> Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language.
Interestingly, this is (roughly) the Qur'anic explanation for the genesis of human consciousness.
It makes a statement that can be interpreted that way with some help, sure. Sort of like how the ancient greeks came up with atoms, evolution etc. But it was just a vague idea, really, nothing very concrete.
I got GPT-3 to take your story and complete it. It's slightly terrifying.
-----------------------------
Short Story
In the not-so-distant future, we’ve trained AI to predict the probability you might die on any given day. But it’s trained on so many factors, and reads so many inputs, that no one really knows how it works.
So the story is of a random person who suddenly observes their meter jump from the usual 0% to a cautious 3%. Then over the course of the day, it slowly climbs to 20%, and onwards.
No one knows why, and no one can help them. They get a call from their boss, who sends them home early, rather than risk their safety in the office. Strangers offer to take them home. A stranger on the street offers to trade cards with them, and promises that his card can help them.
The meter shows up at 30% on the subway, and the narrator tries to hide it, but it’s too late, and the people around them are already looking at them suspiciously. The narrator tries to call their spouse, but they can’t get hold of them. They go home, but their spouse isn’t there.
By the time they get home, the meter is at 40%. They try to call for help, but the police are already there, waiting. The meter hits 60%, and then 100%.
The police tell the narrator that they’re sorry, but they’ve been watching them for some time, and have seen no indications that the narrator is a threat. The narrator protests that they’ve been trying to call the police, but now the police just say that the meter made a prediction, and they’re just going by the numbers.
The police tell the narrator that they’ll have to detain them, for the next 24 hours, to prevent them from doing anything rash. The narrator protests, but the police ignore them, and cuff them.
The police take the narrator in, but they aren’t taken to a normal jail. They’re taken to a special prison — a prison for people who might die.
He spends the remainder of his life in that jail cell.
This is fascinating. It actually reads very much like the type of story a verbally-advanced third or fourth grader could come up with — a broad understanding of how to move the story along (escalating stakes represented by increasing percentage values), unexplained and unresolved side plots (what is the deal with the stranger and his card?), and some tantalizing flashes of what appears to be true creativity (the protagonist’s fate).
I had no idea this was the state of the art. I’m blown away.
One thing that isn't captured nowadays is that a lot of what "couldn't scale" before - i.e manual work, the type of which you described - is now much more scalable due to how much easier it is to automate tasks at scale.
It's suddenly feasible to build businesses that require at-scale manual operations, because you can do so in a predictable, revenue-positive way.
"Do Things That Don't Scale" is not a choice which founders make even if they have all the resources and technical chops. If you don't know or unsure what to focus on then how do you decide to optimize and improve it?
Take Instacart for example, what would you have done differently to build the catalog given you had same information what Apoorva had at that time? Same for Pandora & Airbnb...
I'm impressed people keep making the "option not to use it" argument. Our lines of communication are monopolized. "Just don't use Facebook/Twitter/Amazon" is an irrelevant argument since there are no alternatives.
You can absolutely love comfortably and normally in the US without Facebook or Twitter. It's more challenging to avoid Amazon entirely, but you can easily avoid supporting them directly.
I understand the practical difficulty of another platform being created and being successful, and thus the general recommendation of "not using the platform" is futile.
However, this is a comment thread of OP comparing Pravda to Twitter. You are not at a higher risk of death by the government for trying to start a competitive platform to Twitter.
Short term economic damage is a) hard to measure and b) meaningless
Sweden’s betting on long term recovery in light of second/third/etc waves. As much as it detracts from the catastrophic fear and loathing narrative, it has sound economic and epidemiological foundations.
YC is a crapshoot. We had the most impressive metrics in our interviewing class and killer recommendations and didn’t get in. The ones from our interview group that did were astoundingly dumb.
There wasn’t a single successful entrepreneur amongst the “partners” who interviewed us.
Here we are a year or so later flying at 7 figure revenues thankful we didn’t give up nearly 10% of our business to an incubator that’s a shell of its former self.
I've said this here before (I think) and I'll say it again. With almost all initial YC partners leaving and YC getting bigger, they also get more risk-averse, just like any growing business.
Therefore I'm afraid that we will see less and less interesting and "out there" YC companies but more confirming ones.
I'm aware that growing has other benefits for YC and its companies, but I'm personally just a bit sad about this...
Edit: I feel like Seibel is the last interesting full-time partner and I wouldn't be surprised if he leaves within 2 years.
This is a real wat. You think the tech industry is almost entirely based in San Francisco?
Only about 1% of tech workers are employed by companies headquartered in Silicon Valley, let alone San Francisco. The absolute vast majority of technology employment is at companies that don't have a direct technology product. Software engineers working at traditional businesses like banks and retailers far overwhelm the employees at FAANG and startup type companies.
You're buying into an echo chamber concept because you don't realize the extent of the universe you're characterizing. You're mistaking the echo chamber for the reality, kind of how people mistake what people say on twitter for what people actually think.
Obviously the context of the discussion is regarding the monopoly of political information by the FAANG. Why would software engineers at banks have any relevance here?
One of my exes believes that the tech community suppresses all left-wing discourse.
The President of America believes that the tech community suppresses him personally.
I mean, sure, you could say “both are in their own ridiculous echo chambers”, but the walls of both those echo chambers were built by the tech industry.
My comment specifically states Post-2016. Trump was elected in 2016 and as a result of this the Tech Companies "woke" up to become political entities instead of platforms, many many tech executives were filmed/recorded publicly saying would would do anything in their power to avoid "another 2016"
Interestingly, this is (roughly) the Qur'anic explanation for the genesis of human consciousness.