Who is asking you to be sure in the first place? Why do you need this certainty?
Farm animals need the comfort and stability of the farm to survive. They "flourish" within the parameters some one else sets.
In the Elephant-Rider model of how the mind works, people are talking to rider And the elephant.
The elephant just needs some feel good stuff, to momentarily focus shift away from all the unpredictability in the universe, it has no control over - in this case it is being fed - well the story teller who is not sure about anything is atleast "diligent".
When you let go of the story, and realize the elephant is not under your control and can never be, the ride is much smoother. And that's the only story, no SEO game needed to promote the Truth. And truth is - you are just along for the ride. Don't act like a farm animal thinking you are healthy based on how many eggs you have been told to lay. You are a chimp. All animal domestication protocols break down sooner or later when dealing with chimps. Cuz the chimp mind has an elephant in it. Taking it for a wild ride.
Requires good stories/music/dance/mysticism. And rituals. And modernized pastoral care.
This is why religions have survived the fall of kings, empires and nations. When system starts collapsing under the weight of its ever building contradictions, they allow for stabilization, repair and continuity.
But with the arrival of the printing press and then the internet info tsunami, those older stories and rituals (which act as sync mechanism for large groups over different time frames - daily-weekly-yearly touch points) start loosing influence. This is happening without a good story/sync replacement (see Philosopher Charles Taylor's The Secular Age).
So look to HBO/Netflix/Pixar or the WWE. One is interactive almost real time narrative/emotion resonance/ritual engineering and the other is a deeper slower process. Those are the kind of spaces where potential breakthroughs will come from. Not the totally clueless science or tech world.
They should feel some pressure but the language and framing is a bit over the top. These probs are not going to be solved without these kinds of systems.
The UN's sustainability development goals/WHO data shows most countries in the world hardly have ~1 therapist for every hundred thousand citizens.
The goal they set was ~15 per 100K. Barely a handful meet the goal and even then the quality of care in urban and rural areas is night and day. So we are such a long way away from actually providing mental health to the majority.
OpenAI type systems can really change the story. So good to see them releasing data about what is going on at population scales. Try getting data out of a therapists and priests about how many people they have actually helped and how many they could not. If you can't get it, labelling what they do as "an uncontrolled social experiment" doesn't do anything useful, because in many cases there is no one else stepping up to the plate.
More like "super talented engineers" will keep increasing cost of such projects until they get told this stuff doesn't generate revenue/cost cutting is happening, so work more on ad tech, leave or find external free labor("community") to maintain it.
The modern apps are full of unnecessary features not because anyone asks or even uses these features, but because its become easy for devs to roll them out.
I use Signal only for initial contact/handshake. After that its on private client not touching any cloud. If Signal dies tomorrow, its not the end of the world.
People have been thinking about this stuff for a long time. Here's a partial compilation of the answers - https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-181
click sessions - lecture 12 for utility oriented story - but I would recommend going through the whole series, cause depending on life situations you get thrown into, it will help to see what other stories people have told themselves that have helped them flourish.
Not really. Microbes have been around for a long time. And there are more of them today than there are stars in the sky. No intelligence required. Plus they change so fast that what Life looked like yday can look totally different tomorrow.
As Lynn Margulis would say the chimps aren't the main show. Intelligence maybe an over rated and very buggy feature of Life. And the bugs get amplified as the minds interact with each other and group size increases.
The philosophers have talked about the bugs for a long time (see Plato's chariot, Hobbes passion vs reason, Freuds id-ego-superego, Kahnemann's system 1 vs system 2, Haidt's Elephant Rider). The mind needs stories to handle the bugs. And there is no dearth of stories on Earth to keep the 3 inch chimp brain occupied forever.
Gary Marcus is not changing the story financiers are telling each other about AI. He has been telling the same story without making a dent in their stories. And that is because he is not in the arena. What he says, does and thinks doesn't matter.
Well not surprising. National security/national infra is involved. Private companies will not fund/build nukes, missiles, aircraft carriers, fighter jets etc if there aren't certain guarantees from the State. Not just in US, all over the world.
Think about what would have happen if the Manhattan Project was run by the private sector. As soon as national security/infra becomes a risk the state will start getting more involved whether the private sector wants it or not.
The banking system/telcos/utilities in most countries have the State providing some kind guarantee to keep the lights on in case something unpredictable happens.
It's just middle men reinforcing middle men. History shows platform economics is not sustainable.
Every kid is shown silicon valley and taught being an intermediary/middle man is the path to success. Every kid can see margins running an oil ring, mine, farm, factory or hotel are less than running a platform by a huge factor.
So who is going to want to be a producer in such a system? When the balance in an economic system tilts from production to middle men it makes the whole system unstable.
So silicon valley has pushed the whole world into an unsustainable unstable state, of everyone falling over each other trying to be middle men.
What is working is temporary. They are not blind to it. They just don't know how to do anything else. It's a runaway train.
Just like the British East India company. No one designed it. No one controlled it. No one could do anything when it collapsed. The Free banking system is a similar story. Everyone thought running their own money printer was a great idea. Why doesn't it exist today? Silicon valley will follow the same trajectory. There is a reason its CEO ran to DC to bend the knee. Cause they know their survival is based on maintaining middle men status. Which can break any day the political winds change or another TikTok appears on the horizon from outside SV.
Science doesn't provide a Priest who will show up and sit with you at your time of grief or despair in handling the unpredictable. Priests in all religions are trained to occupy that space. And that is the prime reason Religions have survived for thousands of years long past the death of empires, kings and nations who all get tired or bored of showing up and occupying the unpredictability space.
Lot of that Despair is thanks to how the architecture of the chimp brain handles unpredictability over different time horizons - whats the system going to do tomorrow/next month/next year/next decades. Confidence decreases anxiety increases. You want to break the architecture keep feeding it the unpredictable.
So we get the corporal hudson in aliens cycle - "I'm ready, man. Check it out. I am the ultimate badass. State of the badass art" > unpredictability > "Whats happening man! Now what are we supposed to do? Thats it man. Game over man. Game over!"
It is not decay. People are just more conscious than previous generations ever were about how the world works. And that leads to confusion and misunderstandings if they are only exposed to herd think.
The chicken doesn't understand it has to lay a certain number of eggs a day to be kept alive in the farm. It hits its metrics because it has been programmed to hit them.
But once it gets access to chatgpt and develops consciousness of how the farm works, the questions it asks slowly evolve with time.
Initially its all fear driven - how do we get a say in how many eggs we need to lay to be kept alive? How do we keep the farm running without relying on the farmer? etc etc
Once the farm animals begins to realize the absurdity of such questions, new questions emerge - how come the crow is not a farm animal? why is the shark not used as a circus animal? etc etc
And thro that process, whose steps cannot be skipped the farm animal begins to realize certain things about itself which no one, especially the farmer, has any incentive of encouraging.
Who is asking you to be sure in the first place? Why do you need this certainty? Farm animals need the comfort and stability of the farm to survive. They "flourish" within the parameters some one else sets.
In the Elephant-Rider model of how the mind works, people are talking to rider And the elephant.
The elephant just needs some feel good stuff, to momentarily focus shift away from all the unpredictability in the universe, it has no control over - in this case it is being fed - well the story teller who is not sure about anything is atleast "diligent".
When you let go of the story, and realize the elephant is not under your control and can never be, the ride is much smoother. And that's the only story, no SEO game needed to promote the Truth. And truth is - you are just along for the ride. Don't act like a farm animal thinking you are healthy based on how many eggs you have been told to lay. You are a chimp. All animal domestication protocols break down sooner or later when dealing with chimps. Cuz the chimp mind has an elephant in it. Taking it for a wild ride.