Interesting point - I think the Ted Chiang novella 'The Lifecycle of Software Objects' also include AI pets that develop to the point that they start asking their owners that they be incorporated so they may be given basic rights.
It might seem a bit exaggerated, but I'd expect that's because he's comparing it to growing up in a generic suburb where going on simple errands likely requires a car, and anything other than rows of similar looking houses can be miles away. So, the pastry shop on the corner/ supermarket down the street that the author mentioned are likely inaccessible to those in their childhood days.
That might not immediately seem so bad, but imagine that you didn't own a car (due to being too young or too poor). Then, suburban life may start to feel positively suffocating.
I see what you're saying, but the oddness may feel apparent even to those growing up in suburbia. I can distinctly remember watching miles and miles of suburban settlements sprawl out from where I grew up and telling a friend that I felt like I was in the book 'The Giver,' which included a barren and (literally and figuratively) color-less landscape filled with occasional identical towns. This was exacerbated by the fact that quickly-developed cities had roads in perfect grid systems and public buildings/schools that adopted the same architectural styles. During travel sports season one could get on a bus, take a nap, and wake up in a town completely indistinguishable from the last...
Furthermore, there is a distinct lack of independence for teens who can't drive - the nearest non-residential building can be more than a mile away. Even if you can drive, the popular destinations for errands are big-brands like starbucks, walmart, and CVS. Public transport is practically nonexistant.
This is obviously anecdotal and I think you make a good point, but it should still be considered that being familiar with American suburbia does not mean that it's impersonal and almost surreal nature is invisible to those who grew up there.
I met Dr. Murphy through a mutual friend in 2018, and attended a presentation that he gave about his prTMS treatment. I thought it was a bit odd that someone who had a radiology / oncology background would be pushing TMS, and was very disappointed by the rigor of his presentation. I wish I had the slides to show, but it appeared to be something out of a pop science article, and lacked much scientific background other than a sort of 'drugs are harsh and non-specified, but I have a personalized treatment that works much better.'
This set off the crank alarm for me, which got even louder when he made claims about it being a sort of cure-all for psychiatric and even non-psychiatric problems (depression, PTSD, anxiety, concussion recovery, and even cognitive performance). Furthermore, he appeared to lack a technical or mathematical understanding of the technology itself, using only vague analogies about aligning the frequencies of different parts of the brain and whatnot. However, I'm not the one with titles and prestigious academic positions, so my complaints about his lack of evidence weren't taken too seriously.
I asked him direct questions, but he didn't answer much other than that his brother, a chiropractor, had helped him write the software for prTMS and designed the protocol (which I thought was very odd). Furthermore, he described prTMS as TMS-like treatment that was based on EEG readings and supposedly personalized, but given at a fraction of the intensity of usual TMS treatment (which made me skeptical that it would work).
I'm surprised that he was able to attract so many big-name patients and supporters - which included the Notre Dame University football team too. And, given that his lofty claims about prTMS are completely unsupported by research, I'm not surprised that it has reached the public eye.
Some of what was discussed in the article was news to me ($10 million in funds he said was for him, claims about Newport's surveillance, etc) However, none of it was surprising. He appears to have a history of disputes with his partners and employees (including at other offices that offered prTMS not mentioned in the article) and Notre Dame (he 'treated' their football team). It's a bit ridiculous to hear him claim that people's lawsuits and complaints are simply a result of jealousy and malicious behavior, considering his history of deceit.
The article mentions that, if you are not free to go, then the police must read you your Miranda rights. This appears to be a common understanding as well.
I was surprised too, but it appears that the post has negatives votes, so I take it that it wasn't quite rational enough for the rest of the community.
"Gore Vidal, who’s had his dick sucked more than a few times and been taken to task for it, has written far more persuasively that the novel as an art-form has become a cultural irrelevance, but you don’t hear him whingeing about ‘artistic invalidation’."
It's not too often that I see words like 'tentacular' and 'bathos' in the same article as phrases about metaphorical dick-sucking (see above).
More seriously, I've been getting more into literature and literary critique recently, and am a bit surprised about how personally affronted he seems by the book - is this sort of reaction common in literary criticism?
This isn't necessarily a problem with the analysis, but one thing to keep in mind that the type of student that a college accepts might have a large influence over their graduates income.
So, it's difficult to say whether or not selective schools (ivy league and whatnot) actually prepare students better, or if they just tend to admit people who have high earnings potential in the first place.
Might sound like a nitpick, but it's pretty relevant if you're comparing a low-cost public school to a selective private one.
I think you're missing another possibility (and some other posters are too): maybe it is the case that a simulation can produce consciousness, by simulating a brain for example, but that it takes a sufficiently powerful model of computation to do so.
So, consciousness being computable may not necessarily imply that any given computer could do so. One potential way for this to be the case is if consciousness is tied to some form of hypercomputation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation), which can provide outputs that are not turing-computable. This would mean that a traditional computer couldn't simulate consciousness, but that another hypothetical machine might be able to.
Even if those fields completely stagnated, there's great progress to be made in high performance computing, security, bioinformatics, and human computer interaction (just to name a few).
I agree that it might not be a large portion of all CS students, but it does appear that many of the incoming CS PhDs have chosen to go into ML (of my class, maybe 1/3), which serious distracts from interest in other subfields. It's actually a joke in my department that all of the new students are pursuing ML, while almost no one is pursuing theoretical CS or other less popular subfields.
I'm also not sure about why the exact number matters - 200 kids matters a lot when future professors are drawn from the pool of students who have successfully completed a PhD.
Regarding #1: From the point of view of the company, if other companies are educating their employees, then the company will likely stop spending the resources on their own employees while still taking advantage of the workers educated at the other companies. So, this point doesn't make sense without a very optimistic view on the cooperation that would take place between companies.
2. Treating 'nicely' is far from enough if another company is simply able to offer a better package. For example, are small/new tech companies not deserving of keeping their investments because they can't pay their devs as well as some large ones? Or if they can't match the prestige of other companies?
They're not saying they want it to be easy, they're saying they don't want to do it and don't have to (which ties into the rest of what they're saying)
I think that's an interesting thought. I struggled with DP/DR for a couple years, and the alarming part was that I felt like I was just watching myself perform automatic actions without any need for conscious oversight (this is where my experience differed significantly from Bandersnatch - rather than feeling controlled by someone else, I was frightened by how I was just watching myself act.
It's interesting to connect this to ideas of confabulation in neuroscience/psychology to that of DP/DR. There's evidence that we may actively confabulate stories to explain what we're doing, even if we don't actually know. This is explained a bit here: https://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/the-situati.... Oliver Sack's writings explore the topic a bit too, where those with severe mental injury or impairment would create unrealistic stories to explain their bizarre actions.
So, I wondered if part of the DP/DR involved losing the ability to confabulate and create a narrative regarding why I was acting the way that I was. And, part of my recovery was trying to recover that 'delusion.'
Furthermore, the article 'Anxiety Changes Depersonalization and Derealization Symptoms in Vestibular Patients' has a couple relevant sections:
'It has been hypothesized that “depersonalization is a hard-wired vestigial response for dealing with extreme anxiety, combining a state of increased alertness with a profound inhibition of the emotional response system.” The proposed mechanism is that the medial prefrontal cortex inhibits the emotional processing of the amygdala and related structures in response to increased anxiety resulting in a dampening of sympathetic output and reduced emotional experiencing that leads to hypervigilance, attentional difficulties, and emptiness of the mind.'
This provides evidence that DP/DR involves lessened emotional response. Later, the article states:
'The role of the limbic system and the amygdala in particular is very important, since affective memory connections to past experience could be an important factor in making new perceptions feel familiar and real'
So, I wonder if DP/DR is partially caused by a lessened ability to create narrative/reasoning about control over one's actions (with the emotional hyporeactivity exacerbating the feeling of detachment from the environment). And, if you consider these often-faulty narratives to be a bit delusional, then maybe you could make that conclusion!
Although laboratory experiments suggest it is possible that some substances used in Ayurveda might be developed into effective treatments, there is no scientific evidence that any are effective as currently practiced.[11] Ayurveda medicine is considered pseudoscientific.[12] Other researchers consider it a protoscience, or trans-science system instead.[13][14] In a 2008 study, close to 21% of Ayurveda U.S. and Indian-manufactured patent medicines sold through the Internet were found to contain toxic levels of heavy metals, specifically lead, mercury, and arsenic.[15] The public health implications of such metallic contaminants in India are unknown.[15]