Tim Nordin

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

According to The Infinity Machine, one of Demis Hassabis's favourite books is Ender's Game.

I can see the reluctant messiah angle (along the lines of the Peter Jackson Aragorn, not Tolkien's far superior original), but a lack of much practical application.

For that - thinking of AI - I recommend two books:
1. Samuel R. Delany's "Babel-17"
2. Susan Curtis's "Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day Wild Child"

Is language a product or a provost?

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

@karpathy Comprehension does not have to scale with intelligence, governance does. The failure would be allowing an unintelligible internal representation to carry unintelligible authority with it. Capability can outrun comprehension, but authority cannot be allowed to.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

Emotions were thought of as irrational; however, modern theory considers them rational because they often provoke better decision making.

This is bollocks, because nothing is self-sufficient. This is why AI recursive self-improvement will fail. A system can rationally depend upon processes that are not themselves rational. And often must, because rationality is a tool, not an end in itself. The parallel is that the benefit of pursuing discipline is not to be disciplined, or to eliminate undiscipline - it is to bring some order to chaos because there will always be chaos. Chaos IS possibility.

There is a rational reason for the irrational.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

@PhysInHistory Boundary and substrate, the necessary conditions for anything real. Including consciousness. You can see in this the tools his mind was weighing.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

Art has elevated jargon - artists give the public a hammer and ask that they imagine a house. It's understandable, because process usually grows more important as skill increases, and much of the lower fruit was picked ages ago. But what is happening in the real world is that art is becoming a collection of exclaves and the price of admission is growing steeper every day.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

At one time I had the largest flock of registered Scottish Blackface in North America. When it comes to stock animals like sheep, the amount of shear ignorance is frightening (😏). And so much of the speculation about AI is just as brow-raising. We don't understand our past, and we seem clueless about our future. "If the blind lead the blind, they will both fall into the ditch," appears to be the order of the day.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

@JamesMillerHi This is a curious dark horse in the abortion, MAID, capital punishment round table. Well played. This debate deserves to stick around.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

@MarkJCarney Nothing says Canada quite like the word, "attempt".

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

Hip surgery in Canada. First there is Wait Zero. This is where the patent must document alternative methods of treatment. This is 6-12 months.

Wait 1: Referral to Orthopedic Consultation. This is 4-6 months.

Wait 2: Decision to Surgery. This is 3-5 months.

Average wait time, 18 months. This accords with the wait times for the friends and relatives I know who have had the surgery.

Or, you can fly to another province and pay $35,000 out of pocket and have the surgery in a 3-5 weeks. Healthcare is a provincial matter, so you are only barred from paying in your province of residence.

Yay Canada.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

@LostMyHats The Messiah is the embodiment of the name of God. That name was to be referred to by the label of "Jesus"; however, when it speaks about using the "name of Jesus", it isn't referring to using the label.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

@ytk_matsuda Utopia always ends up being dystopia on steroids.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

@Be_Like_JChrist According to Christian scriptures, sin is the only thing not in God, therefore being separate from God is being in a state of sin - not an act that breaks some semi-arbitrary code of morality. "Sinning" is what you do in that state.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

@raghu_venugopal And yet the same people drone on constantly about America and Trump.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

@Dr_Dark_Matter_ Not sure if stealing is possible without consciousness - they will probably escape justice through a "lack of understanding the consequences" ruling. Perhaps we need a Responsible Machine Ownership Bylaw.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

The CIA found that analysts processed "likely" as somewhere from 20% to 80% depending on who was reading the report. Just saying risk is risky.

When they say, "10–20% chance AI causes extinction," the translation is: "Given what I know, that's roughly how confident I am." That's only as good as the judgment behind it, and even then two brains looking at the same evidence can land far apart.

And a bit of, "it's potentially a risk but we don't know" with numbers so it looks authoritative.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

@francoisfleuret Whether it looks like interpolation or extrapolation usually depends on what axes you draw.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

@ValerioCapraro Sounds like reading Frankenstein:

"Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room..."

vs

"I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed."

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

My grandfather would say, "Det är bra" - fundamentally the same thing but with very little relationship to saying it's good or fine in our current culture. He was sent out logging with horses when he was seven. To stern men from a stern age, saying something was good was high praise.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

If you extrapolate agents as neurological process, then you'll start to wrap your head around where we are going. Think of the Borg like a brain. The problem with the singularity is it extrapolates unlimited freedom, but that's not the direction where this will go - I.T. always wants constraint, because that's where power is found. Agent language is becoming a nervous system.

[Tim Nordin @nordin_tim]

@film_girl The pushback: I can hardly blame them. Lately when I ask Claude a question, I spend the next 25 minutes in an escalating fight, desperately trying get one response without a dig. We're like a bad movie couple.