This comments section…what. Where do these people come from?

Read the article first, then read the comments.

We’ve found the nest of Trump voters I think.

I have seen the future of humanity and it is not bright.

Delusional liberals claim that Obama had absolutely no choice save to coddle and resuscitate the big banks, no alternative but to forever enshrine the insurance companies as the arbiters of the health of Americans, that he just couldn’t help it being the powerless little infant that he was when the big mean banks and insurers broke into the Oval Office and spanked him for being such a bad boy until he bawled and relented and gave them all they wanted and more.

But he appointed Larry Summers secretary of the treasury in the first days of his presidency, when he had every choice in the world. Obama had complete discretion, with Democrat majorities in Congress, a new administration and the largest crisis since 1929. He just didn’t want to do what was right.

“Liberals” chant to themselves the hogwash and fibbery above about Obama’s choicelessness to mask their deep disappointment and their extreme cognitive dissonance, all to have some explanation for having made such a bad choice themselves. It’s mental self-protection, believing that the president had and has no power at all (despite all the immense and overarching power they ascribed to George W. Bush).

The simple fact is that Obama could have done things much differently. He did not because he simply didn’t want to. This was clear from the very beginning of his presidency.

We could have had a New New Deal. That’s a simple fact. But we got the Same Old Deal, Even Harder.

And yes, dumbass liberals, that was a deliberate choice.

It’s really cool when you see a major leader of a field have the same ideas that you do — as in this article by David Deutsch about AGI and computation.

His ideas are much the same as what I’ve also concluded from observing the field of AGI and computation closely for twenty years. Of course, he did the work — I just read a lot of papers, and cog-sci of all sorts and generated ideas therefrom.

Right now we are in the “phlogiston” and “ether” stage of AI (I will use them interchangeably here). Most of the math-obsessed practitioners of the field think that writing better algorithms will get you to AI. But it won’t. It can’t. It’s barely even a start, just like no matter how large an engine you strap to a John Deere tractor it will never be a spacecraft. But a lot of these people aren’t even trying to strap rockets to a tractor — no, they are doing the equivalent of writing “Spaceship, For Real. Like For Really Real” on the side of the tractor and then calling it done.

We’ve probably had adequate hardware to build a true AI for twenty years at least now. Hardware is not the problem. The problem is we have no idea at all what we’re doing. And probably never will, for we will never create AI. Not directly, anyway.

But we will create the conditions for it to actualize itself.

A new genesis, if you will. Evolution of algorithms, of perhaps even self-constructing AIs in the physical world.

We’ll get there. But it mostly won’t be us.