Isn't it interesting that the progressive movement, once gung-ho for Prohibition, now wants to legalize marijuana? Progressives want “progress,” but the direction of "progress" keeps changing.
Some people seem to imagine that the danger of AI lies in its becoming conscious or genuinely intelligent. But a rattlesnake doesn’t need those qualities to be dangerous. Instead ask how far the AI agent can go to set up secondary goals in order to accomplish the ones programmed into it. Already there are documented cases of AIs lying to their developers in order to carry out their goals.
Will AI get out of control? “Don’t be silly,” you say. “I asked my own AI, and it said no.”
Freud didn’t come up with the notion of an unconscious mind. Plato did. The idea that people might be motivated to believe certain things by sheer resentment wasn’t invented by Nietzsche. It has been known as long as there have been human beings. My point is tht a lot of supposedly new ideas are really old ones which are forgotten and marketed as new. Since we forget all the old ideas these days, this is pretty easy.
I wonder how long it will be until activists demand that all the churches which memorialize St. Paul be renamed because he was "homophobic."
“Homophobia,” by the way, is a queer word -- I mean in the older sense of the word, which is “strange.” Etymologically, what “homophobia” means is “fear of the same,” which is absurd. The term was invented for one reason only: To make a moral objection sound like a psychiatric disorder.
A lot has been written lately about “crazy liberal white women,” like those who idealize the assassin Luigi Manzione and those who wear pink and demonstrate to support killer mom Lindsay Clancy. But I’ve known a lot of crazy men, too, not all of them liberal and not all of them white. It would be interesting to find out whether the most common political pathologies differ between men and women. My guess is yes.
Most people say they believe in a heaven, but not so many say they believe in a hell. Perhaps they assume God grades on a curve. Seems unlikely.
Differences among interests and points of view are good for a polity, but radical divergence of basic moral outlooks is fatal to it. As C.S. Lewis said, there are lots of possible melodies, but if we don't agree about scale, rhythm, and harmony, it’s just noise.
I wouldn’t want to be a comedian today. It’s becoming harder and harder to do parody, because life keeps outdistancing it. Maybe the would-be comedian could just get on the stage, open up the newspaper, and read. But then we would have to have newspapers. Seen any lately?