If there’s an heir to Dylan, I don’t see who it is. Great music and great art are still being made and will always be made, and one day someone of his stature will emerge. But this particular age of heroes is over.
Two thoughts about this:
- popular culture is much more fractured now into lots of small scenes - this is probably a good thing - in the UK we used to all watch 4 TV channels and a few radio channels and hear the same stuff, now everyone can persue their own diverse pathway through the avalanche of music/art being created
- In the 80s and 90s there was this sense that (some) musicians had an important message - I would sit with my friend and analyse Robert Smith's latest lyrics as if some secret of life was hidden in there (to be fair, many would say it was). Looking back I think this was due to the power of music and the lack of other easily accessible (lets call them) 'thinkpieces'. But in the 2020s, if someone has a political or philosophical message that they think is important, are they going to try and write it into songs and be a popular musician? There's much easier ways now to broadcast your thoughts. I guess social media and youtube channels have replaced the idea of musician as Guru, for better or for worse.
Huygens was an amazing project. It also sticks in my head as a really instructive example of "bug in production code" - the Huygens probe was transmitting on two channels to the Cassini orbiter during its descent. Due to a mistake in the Cassini software, one of the receivers never got switched on. 900 million miles from Earth and during a one-off unprecedented probe landing on an outer solar system body. Half the images and some wind speed data lost.
I don't know if the exact details of the bug ever got published but it would be interesting to know how it slipped through testing.
Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think.
Right, but imagination starts from what is known, so Vera Historia has wars, journeys, whales and gods. A whirlwind takes them to the moon, and so on. But it would have been very hard for them to imagine the direction that _technology_ would go. That writing (scrolls and ink) could expand into something like the internet and smartphones. They could have imagined long range telepathy I suppose, which is perhaps in the right ballpark. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
And speaking of Arthur C Clarke - in the mid 1960s he could extrapolate from current technology and imagine something a bit like the internet, but conceived of it as a news service, a bit like teletext (see the novelisation of '2001'). The paradigm shift where anyone can publish and you get things like wikipedia, social media and git was a conceptual leap that was very hard to make in advance.
What I'm asking is, despite the huge volume of sci-fi we can produce, could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?
Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to Aristocreon, but related distantly to sand and lightning, would be able to read the scroll again and instantly transmit it to nearly the whole planet, a planet with many times more humans than existed in their time. (and speaking of 'planet', in Aristocreon's time, people had fairly recently been able to show that the world was spherical but much of it was still unknown).
Do we have better imaginations? Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
I had an Archimedes back in the day, they were incredible machines. I remember hearing about Pipedream but never got to try it, it sounded wild:
PipeDream 3 breaks down the barriers between word processor, spreadsheet and database. You can include numerical tables in your letters and reports, add paragraphs to your spreadsheets, and perform calculations within your databases.
I always wondered how it was supposed to work, and voila 36 years later someone has gone to the trouble of explaining it. Many thanks. And in summary: it sounds like a weird compromise.
Thats a good point actually, I hadn't thought about deploying hacks and jailbreaks in a turing test but thats exactly what should be done, if its being done adversarially
But I hear that with Gen Z and Alpha they dont really go to bars but they do tend to go to the gym, and so the gym is becoming a more social space. So maybe OP is on the right track?
Turing test was definitely and conclusively refuted in the 1960s
Are you sure?
Understood properly, Turings Imitation game aka the turing test, should be adversarial. That is, the player should be asking hard questions to try and discover who is who, not just having an idle chat. No chatbot has been able to consistently pass an adversarial Turing Test until the rise of LLMs
Not particularly a Dawkins fan but I dont think OP really understands the philosophical point Dawkins is making. OP complains that Dawkins hasnt considered how LLMs work and how its obvious they're nothing like brains. You can’t just look at the outputs, without investigating the underlying mechanisms, and conclude that two entities with similar outputs reach those similar outputs by similar means.
... But its a longstanding position in philosophy (i.e. not everyone might take this position, but its a well known one) that discussion about consciousness should perhaps only really concern itself with the outputs.
The gist of Dawkins short piece is basically "we always used the turing test as a yardstick for consciousness, it seemed unachievable for a long time. Now thats its been achieved, what is the rationale for moving the goalposts?". And I think thats an interesting point to make. Dawkins maintains that the Turing Test should be enough, by making a point about competence:
Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. There should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being. My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness.
.... Or, thirdly, are there two ways of being competent, the conscious way and the unconscious (or zombie) way? Could it be that some life forms on Earth have evolved competence via the consciousness trick — while life on some alien planet has evolved an equivalent competence via the unconscious, zombie trick? And if we ever meet such competent aliens, will there be any way to tell which trick they are using?
This is fascinating. I see its powered by weights and probabilities - would this be a very simple ancestor of things like Stable Diffusion that we have now, or would this be on a completely different branch (different approach)
It was essentially a jigsaw puzzle, and Venters insight was that computational power was just as important to the project as biology. The Human Genome Project was essentially trying to sequence the human genome by finding large chunks of DNA and fitting them together like a jigsaw, finding which bits unambiguously matched up.
Venters idea was that you could do the same with small chunks of DNA, if you approached it as a computational problem and used computers to try/evaluate/reject the millions of ways the pieces could be fit together. So he recruited mathematicians, computer scientists etc and got them to work on the problem. He speeded the project up massively by making the biology bits simpler (smaller pieces of DNA) and shifting the effort to the computational problem.
So he made a big difference. And his insight that it was a computational problem is kindof obvious now but it wasn't obvious 25 years ago.
Two thoughts about this:
- popular culture is much more fractured now into lots of small scenes - this is probably a good thing - in the UK we used to all watch 4 TV channels and a few radio channels and hear the same stuff, now everyone can persue their own diverse pathway through the avalanche of music/art being created
- In the 80s and 90s there was this sense that (some) musicians had an important message - I would sit with my friend and analyse Robert Smith's latest lyrics as if some secret of life was hidden in there (to be fair, many would say it was). Looking back I think this was due to the power of music and the lack of other easily accessible (lets call them) 'thinkpieces'. But in the 2020s, if someone has a political or philosophical message that they think is important, are they going to try and write it into songs and be a popular musician? There's much easier ways now to broadcast your thoughts. I guess social media and youtube channels have replaced the idea of musician as Guru, for better or for worse.