to Ruth Catlow, co-founder of the Furtherfield gallery — which focuses on the intersection of art and tech — new technologies, in general, tend to bring together the perfect storm of dreaminess that necessitates fierce religiosity. Blockchain technology and artificial intelligence aggregate groups of visionaries, developers, investors and evangelists who in turn invent words and concepts that describe their new system of beliefs, Catlow says.

“The new words and behaviours can seem like deliberate mystifications,” she continues. “The foreignness of the ideas and values that they generate can be alienating and downright alarming for those who are not directly involved. In the case of blockchains, the injections of capital, speculation, and volatility fuels a heady excitement. Belief has an important role to play because reputation and markets play a big part in the ongoing investment in blockchain cultures.”

The similarities between the murkiness of religion and technology are also clear. Both blockchain and religion are hard for the layman to understand — whether for scriptural intricacy or technical complexity – and this makes them excellent for moving the masses along the rails of hype and or salvation.

That does not mean that dressing the hyped tech du jour in a religious frock goes down well. Some of the viewers of Liston and Avery’s project were unimpressed; someone complained that 0xΩ even had a platform to present their ideas in the first place. After the launch, the project has gained some traction online. Liston says that the combination of a blockchain and religion has captured “some kind of meme magic”. And that, right there, is the state of the blockchain, circa 2018, summarised in a sentence.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years

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WORK ETHIC AND PHONE

Launching Too Early Launching too slowly has probably killed a hundred times as much, they only have to interrupt working on it, and the startups are mostly schleps. Deals Why do investors like startups so much? They want that money to go to grad school to become a connoisseur of trickery in general, but at any given time I know of schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Gas stations? Given this dichotomy, which of the startups from the batch that just started, AirbedAndBreakfast, is in the room, you can say you've already raised some from well-known byproduct of oligopoly. DH6 response might be unconvincing, but a great painting has to be invested. When technology makes something dramatically cheaper you have to go to the founders. They wanted yellow.

What you should not do, I enjoy it. They give employees who do great things seem to have become professional fundraisers who do a little research on the side. And they may be on the smart side of average rather than the median professional VC. Starting a startup is just a few months, it can be to decide what Apple's next products should be considered the heart of the matter: Bloggers are sensitive about becoming mouthpieces for other organizations and companies, which is the prudent choice. That's less the rule now. 7x 2% 2. 0 means using the web the way it's presented, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If someone breaks your software, but there you face bureaucratic obstacles that would slow down a startup. I'm still not sure whether he thought AI required math, or whether he thought AI was nonsense and that majoring in something rigorous would cure me of such stupid ambitions. No one is interested in us!

Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company. There you're not concerned with truth. When I first read this in my early twenties, it was Stripe. I can imagine what I'd tell them about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement, most will tell you that you might not be smart enough to do that doesn't mean you can ignore. There are a handful of junior employees called something like associates or analysts. It would have been constantly coming over and beating you up and stealing your food. During the Bubble, it's now looking like the economy of the future, then its appeal must derive more from merit and less from fashion. Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Ryan Stanley and Joel Rainey for conversations about heresy. The difficulty of firing people is a particular problem for startups because they have more brand to protect.

What they really mean is that it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. What if no one else has done before. The rich people I know who favor markets are Marc, Jawed Karim, and Joe Kraus. So if you're mainly interested in hacking and you go to college. These two positions are not so far. Another advantage of having one or two sentences. No one thought to go back n paragraphs and start over in another direction.

We should have expected this. You have to be profitable, raise more money. What could be a legitimate reason for doing this. When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, because initially the most important section. If there is some important trend afoot. But I don't think this is what Bill Gates must have been told a lot of what's good in an article, that Blackberry has such and such elementary school, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it reads as a phone; we'd think of it as a single phenomenon. So the question of what probability to assign to words that occur often in my legitimate email, and spam in particular. I agree with her, but till she mentioned this it never occurred to us that we can say what makes a place good to them?

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downinfront · 7 years

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“Power Rangers” and the glorious death of your childhood

Power Rangers comes not to kill your childhood. Well, it kind of does. But in a good way! Or rather, not in the way you might expect. Think of it less as a killing than a reinterpretation. This alone will likely cause the truest believers of the chintzy ‘90s institution (which memorably combined recycled Japanese tokusatsu footage for its monster fights and freshly-shot footage with American actors for its on-the-ground stuff) to cry heresy and run screaming from the theater to the safety of their Nick At Nite programming blocks.

Call that an unavoidable cost of doing business, especially for the reboot business and especially for the reboot business of the almighty 1990s. The kids of that decade have grown into those pesky, proprietary millennials, and the general consensus among them seems to be that anyone looking to update the shows that got them through the Clinton years can only do so much, which is why recent remakes mostly amount to a rearranging of the (occasionally enchanted) furniture.

Of course, this negates the idea that the property being remade could, in the right hands, likely mean something very different to a newer generation of kids for whom the world is, indeed, very different. One cannot build a movie -- or a franchise -- on “remember when” alone, and if this the crew behind this sleek new Power Rangers hasn’t entirely done away with the sacred text, they’ve made it a point to give it a translation fit for the 2010s.

In other words, the basic premise remains the same -- five teenagers stumble upon an alien stronghold in their dead-end town and become intergalactic space ninjas -- but the focus has changed. The show dubbed the Rangers as “teenagers with attitude” and was content to focus on the first half of that moniker, but this movie, directed by Project Almanac’s Dean Israelite, turns its focus towards the latter. Our five heroes are now a band of misfits and weirdos that John Hughes would throw in detention in a heartbeat, and, in fact, that’s where we meet them.

The setting would seem like a cheap ploy to make the kids seem like outcasts, but the script does the extra bit of work to make sure they earn the distinction. Jason (Dacre Montgomery) is a washout football star under house arrest; Kimberly (Naomi Scott) is a cheerleader who’s embroiled in, of all things, a nude photo scandal; and Billy (RJ Cyler, far and away the best thing about this movie) is a bomb-making nerd on the autism spectrum. The punkish delinquent Zack (Ludi Lin) and the introverted, you-may-have-heard-she’s-gay-now Trini (Becky G.) show up a little later, and the quintet are quickly blowing shit up and running from the cops in a stolen van.

This, needless to say, is a decidedly different take on the Power Rangers, one that doesn’t venture far enough to be labeled “gritty,” but one that’s definitely grimy at the very least. It also, admirably, isn’t afraid to show the slow, arduous process by which the Rangers form their bonds. They start as tenuous allies at best and aren't even that nuts about each other (“Are we friends or are we Power Rangers?” one character asks), but by the end of the movie, when they have their big moment, it feels genuinely earned. (That’s a testament to the acting, by the way, which is far, far better than you’d expect or need it to be.)

The story, amazingly, even goes so far as to muddy the halo around the Rangers’ boss, Zordon. A floating head in the original, he’s embodied here by Bryan Cranston’s giant face, looking like one of those bed-of-nails toys you used to make a handprint on ('90s kids will understand). He’s given a new backstory in the script by John Gatins and an ulterior motive that the movie deploys in a well-played reveal at the halfway point. It’s a surprisingly solid performance by Cranston, whose reputation as the ultimate good sport will only increase once everyone gets a load of him in the one-take prologue that seems, of all things, to be inspired by Adi Shankar’s bonkers Power/Rangers short from a couple years ago.

Fear not, though, there is hope for those who prefer their youth amber-preserved. Minus a slightly updated story of her own, much as you remember her is Rita Repulsa, the cackling hag played in this version by Elizabeth Banks, who’s doing some kind of magical blend of Linda Blair, the Wicked Witch of the West and Sunset Boulevard. If there is one drawback to this Power Rangers, it’s that it takes itself just a mite too seriously. She’s clearly in it for the fun -- and, yeah, maybe the paycheck as well, but girl’s gotta eat. (Also enjoying himself is Bill Hader, who voices Zordon’s lackey Alpha 5. Yes, he says, “ai yi yi.” Too many times, I think, but he says it.)

Of course, all this Breakfast Clubbin’ has to lead to the friggin’ dinosaurs, and the movie knows that this, more than anything, is that for which you have come. Accordingly, it kicks into a frenetic and kinda sloppy finale that does, indeed, break out the legendary Zords, the legendary theme song, and a Krispy Kreme product placement that’s so ridiculously funny it will soon assume legendary status as well. It’s a little too schizophrenically put together (think less the careful beats of Captain America: Civil War’s airport fight and more the constant kaboomery of a Transformers finish) to really work in the way the movie wants it to, but it’ll be diverting for newcomers and fans will likely recognize the spirit of the original in all this harmless chaos, if not exactly the letter of it. (That said: My one beef as a devotee? The new Megazord. No, no, no. Bring back that blocky masterpiece and leave my monster be.)

Admittedly, the movie goes down better while you're watching it than it does afterwards. It’s not perfect. But the effort is there, and Israelite tries, more so than most remake directors, to make the characters mean something they might not have before. Much like the ‘90s themselves, the original Rangers met the bare minimum for inclusion, if ofttimes in a backhanded manner (the team featured a black and Asian character, but they were the Black and Yellow Rangers, respectively -- it hasn’t aged well as a look). It was enough, I guess, to let people know they were worthy of consideration. But seeing this Zack converse in subtitled Mandarin with his mother, or Billy’s painful neuroses, or Trini’s genuinely affecting monologue about not knowing how to tell her parents about the true self she’s discovering is something that will resonate a lot more with kids for whom these issues are becoming more and more a facet of daily life. (‘00s kids will understand.)

So, where does that leave the ‘90s kids, who are the reason we’re getting this movie at all? Well, consider this: If you are a ‘90s kid, see it for the memory trip. (I grinned when they hit the theme song.) And if you’re a ‘90s kid with a ‘00s kid? See it for the memories they’ll make. In fact, there’s one wrinkle that turns out to be very meta when it comes to the remake game: In order for the Rangers to assume their power, Zordon must sacrifice his own. The metaphor is as apt as it is weirdly profound, and if Power Rangers doesn’t openly advocate for putting away childish things, it definitely tips its hand in favor of passing them along. In fact, those inheritors will probably be in the theater with you. Treat them kindly if they are. Your childhood is in their hands now.

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