This is one of note thousands of videos of cats and dogs using buttons to talk.
Cats, and all mammals, have a neocortex. Theirs is not as deeply layered or large as humans, but they most definitely have the ability to reason abstractly, are aware of themselves, think emotionally, and engage in complex, time aware planning over long periods.
Your views are wrong. Language areas like Broca's region in the human brain are a consequence of physical distribution relative to the connectome and sensory endpoints. If you were to rewire the millions of connections to the lips, tongue, mouth, ears, and other body parts to be locations on the neocortex, broca's region would be somewhere different. You have about 1 square meter of neocortex responsible for all of your perception and cognition, and almost all of it is uniform. Neurons aren't differentiated by function, and animal experiments show that plasticity allows for arbitrary rewiring.
The literature in the field shows that human cognition is likely superior to other species in the depth of cortical layering and size of the organ. It's likely the only reason elephants and whales or other animals with larger brains can't compete with humans is the mere absence of hands and vocal organs. Our range of colors and audible senses are important but lesser than many animals.
Give an orca hands and human speech and there's nothing we know about neuroscience to imply that the animal wouldn't be smarter and more capable than humans. There's a lot of evidence that the killer whale would be more intelligent than humans in many ways.
The cortical layering and columnar architecture of neuron clusters differs between species, and seems to dictate the cognitive depth of abstract reasoning. There may be different algorithmic constructions in neural connections that favor human level cognition.
In principle, however, human brains aren't terribly different from many other large mammals, and elephants certainly display complex, emotional, symbolic, and abstract reasoning well within a range comparable to human experience.
Your notion of animal cognition is unscientific and biased toward an assumption of human superiority that isn't grounded in fact. Neuroscience is slowly and tirelessly matching toward reverse engineering the brain. The more we learn, the more we find similarity in the basic functions of mammal brains, from mice to humans to blue whales.
And it's possible to acquire the equivalent of a PhD through the vast wealth of information and literal college courses online. Degrees don't mean what they used to.
The dilution of quality caused by profit based perverse incentives, the cultural issues grounded in grievance studies, and the enormous wealth of high quality material and alternatives to formal education have radically changed what academia means to society going forward.
Gatekeeping for profit and not discriminating between the value of a degree in mathematics and a degree in underwater basket weaving, eliminating political, ideological, and epistemic diversity have resulted in a world where degrees increasingly mean you simply paid money to exist in the presence of other folks with paper over a sufficient length of time that all parties involved felt satisfied with the kabuki show.
Accreditation through a legitimate culture of intellectual peers in which institutional academia has earned the respect and dedication of its members approaches the ideal case. Few, if any, American institutions pass muster. They're not without value, and some departments are world class, but they exist in relation to near total institutional failure, and they are infecting the rest of the world.
Academic journals, outdated pedagogy, DIE gatekeeping, woke babysitting and infantilized students are just the most obvious rot.
American academia has a lot of soul searching and hard work to do, or it's going to be displaced by something better that serves the need for legitimate accreditation in society. I personally don't want that to be private corporations, and I'm rooting for the professors and alumni who want to preserve the integrity of their institutions.
Some perspectives still hold that degrees are critical, but unless it's from less than a handful of the top programs in a field, the degree is barely worth the paper it's printed on. Degrees are useful to get into corporate work, but having industry experience, a competent body of work, recognition from your peers, and a demonstrated work ethic can get you into almost any type of job at a competitive rate of pay.
In some cases, degrees can be harmful by elevating incompetent, ignorant, entitled graduates to positions they shouldn't have, particularly in middle management. Getting a degree is not paying your dues or putting in time toward something useful. It can be, but it depends on the individual, so degrees fail as a shibboleth for utility.
Oversubscription should be regulated and totally transparent to the customer. Something on the monthly statement like:
"You pay for symmetric gigabit internet access. You share this line with 4 customers, and load balancing means your service performance will be equally distributed among the users of the line at any given time. The internet egress point where you leave Honest Joe's network is a 25gbps connection and is shared by 382 other gigabit residential customers. The average load at egress is 14.5gps down, 5 gbps up."
Allowing customers to pay a premium for dedicated access is a net good as well, because that can finance infrastructure improvements.
It's greed and lack of transparency that causes shitty service. It's repeatedly merged isps that are so big that they can afford to not give a shit about the last mile.
The sick joke is the unused fiber capacity. Many of the large isps have residential fiber presence, but don't want to invest in towns under 100k people, so they leave the fiber to rot. A lot of ambitious small isps funded and deployed fiber throughout all sorts of places in small town America but didn't stipulate the use of the fiber when they sold out.
Yes. We carry supercomputers in our pockets, it's nice being able to use them and not be subject to connection issues or server outages, or developer whim.
History is a construct. It's a product of actual physical processes in the electrical and chemical networks of human minds resulting in the rearrangement of atoms elsewhere in the universe into patterns that self replicate, or spawn processes in other networks, using any interface available. History used the medium of vibrating air, then worked its way through different symbolic systems until we landed here, at the pinnacle of human achievement, arguing on the internet.
Humans are special because our constructs are orders of magnitude more complex than anything that came before. Opposable thumbs and large wrinkled brains and a lottery ticket combination of environmental factors allowed us to happen. We're a fundamentally different type of thing than anything that we know of that came before. It isn't an anthropomorphic conceit, it's a matter of physical evidence and computational theory. Nothing else does what human brains do. It's a little silly to dismiss it as somehow not real. It's as real as fusion producing light from the core of a sun, or pulsars blazing with energies that outshine entire galaxies.
If you could build a computer that held and displayed the data, you might be able to preserve it - a tablet or handheld device that gets handed down through generations and only activated one a decade or so?
Beyond preservation, though, that's an interesting engineering puzzle - could you fashion a computer intended to operate for 500 years, without replacement parts?
It'd need serious shielding, components that wouldn't degrade, some sort of capacitor based rechargeable power system, connector interfaces designed to be easily modded, and so on.
I imagine such a legacy computer would be durable beyond even advanced military or nasa tech allows for.
They don't know what a url is, and to them the address bar is the search box, and the search box is the address bar. Developers of all the major browsers made the two elements work interchangeably.
A power user can create a web navigation system with plug-ins and customizations that rival a space shuttle for complexity and sophistication. The novice user, and users that are tech challenged can get stuck on the most basic uses of browsers. The trouble with catering to the "bad users" is that every forced simplification removes an opportunity for learning to be better. Every removed and hidden feature "for their own good" amplifies the feedback loop of dumbing down the user of the software, enabling a stasis of competence hovering around some arbitrarily chosen threshold of functionality.
In the case of big tech, keeping users dumb and incompetent is a tool to reinforce the walled gardens. Keeping the consumer ignorant of nuance and flexibility creates artificial problems that are solved with more dumb software, gatekeeping every possible increment of utility by making everything a commercial transaction.
I had a user who was proudly showing me a 99 cent app that allowed them to ping things from their phone. When I showed them the command line and that they'd already had the ability to do that from their laptop, they were embarrassed and a little annoyed.
Their ignorance was encouraged and cultivated throughout the time they spent trying to find a solution to a problem, guiding them to an app store and to waste money on an app.
Artificial incompetence is the defining feature of those who reside in walled gardens. It seems to be the rock bottom to which big tech companies race, because it's the most efficient way to perpetuate a revenue stream. Not only treating people as incompetents, but developing the ux and ui around that core assumption.
There's definitely a place for simplicity and user friendly design, but artificial incompetence is a scourge, one of the worst anti-patterns affecting consumers. There needs to be a culture shift away from rent seeking software design and toward making users as competent and knowledgeable as possible.
The model and attention mechanism produces Bayesian properties, but transformers as a whole contain non-Bayesian aspects, depending on how rigorous you want to be in defining Bayesian.
Transformers do learn and abstract. Not as well as humans, but for whatever definitive of innovation or creativity you wanna run with, these gpt models have it. It's not magic, it's math, but these programs are approximating the human function of media synthesis across narrowly limited domains.
These aren't your crazy uncle's Markov chain chatbots. They're sophisticated bayesian models trained to approximate the functions that produced the content used in training.
This is one of note thousands of videos of cats and dogs using buttons to talk.
Cats, and all mammals, have a neocortex. Theirs is not as deeply layered or large as humans, but they most definitely have the ability to reason abstractly, are aware of themselves, think emotionally, and engage in complex, time aware planning over long periods.
Your views are wrong. Language areas like Broca's region in the human brain are a consequence of physical distribution relative to the connectome and sensory endpoints. If you were to rewire the millions of connections to the lips, tongue, mouth, ears, and other body parts to be locations on the neocortex, broca's region would be somewhere different. You have about 1 square meter of neocortex responsible for all of your perception and cognition, and almost all of it is uniform. Neurons aren't differentiated by function, and animal experiments show that plasticity allows for arbitrary rewiring.
The literature in the field shows that human cognition is likely superior to other species in the depth of cortical layering and size of the organ. It's likely the only reason elephants and whales or other animals with larger brains can't compete with humans is the mere absence of hands and vocal organs. Our range of colors and audible senses are important but lesser than many animals.
Give an orca hands and human speech and there's nothing we know about neuroscience to imply that the animal wouldn't be smarter and more capable than humans. There's a lot of evidence that the killer whale would be more intelligent than humans in many ways.
The cortical layering and columnar architecture of neuron clusters differs between species, and seems to dictate the cognitive depth of abstract reasoning. There may be different algorithmic constructions in neural connections that favor human level cognition.
In principle, however, human brains aren't terribly different from many other large mammals, and elephants certainly display complex, emotional, symbolic, and abstract reasoning well within a range comparable to human experience.
Your notion of animal cognition is unscientific and biased toward an assumption of human superiority that isn't grounded in fact. Neuroscience is slowly and tirelessly matching toward reverse engineering the brain. The more we learn, the more we find similarity in the basic functions of mammal brains, from mice to humans to blue whales.