The yellow flowers are back!
Plus, various recent writings.
Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!
Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:
New articles published by yours truly in Mindplex:
Writing in the 1960s, Primo Levi anticipated today’s LLMs.
In the sixties, Primo Levi imagined LLM-like AI that can write human language and some typical social reactions.
Prompted by a post by legendary science fiction author Bruce Sterling, I’ve been reading Primo Levi’s description, written in the sixties, of a future science-fictional technology that seems very close to today’s large language models (LLMs). Levi’s screenplay was also aired by the Italian TV.
“It’s quite amazing how well Levi understood the future human reactions to a novelty like an AI that can write human language,” says Sterling. “It turns out, sixty year later, that Primo Levi was quite right about the prospect of machines with an astonishing command of human language. They’re very much here, and wreaking predictable havoc.”
Optimus robots on Mars, powered by Grok AI.
Optimus robots on Mars, driven by Grok, would run on a state-of-the-art AI more sophisticated than the necessarily limited on-board AI.
Elon Musk said that “if all goes well, SpaceX will send Starship rockets to Mars with Optimus robots and Grok” in the next transit window, which will be in late 2026. Optimus robots on Mars, driven by Grok, would run on a state-of-the-art AI more sophisticated than the necessarily limited on-board AI.
In my recent Mindplex articles on “Should we still want biological space colonists?” (part 1, part 2) I’ve considered the question: Should we still want to send human astronauts to colonize space? Or should we want to leave space expansion to AI?
My conclusions:
Human-level and then superintelligent conscious AI will take over in the long run and spread into the universe. We’ll merge with the AIs to some degree, but the perception of a difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ will gradually fade away: all will be ‘us’.
For the rest of this century, we should pursue both AI technology and traditional space expansion with both biological and AI colonists, establishing a multi-planetary civilization in the solar system.
In the meantime, we must learn to see AI machines as persons. Future generations will find this intuitively and emotionally obvious, but presently we must train ourselves to accept our mind-children as ‘us’.
AI-driven robots that explore Mars, and chat with us from there, would help us make peace with the still-radical idea that the AIs will go to the stars for us and we should be happy.
The next Terasem Colloquium in July will be focused on the question: Should we still want to send human astronauts to colonize space? Or should we want to leave space expansion to AI?
New article published by yours truly in Blaxxky:
Alogonal mechanics.
Unthinkable concepts and inconceivable thoughts in mathematics and quantum physics.
I’ve been reading “Logos and Alogon,” by Arkady Plotnitsky. I’ve also been reading the author’s previous work “Reality Without Realism.”
The central thesis of Plotnitsky is that the unthinkable, the inconceivable, or to use his favorite term the alogonal, is indispensable in mathematics and science. The alogon, “that which is strictly inconceivable or incomprehensible, unthinkable,” is part of the logos. Mathematics and science would grind to a halt without unthinkable concepts and inconceivable thoughts.
Blaxxky has a longer open excerpt, but most of the article is paywalled. I wish to encourage you to subscribe to Blaxxky. I don’t pocket even half a cent of the money: all goes to support the growth of this new media project, for which I have high hopes.
If you also want to support me, you know what to do.
This and some other articles that I publish here, in Blaxxky, in Mindplex, or elsewhere will be eventually also published as chapters of my next book.
The yellow flowers are back! They’ve made me happier since early March. Soon they’ll be gone again, but I’ll wait for them to come back next year.
In my last book “Irrational Mechanics” I said:
“I’m writing this passage in March 2024, a few days before the first anniversary of the departure of our little dog Ricky. Now we have another little dog called Emily. The first spring flower bush is blooming again in our garden and I think that the yellow flowers are really the same yellow flowers of last year in the sense that matters. And I think our Emily is also our Ricky, and also our Sacha who departed in 2016, and also our Stormi who happily lives with our daughter. They are separate dogs, but they are so much entangled with us, and therefore with each other, that they are also one and the same dog. This is not only a nice poetic thought: in some sense that will be made clearer by the future science of irrational mechanics, they share the same core consciousness.”
And also:
“The concept of entanglement [Chapter 10] comes to mind. In quantum mechanics, two entangled particles are really one and the same thing. Science is beginning to speculate that living information systems like you and me can be entangled across space and time.”
Understanding and communicating this better, with more detail, is part of my metaphysical quest.