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An Engineer’s Failed Journey to Find Artificial General Intelligence

I've been looking for Artificial General Intelligence for years and haven't found anything close. Last time I looked [1] there was no sign of any Artificial General Intelligence. When I first looked [2], eight years ago, there was also no sign of any thinking machines. And today there still isn't. We're much closer, a recent article by engineers at Apple [3] hints at where the next breakthroughs are needed. The paper "AI:2027" makes a spirited argument that AGI will be here in two years. [5] Regardless of all the hype out there (mostly pushed by people who plan to make money off of selling general intelligence) the actual evidence is scant. Pattern matching Machine Learning using vector databases and transformers is getting better exponentially, it shows lots of competence, but little understanding... just like evolution. But I thought I'd take a day or two and go looking again. It's been eight years since my first journey and things have really gotten...
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We are at a Crossroads. We can let the billionaires enshittify society or we can stand up for ourselves.

What is Surveillance Capitalism?  [1] It's the businesses that are free to you but support themselves by selling advertising over a network. They sell your attention: You are the product. Their real customers are the advertisers, who pay the Surveillance Capitalist's to throw their messages in front of you. FBook and YouTube were the first to industrialize this business model. It leveraged Google's original business model of advertising on their search page and selling the same advertising to web sites to resell, thus giving sites a way to monetize their views. Surveillance Capitalists are much more intrusive: they design their sight to be addictive (which isn't healthy.) They have AI algorithms tuning the feed of presented nuggets to increase the amount of time you spend online and the likelihood you will click on one of their ads. Even though this could be bad for you and your neighbors. They don't care and they pretend it's "out of their control", b...
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Religion Without Lies: Why We Have Free Will

 Religion Without Lies: Why We have Free Will The Final Great Awakening of the human race, wherein we throw off the yoke of evolution by natural selection and embrace intelligent design of our morals to create a world of abundance. The Future. And Welcome To it!  It's up to you. You have Free Will. (You know you do.) Just as Rene Descartes could not doubt that he existed, "I think therefore I am"; you cannot doubt that you are and that you have that choice of doubting. You can doubt yourself and you can doubt that you have Free Will, but the act itself shows that you are and that you have Free Will. You are not a zombie. You are not a puppet. You are a sentient human being that can read and write and reason. You are a miracle of evolution about to take control of your own destiny. As it ever was, it will be. Consciousness is the original secular sin: awareness creates responsibility. To argue that there is no Free Will is arguing that evolution doesn't exist. And we k...
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Political Corruption

  What is Corruption?  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption Political corruption occurs when an office-holder or other governmental employee acts in an official capacity for personal gain. It’s essentially the protection racket: unless you pay me, you will be threatened and you will not get what you want; even though they are legally required to provide aservice. Corruption: why is this a secular (real) sin? It causes individual and societal harm causing everyone to be poorer and bullies to be crueler. Because it breaks the golden rule of ethical requirements.  Kant : Categorical Imperative. The same rule must apply to everyone. Copernicus : Anthropomorphic principle. You are not the center of world,  Dawkins : Intelligent Design: Morals must be supported with reason. Dennet : The basis of morals come from evolution, but they are not constrained by it. Ethics must be universal : All men are created equal in the eyes of the law (the state must not play favorites...
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The Nerd Rapture: The Second Singularity is Coming, but it's not the POINT.

If evolution can create it, so can man. There is and will be intelligent design. It's only a matter of time. We are in the midst of the last great battle of reason over evolution -- why is this happening now? Because evolution developed the first great singularity [1] about 300 thousand years ago. And it happened to our ancestors and they learned to talk somehow, really talk. Talking lets you pass information between generations at an exponentially faster speed than evolution does. Evolution is slow. We evolved complex language which let us talk about abstract concepts very quickly, in evolutionary terms. This happened a long time ago in human terms (in the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.) This ability to know thyself and talk about it is the genesis of the tree of knowledge story. Not only did humans name all the animals, they could now talk about and reason about what an animal would do. [2] Darwinian evolution signed its own death warrant that day. In evolutionary time ...
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