> Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language.
Interestingly, this is (roughly) the Qur'anic explanation for the genesis of human consciousness.
I got GPT-3 to take your story and complete it. It's slightly terrifying.
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Short Story
In the not-so-distant future, we’ve trained AI to predict the probability you might die on any given day. But it’s trained on so many factors, and reads so many inputs, that no one really knows how it works.
So the story is of a random person who suddenly observes their meter jump from the usual 0% to a cautious 3%. Then over the course of the day, it slowly climbs to 20%, and onwards.
No one knows why, and no one can help them. They get a call from their boss, who sends them home early, rather than risk their safety in the office. Strangers offer to take them home. A stranger on the street offers to trade cards with them, and promises that his card can help them.
The meter shows up at 30% on the subway, and the narrator tries to hide it, but it’s too late, and the people around them are already looking at them suspiciously. The narrator tries to call their spouse, but they can’t get hold of them. They go home, but their spouse isn’t there.
By the time they get home, the meter is at 40%. They try to call for help, but the police are already there, waiting. The meter hits 60%, and then 100%.
The police tell the narrator that they’re sorry, but they’ve been watching them for some time, and have seen no indications that the narrator is a threat. The narrator protests that they’ve been trying to call the police, but now the police just say that the meter made a prediction, and they’re just going by the numbers.
The police tell the narrator that they’ll have to detain them, for the next 24 hours, to prevent them from doing anything rash. The narrator protests, but the police ignore them, and cuff them.
The police take the narrator in, but they aren’t taken to a normal jail. They’re taken to a special prison — a prison for people who might die.
He spends the remainder of his life in that jail cell.
One thing that isn't captured nowadays is that a lot of what "couldn't scale" before - i.e manual work, the type of which you described - is now much more scalable due to how much easier it is to automate tasks at scale.
It's suddenly feasible to build businesses that require at-scale manual operations, because you can do so in a predictable, revenue-positive way.
I'm impressed people keep making the "option not to use it" argument. Our lines of communication are monopolized. "Just don't use Facebook/Twitter/Amazon" is an irrelevant argument since there are no alternatives.
Short term economic damage is a) hard to measure and b) meaningless
Sweden’s betting on long term recovery in light of second/third/etc waves. As much as it detracts from the catastrophic fear and loathing narrative, it has sound economic and epidemiological foundations.
YC is a crapshoot. We had the most impressive metrics in our interviewing class and killer recommendations and didn’t get in. The ones from our interview group that did were astoundingly dumb.
There wasn’t a single successful entrepreneur amongst the “partners” who interviewed us.
Here we are a year or so later flying at 7 figure revenues thankful we didn’t give up nearly 10% of our business to an incubator that’s a shell of its former self.
Obviously the context of the discussion is regarding the monopoly of political information by the FAANG. Why would software engineers at banks have any relevance here?
So a rigorous 4 year degree in a highly technical engineering stream doesn’t make him an engineer, but the script kiddie high school dropout making crypto apps is?
Give me a break. Tim Cook is more engineer than 90% of people who call themselves one.
Interestingly, this is (roughly) the Qur'anic explanation for the genesis of human consciousness.