I think this is a meta-allusion to the theory that human consciousness developed recently, i.e. that people who lived before [written] language did not have language because they actually did not think. It's a potentially useful thought experiment, because we've all grown up not only knowing highly performant languages, but also knowing how to read / write.
However, primitive languages were... primitive. Where they primitive because people didn't know / understand the nuances their languages lacked? Or, were those things that simply didn't get communicated (effectively)?
Of course, spoken language predates writings which is part of the point. We know an individual can have a "conscious" conception of an idea if they communicate it, but that consciousness was limited to the individual. Once we have written language, we can perceive a level of communal consciousness of certain ideas. You could say that the community itself had a level of shared-consciousness.
With GPTs regurgitating digestible writings, we've come full circle in terms of proving consciousness, and some are wondering... "Gee, this communicated the idea expertly, with nuance and clarity.... but is the machine actually conscious? Does it think undependably of the world, or is it merely a kaledascopic reflection of its inputs? Is consciousness real, or an illusion of complexity?"
I’m not sure why it’s so mind-boggling that people in the year 1225 (Thomas Aquinas) or 1756 (Mozart) were just as creative and intelligent as they themselves are, as modern people. They simply had different opportunities then comparable to now. And what some of them did with those opportunities are beyond anything a “modern” person can imagine doing in those same circumstances. _A lot_ of free time over winter in the 1200s for certain people. Not nearly as many distractions either.
Saying early humans weren’t conscious because they lacked complex language is like saying they couldn’t see blue because they didn’t have a word for it.
Well, Oscar Wilde argues in “The Decay of Lying” that there were no stars before an artist could describe them and draw people’s attention to the night sky.
The basic assumption he attacks is that “there is a world we discover” vs “there is a world we create”.
It is hard paradigm shift, but there is certainly reality in “shared picture of the world” and convincing people of a new point of view has real implications in how the world appears in our minds for us and what we consider “reality”
It should be almost obligatory to always state which definition of consciousness one is talking about whenever they talk about consiousness, because I for example don't see what language has to do with our ability to experience qualia for example.
Is it self awarness? There are animals that can recognize themselves in mirror, I don't think all of them have a form of proto-language.
I've been looking for a video of the landing to see how it over turned, but haven't found one yet. I would have expected all airport runways to have multiple security cameras pointing at them t all times in this day and age.
I'm sure they do have video of the crash, but there's really no upside for them to release it. Eventually it'll come out, at the very least once the NTSB report is published.
Many would be quick to argue that they are interlinked but I strongly agree with you - particularly in the context of this thread.
For me, optimism still provides a lot of value in my worldview. The beliefs that have changed the most for me in the last 25 years is the limits and boundaries of what tools can do for us.
Technology ‘fixing humanity’ (when that ‘fixing’ is based on your own personal value system) is certainly a fools errand. But that limitation shouldn’t get in the way of imagining a utopia which is worth having.
Sure, I miss my childhood feelings of the 90s. But I also never expected a techno utopia to be ‘easy’.
I don't know why the parent post is being down voted. I think it makes a solid argument about creating a car that normal people can afford.
That is exactly what Chinese car companies is doing. Here's a video by Caresoft of the BYD Seagull which s apparently sub $12k. (Caresoft AFAIK do professional level car teardown reports for the auto industry) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izvdO-zdlKg&t=2s
I'd love to buy something like that at that price point.
> The most mechanical innovation we saw was a new type of brake for EVs. Although Mercedes says that EVs typically use regenerative braking for 98 percent of their decelerations, they still need friction brakes for that last 2 percent—which tend to be critical needs. The reason is simple: typical EV regen can provide a maximum of 290 kW of braking power, while a maximum 1G plus stop might require 2200 kW.
>But because these friction brakes are not used much, their rotors tend to rust, leading to noise during application, as well as degraded appearance. And they still produce brake dust.
>To solve these problems, Mercedes is developing what it calls In-Drive Brakes. The idea is to move the brakes from the wheels to inside the electric drive motor at either end, where the half-shafts emerge. The prototype is shown on the rear axle, but the concept could work at both ends.
>The brake would not be a conventional disc brake but rather something that looks like the clutch in a manual transmission. There would be a disc that spun with the half-shaft connected to each wheel. This disc would have friction material on most of each side near the periphery and with something that looked like a non-rotating flywheel on each side. An annular hydraulic cylinder would press the assembly together causing the rotating friction disc to drag on the two fixed plates to slow the car.
> Since this assembly would be fully enclosed in a housing at each end of the motor housing, the two fixed plates would have liquid cooling passages to remove the heat generated by the braking. A small sump at the base of each brake housing would serve to collect the brake dust generated.
mercedes benz innovations future technologies 2024, in drive brake
Mercedes-Benz
> The goal would be for these brakes to last for the life of the car. Being enclosed, they would be quiet. And being inboard, they would leave the wheels clean, reduce unsprung weight, and allow greater freedom for wheel designers, who would no longer have to worry about getting cooling air into the brakes.
This is NOT an innovation.
The initial mentioned problem of brake discs possibly rusting because they are rarely used can be easily address by the car computer periodically using the disc brakes rather than regenerative brakes if those haven't been used recently. Applying the disc brakes a few times every couple of days should not impact the range measurably.
They are making an easily reparable wear item such as brakes, almost cost prohibitive (labor costs) to replace by putting it inside depths of the electric drive unit. You now have to disable and disconnect high voltage battery , pullout the electric motor (usually include the motor, differential gear units, inverters in the same unit so it is similar to pulling out an engine in a ICE car), then take apart that engine, replace the friction clutches used for breaking, and then reverse the whole process to put it all back together.
The only thing this is designed to do is to sell more cars every x years by making cars harder to repair. The funny sad thing is; this is clear anti-consumer activity ironically developed with consumers (tax payers) money using tax write-off for R&D.
This type of thing is also why electric cars have a bad reputation at the moment. They depreciate so fast because the the greedy companies design them to make it impossible to repair economically, and insurance companies write them off after the tiniest accident/issue.
Nobody is stranded. At no time does NASA not have a plan to evacuate the space station if there's an emergency. There's currently 7 people aboard and 5 space craft docked, all of which can carry multiple people, all of which can be used to get people off the station.
You’re describing a plan for how to deal with stranded astronauts. If I’m on a road trip and my car breaks down at a gas station, I’m stranded. Even if there are other people and other cars at the gas station, and even if I still have access to emergency services, and even if I have a plan for how to deal with being stranded at a gas station.
I think some of us have a different (and perhaps colloquial) definition of stranded. Like, on a deserted island with no practical way home until some random ship happens to come by.
Stranded means you have no means for moving from where you are, or really no practical/acceptable means (you could swim off a deserted island for instance, but that probably wouldn't be considered a practical means of moving off the island).
Boeing has stranded these astronauts on the ISS because it has no (acceptable) means of bringing them down, and the astronauts themselves have no personal means for doing so. If they want to become un-stranded then somebody will need to arrange the means for them to come down.
That doesn't mean that it's impossible for somebody else to provide those means, or that the means simply don't exist in any capacity. But they meet both the dictionary and common colloquial definition of stranded.
There is no emergency that would require launching a rocket. They have craft docked to the space station at all times that they can return to Earth on at a moment’s notice.
I thought about this overnight and isn’t the real problem that nobody is saying is that NASA never wants less than 1 re-entry module on even an empty ISS, so that if god forbid they had to evacuate everyone for any reason other than a dead station, that the next crew has two ways to get home?
So even though everyone fits in the existing modules there is no spare if they let these two go home.
This. Even without AI, we have inexperienced developers rolling out something that "just works" without thinking about many of the scaling/availability issues. Then you have to spend 10x the time fixing those issues.
I presume they loose a fair bit sales. It will be interesting to see any data on what happens to the customers who try to buy something on a Sunday and realize they can't. Do they return another day or purchase somewhere else.
Bone marrow transplant. All the infected cells die, and the transplant produces new one, free from HIV an. carrying a mutation preventing them from being infected.
This approach does not scale.
HIV treatments prevent replication of cells infected by HIV such that the number of immune cells infected by HIV can be undetectable. The problem is there are latent reservoirs of HIV DNA / cells that may reactivate later or hide in areas of the body without immune protection (this is a lot easier for immune system cells with privileged access!). See https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro.2015.5 for an older but good discussion on this.
From what I know (which is very little though I follow the news with excitement) HIV is "suppressed" by making it untestably low, which means (apparently) that you are also not contagious. IIRC, therefore maybe you are a carrier, but you experience no symptoms, will not develop AIDS, cannot be proven to be a carrier via testing, and are not contagious. Good enough.
However, in this particular treatment, it was via bone marrow donation, so it literally did change the DNA / body.
