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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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Philip K Dick as the unasked-for system update to Orwell?
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Pete Jones wrote: | | Philip K Dick as the unasked-for system update to Orwell? |
That might indeed be timely and appropriate.
| Dick's stories typically focus on the fragile nature of what is real and the construction of personal identity. His stories often become surreal fantasies, as the main characters slowly discover that their everyday world is actually an illusion assembled by powerful external entities |
I vaguely recall reading some of his books while I was in my teens. Have not much thought about him or his works for 50 years or so. But this encourages me:
| "There are no heroes in Dick's books", Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, "but there are heroics. One is reminded of Dickens: what counts is the honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people. | |
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Why is any of this automatically bad?
Why are you lot against fewer murders and less crime?
Why shouldn't the police use AI, just like our scientists are now trying to do, to give better predictions of when volcanos erupt and so save lives.
Satellites are providing torrents of data about the world's active volcanoes, but researchers have struggled to turn them into a global prediction of volcanic risks. That may soon change with newly developed algorithms that can automatically tease from that data signals of volcanic risk, raising the prospect that within a couple years scientists could develop a global volcano warning system.
Without such tools, geoscientists simply can't keep up with information pouring out the satellites, says Michael Poland, the scientist-in-charge of the U.S. Geological Survey's Yellowstone Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington, who was not involved in either study. "The volume of data is overwhelming," he says.
Andrew Hooper, a volcanologist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom who led the development of one method, says the new algorithms should benefit the roughly 800 million people who live near volcanoes. "About 1400 volcanoes have potential to erupt above the sea," he says. "About 100 are monitored. The vast majority aren't." Both methods were presented this week in Washington, D.C., at the semiannual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). | |
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Surely this is a good thing, because we can all go about our business more safely, and those predicted to kill can get the treatment they deserve, in secure units.
The Police would be concentrating on those likely to kill, rather than getting carried away by trying to uncover serial killing nurses in neo-natal wards.
Sounds good to Wiley.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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We wouldn't have most of this nonsense about hate crimes, because when Tabitha Tummywobble goes along to complain about something posted on Mumsnet, the police can reassure her.
She feels better, no police time wasted.
Or the AI realises it's a real problem and the police actually do something, an arson attack is prevented.
What's not to like?
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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When I was doing my Tai Chi this morning, I tried to clear my "mind". But a disturbing thought came into my brain, that many of our deeply held beliefs are merely catastrophe stories that we are told, or we tell ousrselves, to reconfirm our belief that the present is better. Fortunately I cleared my mind of this, and was soon happily soaking in the warmth of the morning rays......
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Sledgehammer to crack a nut?
| BitChute, the pro-free speech alternative to YouTube, has decided to stop operating in the UK for fear of being censured – and fined – by Ofcom, following the regulator’s acquisition of sweeping new powers under the Online Safety Act. |
One of the bizarre consequences is that people in the UK can still be BitChute users, and post content, it just won't be visible to them or anyone else in the UK.
| Therefore, effective immediately, BitChute platform users in the UK will no longer be available to view content produced by any other BitChute user. Because the OSA’s primary concern is that members of the public will view content deemed unsafe, however, we will permit UK BitChute users to continue to post content. The significant change will be that this UK user-posted content will not be viewable by any other UK user, but will be visible to other users outside of the UK. |
YouTube always had a much more aggressive "Content Moderation" effort. As evidenced by anyone who posted or viewed any content that was critical of the Covid hysteria. So YT might not follow the same route.
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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| Wile E. Coyote wrote: | | Why is any of this automatically bad |
I don't think it's automatically bad. But I'm surprised how often the world doesn't remember the sci-fi or dystopian novels (or movies, if you prefer) that have gained great fame by warning us about these things. My short list is: 1984, Brave New World, Minority Report, Terminator, and Jurassic Park. They all start out in well-meaning-ness and end badly.
Jurassic Park is the most interesting one to me. It's not automatically bad to clone dire wolves or woolly mammoths, but despite it being the most popular monster movie of my lifetime, the lesson hasn't made much of a dent. Gain of Function research seeming to be the most obvious case of ignoring the lesson.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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But surely 1984, Brave New World, Minority Report, Terminator, and Jurassic Park haven't turned out to be very predictive. Or are you saying we were warned just in time?
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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Exactly predictive, no. They each point at dangerous directions society could take, and then they play out the implications (assuming worst case scenarios, admittedly). I'd say the US has taken at least a couple steps in most of the dangerous direction those books suggest (the exception here might be Minority Report).
I don't know that reintroducing non-dinosaurs via cloning is all that bad. But I also don't know. And I think that's the basic lesson of the novel/movie, which nobody should need to be told. "Just because you can do a thing, should you?"
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Pete Jones wrote: | | They each point at dangerous directions society could take |
What do writers know? Over-imaginative twats with no social life who never leave their desks. And why dangerous at all? The world has always got better so they got that wrong. And I don't know any writers who predicted global warming.
Please provide a list of writers who created utopias, not dystopias. Or even plain old ordinopias.
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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There are not many utopian novelists, no doubt because utopias contain very little tension and drama, being ideal settings. Dystopia sells, which I see immediately is a good reason to discount what it actually says.
But there are some novelists. Gene Roddenberry and his scriptwriters) definitely presented a utopia in Star Trek and the Federation of Planets where all domestic problems had been solved and the only problems were caused by aliens, misunderstandings, weird science problems, etc.
The only other utopian writers I can think of are political writers. Thomas More (or his suspected forger), Plato, a whole bunch of socialists and Marxists who were theorizing future utopias.
Ordinopias would perhaps just be somewhat dull realism, of which there are legions of such writers. There is an entire genre devoted to dull realism, which is the post-Hemingway US short story.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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As Nancy Reagan said. Just say no.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Pete Jones wrote: | | There are not many utopian novelists, no doubt because utopias contain very little tension and drama, being ideal settings. Dystopia sells, which I see immediately is a good reason to discount what it actually says. |
New Atlantis.
| a utopian novel by Sir Francis Bacon, published posthumously in 1626. It appeared unheralded and tucked into the back of a longer work of natural history, Sylva Sylvarum (forest of materials). In New Atlantis, Bacon portrayed a vision of the future of human discovery and knowledge, expressing his aspirations and ideals for humankind. The novel depicts the creation of a utopian land where "generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendour, piety and public spirit" are the commonly held qualities of the inhabitants of the mythical Bensalem. |
Possibly written in a quiet spell while not otherwise occupied?
| The Baconian hypothesis of Shakespearean authorship, first proposed in the mid-19th century, contends that Francis Bacon wrote some or even all of the plays conventionally attributed to William Shakespeare | |
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