I still can’t get over the fact that the Turing Test, which my college classmates and I discussed as a thought experiment about evaluating hypothetical sci-fi entities, is just…over. Life is sci-fi now.
I think it's still got a little bit left in it! People tend to focus on the passage where Turing forecasts that by 2000 there would be computers with a gigabyte of storage that could fool "an average interrogator" about 30% of the time in a five minute conversation. But if you actually look at the rest of the paper carefully, I think he's saying that what it would take for us to say that a computer is "thinking" is that in arbitrarily-extended conversations on arbitrary topics, we would be just as happy to continue the conversation with the computer as with a human. He recognized that there were likely to be some aspects of conversation that wouldn't be shared (e.g., discussions of how much we enjoy strawberries and cream, but he also acknowledges that interracial friendships sometimes stumble over these missing shared cultural interests as well) but I think he didn't realize that we would get computers that are so much more interesting interlocutors on some sorts of topics than humans, while still failing to hold our interest in other ways.
Oh interesting, I didn’t know anything about the nuances of Turing’s original paper—only the basic concept of an AI good enough to act like a human in a text conversation. I guess I should read it!
There's a scene in the recent(ish) Netflix version of Dracula that makes a similar point. Dracula has woken up after over a century of sleep and is in the trailer home of a working class British woman, asking her if she's royalty because of all the luxuries she has (a pantry full of food from all over the world, heat, clocks, etc). Highly recommended!
I grew up in a poor family, in one of the poorest counties in the US. Some of my neighbors did not have running water in the 1980's. And I never went hungry: yes, there were memorably terrible meals (the time my father mistakenly mixed rice pudding and rabbit in tomato sauce comes to mind), but I never went hungry. People my parents age did: I heard those stories.
How many people, in the whole history of the world, have never gone hungry?
Thank you, Jerusalem. This is an article everyone in the US should read, especially those who perpetually complain about inequality and how unfair life has been to them. And it's almost never those who are actually poor. It is nearly always those who are middle or upper middle class and have been blessed beyond their understanding.
My work has taken me to third world countries where I have traveled beyond the tourist areas and have seen what real poverty is, such as the women with two children whose home was four sticks in the ground with discarded plastic from the nearby garbage dump wrapped around them. She wasn't homeless. This WAS her home, not much different from all her neighbors. She had barely enough for her kids to eat, but offered to feed us without hesitation.
On another trip, I saw a man lying on the side of the road who had been hit and killed on a motorbike. He was there in the morning surrounded by neighbors and family, and still there in the evening when my group returned. There was no ambulance, no doctor, no first responders. No one was protesting or complaining. This was everyday life.
When I would return home from these trips, I felt like kissing the ground. I marveled at how green and splendid it is here. Even the Netherlanders, who were visiting Kansas City recently for the World Cup, made the news for their wide-eyed wonder at the wealth: massive Costcos, huge meal portions, near universal air conditioning, two-car garages, walk-in closets, second refrigerators.
We're spoiled. And all too often act like brats. We used to count our blessings. Now we count our grievances.
“Delight in it.” I cannot. Grateful, yes. Humble, yes. Filled with satisfaction through sharing with others who have less, yes. But I cannot experience delight from the benefits of wealth. Delight, in my experience, comes from that which is free and available to all - a refreshing breeze on a hot day, the exhaustion from hard and honest work, friendship wherein forgiveness and acceptance are a given - all free and free for all. Delight is always available 24/7/365 via the miraculous portal of human consciousness and our freedom to focus attention away from concerns about the past, the future and how I’m doing in relation to others. Delight is found in the moment of now and this is where the author and I might find agreement.
It's worth noting that a thoughtful 18th century American writer would have defined “happiness” in a more social and less individual way. If you had to pick a one-word synonym it might be closest to "harmony."
We can see this in the common use of "happy" in phrases like "in happy circumstances" or "a happy state of affairs." It did not preclude private grief or misfortune, but it did presuppose a generally harmonious society and a place of harmony within it, so "the pursuit of happiness" included what was at the time the very novel idea of trying to invent and bring into being a better and more harmonious society.
I do love Kelsey's article and hope it will get the wider readership it deserves. As a solidly middle class American, I have lived a long life of almost unimaginable luxury and good health compared to my ancestors, something I try to be aware of and always grateful for.
Any review of the wonders of human progress always leaves me humbled about the plenty we enjoy now, and yet still has me wondering if we will take the same necessary steps our ancestors did to make sure these wonders weren't horded by a precious few?
Given how powerful AI is now, and quickly its getting more powerful. I'm worried that there is a long, dark road ahead for us all if we don't learn from the lessons of past technological revolutions.
I feel like the lesson I take from our ancestors is that society has never tried that hard to distribute gains from progress broadly, but (at least some of) the gains eventually distribute themselves anyway! “Medieval kings would envy you” not because you live in a socialist paradise that is consistently serious about taking care of all its citizens, but because there is so much wealth in this world that even if a little ends up in your hands just because nobody is paying much attention, that little is already unimaginable to those medieval kings. Of course, as a liberal I prefer to get to as fair and equal an equilibrium as possible as quickly as possible, but I’m not scared that a few people will somehow suck up literally every drop of progress to the point of leaving everyone else worse off than before. They’ve never managed that before, and not for lack of trying.
The labor movement of the 19th and 20th centuries that got us 8 hour workdays, weekends, safety laws, and so forth would beg to differ. That's not an argument that we live in a socialist paradise, but it is an argument that it's completely ahistorical to say that people in the past were not fighting VERY hard to try and have progress benefit everyone.
My main gripe I guess with your line of thinking is that it seems to make posit that progress is completely automatic, and not something that we as individuals/societies need to take an active hand in.
The declaration of independence Jerusalem's post is (rightfully) celebrating was a perfect example of this. The founders who were firm believers in markets, religious freedom, all that good stuff, said "Y'know, this isn't going to get better if we just stand around doing nothing" and so they did something!
I’m not saying those movements aren’t important, I’m saying I’m confident they’ll win. What I hate is dooming about how next time the oligarchs are totally going to capture more than 100% of the spoils so the solution is to not have technological progress at all. I think that’s insanely ahistorical and counterproductive.
Leonardo never got to vibe code 😭
Even Alan Turing or Grace Hopper would be astounded!
I still can’t get over the fact that the Turing Test, which my college classmates and I discussed as a thought experiment about evaluating hypothetical sci-fi entities, is just…over. Life is sci-fi now.
I think it's still got a little bit left in it! People tend to focus on the passage where Turing forecasts that by 2000 there would be computers with a gigabyte of storage that could fool "an average interrogator" about 30% of the time in a five minute conversation. But if you actually look at the rest of the paper carefully, I think he's saying that what it would take for us to say that a computer is "thinking" is that in arbitrarily-extended conversations on arbitrary topics, we would be just as happy to continue the conversation with the computer as with a human. He recognized that there were likely to be some aspects of conversation that wouldn't be shared (e.g., discussions of how much we enjoy strawberries and cream, but he also acknowledges that interracial friendships sometimes stumble over these missing shared cultural interests as well) but I think he didn't realize that we would get computers that are so much more interesting interlocutors on some sorts of topics than humans, while still failing to hold our interest in other ways.
Oh interesting, I didn’t know anything about the nuances of Turing’s original paper—only the basic concept of an AI good enough to act like a human in a text conversation. I guess I should read it!
It's a great paper! Definitely worth reading:
https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf
(And if you want my commentary in a long YouTube video: https://youtu.be/Xj62KxHfYlY?si=8pIqUQtsBxF3oxmj )
How is it nobody ever told me that the last few pages of this paper contain a description of modern ML training?! This is insane!
I think a lot of histories greatest minds would be as horrified by AI as they would be excited.
There's a scene in the recent(ish) Netflix version of Dracula that makes a similar point. Dracula has woken up after over a century of sleep and is in the trailer home of a working class British woman, asking her if she's royalty because of all the luxuries she has (a pantry full of food from all over the world, heat, clocks, etc). Highly recommended!
The point of “pursuit of happiness” as opposed to just “happiness” is that no one is obligated to make you happy.
Thank you.
I grew up in a poor family, in one of the poorest counties in the US. Some of my neighbors did not have running water in the 1980's. And I never went hungry: yes, there were memorably terrible meals (the time my father mistakenly mixed rice pudding and rabbit in tomato sauce comes to mind), but I never went hungry. People my parents age did: I heard those stories.
How many people, in the whole history of the world, have never gone hungry?
Thank you, Jerusalem and Kelsey. The painting you included reminds me of "The Death of the Pharaoh's Firstborn Son" by Lawrence Alma-Tadema: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/1872_Lawrence_Alma-Tadema_-_Death_of_the_Pharaoh_Firstborn_son.jpg
Thank you, Jerusalem. This is an article everyone in the US should read, especially those who perpetually complain about inequality and how unfair life has been to them. And it's almost never those who are actually poor. It is nearly always those who are middle or upper middle class and have been blessed beyond their understanding.
My work has taken me to third world countries where I have traveled beyond the tourist areas and have seen what real poverty is, such as the women with two children whose home was four sticks in the ground with discarded plastic from the nearby garbage dump wrapped around them. She wasn't homeless. This WAS her home, not much different from all her neighbors. She had barely enough for her kids to eat, but offered to feed us without hesitation.
On another trip, I saw a man lying on the side of the road who had been hit and killed on a motorbike. He was there in the morning surrounded by neighbors and family, and still there in the evening when my group returned. There was no ambulance, no doctor, no first responders. No one was protesting or complaining. This was everyday life.
When I would return home from these trips, I felt like kissing the ground. I marveled at how green and splendid it is here. Even the Netherlanders, who were visiting Kansas City recently for the World Cup, made the news for their wide-eyed wonder at the wealth: massive Costcos, huge meal portions, near universal air conditioning, two-car garages, walk-in closets, second refrigerators.
We're spoiled. And all too often act like brats. We used to count our blessings. Now we count our grievances.
“Delight in it.” I cannot. Grateful, yes. Humble, yes. Filled with satisfaction through sharing with others who have less, yes. But I cannot experience delight from the benefits of wealth. Delight, in my experience, comes from that which is free and available to all - a refreshing breeze on a hot day, the exhaustion from hard and honest work, friendship wherein forgiveness and acceptance are a given - all free and free for all. Delight is always available 24/7/365 via the miraculous portal of human consciousness and our freedom to focus attention away from concerns about the past, the future and how I’m doing in relation to others. Delight is found in the moment of now and this is where the author and I might find agreement.
It's worth noting that a thoughtful 18th century American writer would have defined “happiness” in a more social and less individual way. If you had to pick a one-word synonym it might be closest to "harmony."
We can see this in the common use of "happy" in phrases like "in happy circumstances" or "a happy state of affairs." It did not preclude private grief or misfortune, but it did presuppose a generally harmonious society and a place of harmony within it, so "the pursuit of happiness" included what was at the time the very novel idea of trying to invent and bring into being a better and more harmonious society.
I do love Kelsey's article and hope it will get the wider readership it deserves. As a solidly middle class American, I have lived a long life of almost unimaginable luxury and good health compared to my ancestors, something I try to be aware of and always grateful for.
Just a phenomenal article, it really does help put stuff in perspective
Any review of the wonders of human progress always leaves me humbled about the plenty we enjoy now, and yet still has me wondering if we will take the same necessary steps our ancestors did to make sure these wonders weren't horded by a precious few?
Given how powerful AI is now, and quickly its getting more powerful. I'm worried that there is a long, dark road ahead for us all if we don't learn from the lessons of past technological revolutions.
I feel like the lesson I take from our ancestors is that society has never tried that hard to distribute gains from progress broadly, but (at least some of) the gains eventually distribute themselves anyway! “Medieval kings would envy you” not because you live in a socialist paradise that is consistently serious about taking care of all its citizens, but because there is so much wealth in this world that even if a little ends up in your hands just because nobody is paying much attention, that little is already unimaginable to those medieval kings. Of course, as a liberal I prefer to get to as fair and equal an equilibrium as possible as quickly as possible, but I’m not scared that a few people will somehow suck up literally every drop of progress to the point of leaving everyone else worse off than before. They’ve never managed that before, and not for lack of trying.
The labor movement of the 19th and 20th centuries that got us 8 hour workdays, weekends, safety laws, and so forth would beg to differ. That's not an argument that we live in a socialist paradise, but it is an argument that it's completely ahistorical to say that people in the past were not fighting VERY hard to try and have progress benefit everyone.
My main gripe I guess with your line of thinking is that it seems to make posit that progress is completely automatic, and not something that we as individuals/societies need to take an active hand in.
The declaration of independence Jerusalem's post is (rightfully) celebrating was a perfect example of this. The founders who were firm believers in markets, religious freedom, all that good stuff, said "Y'know, this isn't going to get better if we just stand around doing nothing" and so they did something!
I’m not saying those movements aren’t important, I’m saying I’m confident they’ll win. What I hate is dooming about how next time the oligarchs are totally going to capture more than 100% of the spoils so the solution is to not have technological progress at all. I think that’s insanely ahistorical and counterproductive.