Ah, so Seagate still sucks!

Eh, I don’t think it’s fair to erase all nuance between spirituality and religion.

Heaven/Hell are these ordered places where some sentient divine being is supposed to judge you at death and sort you into. Whether it’s Anubis or God or whatever. It places a sort of human sense of control over the natural world.

Thinking there might be some sort of spiritual something or other, at least on my end, is thinking that well, we’ve got energy in our bodies that dissipates as we die. That energy ends up recycled in some way, first law of thermodynamics and all that. I don’t know if that energy can linger around as ghosts, or act as some new “soul” in some reincarnation cycle, or if it just gets dispersed or what, but you don’t need to believe in religion to consider it.

Though there’s definitely some overlap.

I would suggest the textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russell and Norvig. It’s a good overview of the field and has been in circulation since 1995. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Modern_Approach

Here’s a photo, as an example of how this book approaches the topic, in that there’s an entire chapter on it with sections on four approaches, and that essentially even the researchers have been arguing about what intelligence is since the beginning.

But all of this has been under the umbrella of AI. Just because corporations have picked up on it, doesn’t invalidate the decades of work done by scientists in the name of AI.

My favourite way to think of it is this: people have forever argued whether or not animals are intelligent or even conscious. Is a cat intelligent? Mine can manipulate me, even if he can’t do math. Are ants intelligent? They use the same biomechanical constructs as humans, but at a simpler scale. What about bacteria? Are viruses alive?

If we can create an AI that fully simulates a cockroach, down to every firing neuron, does it mean it’s not AI just because it’s not simulating something more complex, like a mouse? Does it need to exceed a human to be considered AI?

Honestly, I think part of it is that having an entire community of people suffering depressive symptoms becomes a depressing environment.

I’m sure I heard this in a Brene Brown video, but in order to be able to help someone else, you need to be in the right place yourself. Two empty glasses can’t help fill each other. And most people can’t help an entire community of struggling people, one glass can’t help fill fifty, it’s futile and self damaging to try. It’s why we have professionals that do one on one therapy.

And, this might be unpopular, but I think historically this is why we have priests too. I’m not religious, but I think that community offers that to some people.

Sometimes people need to vent, and some people aren’t lucky enough to be in a position where they can vent to anybody, but I don’t know if diving into a community where you expose yourself to everyone else’s problems too is the solution. Things like addictions counseling are controlled, with professionals at the helm, and often in small spaces, with a prescribed meeting time and an end.

I think you’re conflating “intelligence” with “being smart”.

Intelligence is more about taking in information and being able to make a decision based on that information. So yeah, automatic traffic lights are “intelligent” because they use a sensor to check for the presence of cars and “decide” when to switch the light.

Acting like some GPT is on the same level as a traffic light is silly though. On a base level, yes, it “reads” a text prompt (along with any messaging history) and decides what to write next. But that decision it’s making is much more complex than “stop or go”.

I don’t know if this is an ADHD thing, but when I’m talking to people, sometimes I finish their sentences in my head as they’re talking. Sometimes I nail it, sometimes I don’t. That’s essentially what chatGPT is, a sentence finisher that happened to read a huge amount of text content on the web, so it’s got context for a bunch of things. It doesn’t care if it’s right and it doesn’t look things up before it says something.

But to have a computer be able to do that at all?? That’s incredible, and it took over 50 years of AI research to hit that point (yes, it’s been a field in universities for a very long time, with most that time people saying it’s impossible), and we only hit it because our computers got powerful enough to do it at scale.

Nope, I’m playing DOS2, since that’s been sitting in my steam library for way too long!

THEN maybe I’ll BG3. If my laptop can handle it…