The Metaverse

[Clinamenic]

ARPA-Net was an example of top-down, or at least nearly top-down comp-sci innovation and implementation, to my knowledge. That and a lot of radio tech was developed for reasons of national security and wartime efforts, if I'm not mistaken.

 

[Clinamenic]

Its my understanding that Silicon Valley was initially, and likely still largely is, a means for US defense research.

edit: namely through university STEM programs pertaining to radio technology.

 

[luka]

you might be using top-down in a much stricter, more limited way than me and Version here...

 

[sus]

one of the problems you have with thinking is that you are good at systematic logical and meticulous thought, and you do it for its own sake with no concern for reality whatsoever. so it all becomes arithmatic relating to nothing outside of itself

I'm actually making a very basic point that you'd readily agree with if I phrased it in terms of "training programs" and "you create what you reward"—but for some reason you just don't like this particular factoring. (Or caught a mood today...)

 

[luka]

if your point is simply that if i die before i reproduce then i have died before i have reproduced, then yes, i do agree

 

[Clinamenic]

you might be using top-down in a much stricter, more limited way than me and Version here...

Officially or privately, much/most of it is top-down. But yeah, I was using it in strictly the official sense of budget appropriations and military operations.

Yet another reason why blockchain is so interesting, unless of course you believe Satoshi was an intel operation.

 

[luka]

I'm actually making a very basic point that you'd readily agree with if I phrased it in terms of "training programs" and "you create what you reward"—but for some reason you just don't like this particular factoring. (Or caught a mood today...)

but we've talked about this before and you know that the problem here revolves around 'incentive' and what that might mean and involve.

 

[Clinamenic]

thats exactly what im saying. this is the problem. that there is top-down administration of an agenda which is drawn up without consulting me in any way

Well we could hold the first annual Thames Riverside Blockchain Convention, loop in your long overdue opinions.

 

[Clinamenic]

but we've talked about this before and you know that the problem here revolves around 'incentive' and what that might mean and involve.

Even dynamic incentives, ones that react to the very policies attempting to account for them, can be sufficiently accounted for.

Really it just seems this board, certainly not unreasonably and not in a manner uncharacteristic of the majority of humans, has deep and visceral reservations about being psychically wired into a global system over which the financial 0.001% exert considerable influence.

 

[Clinamenic]

Hence why I place ultimate value on unmediated enlightenment, rather than anything predicated on the aforementioned system, which is to say almost anything external to your mind, and even much of what can be considered internal to it.

 

[luka]

but we've talked about this before and you know that the problem here revolves around 'incentive' and what that might mean and involve.

im not just being a dick for the sake of it (on this occassion). this really is a way of thinking im very very chary of. not that there's nothing in it, just that you have to be very very careful and very very cute in how you think through it

 

[Clinamenic]

If I wasn't approaching this from a perspective of detached pragmatism and technical problem-solving, but instead was aiming to base some personal fulfillment in the world external to my mind, I suspect I too would have little faith.

The criticisms of these developments seeming bleak and unexcited betray to me, in addition to a lack of technical understanding, a fixation within the material realm, and an insistence upon ultimately deriving personal fulfillment therefrom, instead of transcending the whole thing altogether. One can transcend reality without so much as leaving one's room, but it can certainly be more interesting to venture about.

 

[Clinamenic]

The detachment is critical here, but threatens to wane too deeply into apathy. Part of the exquisite science would seem to be the paradoxical reconciliation of this ultimate detachment with a compassion that does, indeed, attach one to others.

 

[Clinamenic]

By detachment I largely mean the ability to see through everything without despair. Easier once one has tapped into the infinite reassurance that real faith provides, as a reservoir of sorts.

 

[yyaldrin]

i was thinking this whole metaverse is gonna take tens of thousands of people working on it right? i already read somewhere that facebook was looking for thousands of new employees. when the metaverse is gonna be a success it's gonna accelerate gentrification even further cos you have a million more of those programmers taking all the houses.

 

[Clinamenic]

i was thinking this whole metaverse is gonna take tens of thousands of people working on it right? i already read somewhere that facebook was looking for thousands of new employees. when the metaverse is gonna be a success it's gonna accelerate gentrification even further cos you have a million more of those programmers taking all the houses.

Yeah I expect programming jobs to increase substantially, which would hopefully warrant increased spending (publicly or privately) on comp-sci education. Jobs for smart contract engineers, for example, I expect to skyrocket over the next decade.

 

[luka]

we should blow it all up now and return to a text only internet. only chat rooms and forums and perosnal websites. no images.

 

[Clinamenic]

It would be quite difficult, even for the US, to destroy something like Bitcoin, and we are only getting started.

 

[Clinamenic]

(This is why AGI isn't coming anytime soon: we don't have the raw data to create a simulation of the Real over which they can train and optimize)

Yeah we don't even seem close to artificial consciousness, to my knowledge, assuming that is close enough to what you mean by artificial general intelligence.

Once we have artificial consciousness, then things will really get interesting.

 

[Clinamenic]

I think the task of science in the 21st century is to demystify consciousness, and subsequently to programatize it and embody it in a higher form than our wetware presently does.

The task for the humanities, I suppose, would be to anticipate this and define a framework for ethical coexistence between natural and artificial consciousness. Failure here could lead to a situation similar to the plot of the Matrix.

edit: by "science" I mean the exact sciences as grounded in the discourse of physics.