Also see: Truth is stranger than fiction

Well, if LIGO is detecting it, I’m not sure how they could hide. That would imply their warp drive created gravitational waves / ripples in the fabric of spacetime

Wow, that was quite something

Nah, the lucky ones have a long, healthy life with good friends

At some point you have to define the test a bit further.

My personal test, I want to be able to converse with the AI for a week. And I want it to be able to impersonate an arbitrary number of personalities

Sure! But we ain’t there yet

Medicine and AI in particular are just getting started

Space travel might have fallen off, but that’s mostly because we reached so far so fast

Think about how much has changed since 1900. I mean, gosh, the introductory level textbooks I had in high school barely scratched the surface.

Covid and Russia-Ukraine war are just a drop in the bucket.

AI will probably turn out to to be something big.

Fusion looks like it’ll see side spread adoption within 20 years, so that’s neat.

Human nature will not have changed.

On the science side, we’ll see more renewable energy, probably also fusion.

On the tech side, we won’t have computer chips in our brain yet.

On the climate side, we’re fucked and will be talking about keeping it below 2 degrees.

AI will have advanced even further, no idea how far. I’m not expecting AGI in 30 years, but I am expecting it to pass the Turing test.

Medicine will be showing signs of incredible progress. Molecular biology and protein design is the key to curing any disease.

China tried to invade Taiwan, failed, and collapsed.

Someone used a nuke. Iran, Pakistan, Russia…I don’t know. Someone.

Most people will be fine. The world will not have ended.

Ambitions of space travel will have dampened again. We made it to Mars, then remembered that it’s just an orange rock with no atmosphere or magnetic field. Well…maybe someone made a space hotel, or has dreams of an orbital colony.

<Shrug> Life goes on. Or you get unlucky and your life doesn’t. Make friends and be kind to people, because we are social creatures who need those things.

Doesn’t like civilian casualties

Not interested in destruction

Enjoys their friendly bouts as a mental exercise

Very clearly a bad guy, but not a bad guy - And that’s why Aurora is the leader! Her sparkling intuition

But I sure wonder what his ultimate goal is here:

• Observe their powers, invent more things, get the power source returned to him, power his inventions

• Help them with the day-to-day troubles so that he can be their one and only antagonist, but not because he likes them or anything, baka!

• Legitimately just help them! Fighting bad guys is also a mental challenge, right?

He could also set up The Perfect Betrayal^([TM]), but that’s not really in the cards

Edit: oh yeah, loved it! Great job 😊

Uh….yes? Neural networks and machine learning are just fancy algorithms, not AGI

But these fancy algorithms are better than us at many tasks.

Superman fighting bad guys isn’t interesting

But Superman trying to persuade people to be better? That’s interesting. How does he win people over? How does he change society without resorting to violence or autocracy?

Even if Supes isn’t trying to fix systemic problems, he can change people just by being himself. He can inspire people.

There’s a lot of stories you can tell. For example, what happens when Superman’s heroics inspire a young boy, and that boy then tries to stop a robbery at a local store and gets shot? That would wound Superman like no bullet can. And while Superman is trying to figure out what he could have, should have done, life doesn’t wait.

There’s another boy to inspire with inspiring words. There’s another villain to put a stop to without allowing any harm to come to anyone. Louis asked for a favor, Clark Kent has a report coming up, a politician wants a photo op, and all Superman wants to do is fly back to his fortress of solitude. He wants, just for one second, for this responsibility to be lifted from his shoulders. He wants, just once, to take the quick and easy way.

But he can’t. He can’t let go of the responsibility, he can’t use violence to solve problems, he can’t order people around, and he must continue to inspire people.

And it’s all worth it, because he does inspire people. He does save people. The henchman he spared, looked in the eye like the faceless mook was a real human now has a productive job. There are countless children happier and more optimistic about life because Superman is there.

Superman is a simple character. He’s as close to perfect as you can get (and he has to be, any abuse of power or laziness would be catastrophic), and he doesn’t change, doesn’t have a normal character arc.

Because Superman works as hard as he can to change the hearts and minds of other people. He is a beacon of hope. He is the catalyst for their character arcs.

Lmao, lot of toys out there for sure, but have you seen our social media algorithms? Have you seen AlphaFold and the Rosetta team’s adaptation of it?

Protein folding is very near and dear to my heart, molecular biology will change medicine and the world forever. And neural networks will speed up progress 20x

Well, he did an impressive job for the first decade or so. Authoritarian, killed a lot of people for political gain, but dragged Russia out of the post-collapse gutter.

But then Putin decided that he would never join the club with the Evil Western Powers.

And then he decided that he could bully Ukraine with no consequences. And then he decided that he could invade Ukraine with no consequences. And he decided to do it at possibly the worst possible time, when the US arms industry was sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

And then he doubled down. And doubled down again. And again, and again.

And now Russia is ruined, and he’ll be remembered as one of the worst rulers in modern history. (But still not the worst in Russia’s modern history, oof)

Well done wordsmith

Lenovo Legion Y540.

It's about three years old. Battery still works, just only lasts about 20 minutes when not plugged in.

The cracked screen casing is from when I dropped it a short distance -- no damage to the screen itself.

2060 - the laptop’s battery has died, the headphone jack doesn’t work, the power cord is frayed, the screen casing near the hinge has cracked

But I have no complaints with the graphics card.

And as a follow up, I want to see if I understand his two points.

Seinsfrage, the question of being… I think he would reject any answer to that question that was simple enough to be called complete. “What is a door”? A door is more than a description and a purpose. It’s an object and an idea, difficult to define. A door is a door because we see it as a door. It’s defined by its relationship to how it is seen and used.

People are the same. We are an intricate web of relationships, physical identities and interactions, ideas and conceptions. That’s what I would call his Seinsfrage, an attempt to wrestle with that question and try to get to the bottom of it, and to encompass the whole of the being rather than isolate any one or two parts of it that are easier to grab onto.

As for technological vs poetic…that seems straightforward enough. Technological is a utilitarian view of the world, things are defined by how useful they are. But like, yeah, obviously that’s wrong. I’m tempted to accuse him of setting up the opposing side as a straw man. Ask anyone who loves their cat, or child, or car — these things have a significance beyond their usefulness. To argue that people think otherwise is absurd.

But sure, if we accept the premise that people have this technological view of the world, where things are defined by their purpose and usefulness, then obviously there is something missing. Such a perspective on life would be immensely joyless. Such a view of the world would struggle to answer the age old questions “Why are we here? What is the point of it all?” Such a view of the world would have no place for telling jokes with your friends, for loving another person, or for anything that couldn’t be described as useful. Many good things, many joys in life, would be lost in such a technological world view.

Is that supposed to be groundbreaking?

Idk. Y’all think I got him right? Did I miss his point?

“The question of Being has been utterly neglected since the work of Aristotle.

After millennia of neglect, Martin Heidegger made it his life’s work to ask just this question. He called it the “Seinsfrage” — the question of Being — and his work in this field has earned him the reputation among professional philosophers as one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century.”

So…I may not be a philosopher, and I’m definitely a materialist / objectivist / whatever… but that first sentence rings of hyperbole. The question of being utterly neglected for over a thousand years?

I know nothing in the subject, can anyone back that claim up?