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SedanChair posted:Who am "I"? I'm Batman. Presumably, somewhat obviously, 'you' are a prospective employer.
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Apr 28, 2014 14:23
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DrProsek posted:Statistically speaking, there is a non-insignificant chance that at least one person in this thread is related to Charlemagne, the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), and/or Genghis Khan, so being descended from some dude who managed to not lose land to Vikings isn't really all that impressive. Well, not Charlemagne, but I am descended from his mother's favorite nephew, Berthalot, on my grandmother's side. (I know this because his grandson came over with William the Bastard, and then his descendants stayed in a town of 85 people for literally six hundred something years.) On my father's side, I've got Stuart blood (Our William who came over was either the grandson of James II's daughter or the son of James II's granddaughter, I keep forgetting which way it goes), but the descent from this old high king who kidnapped a guy who later became a saint is a bit more entertaining to me. It's entertaining to one-up some chinese people with - 'I have a hat that's older than your dynasty' is a phrase I've used once or twice. (And a pitchfork older than the Magna Carta) It's even more fun to run into a distant cousin - I found out that someone I work with is a relative that separated from the family before we came to America. Both families have the same story about the time the Vikings tried to raid our castle back in 895 or so, with minor variations. William Wallace was one of our neighbors after a famously bad incident involving Edward the Bruce and the English persuaded us to rapidly leave Ireland. (Dal Riata family - we go back and forth a lot. Generally after starting, and then losing a fight of some kind.) Note: We did not lose the land to the Vikings, the castle wasn't finished so we lit it on fire with them inside. Lost everything we had, mind you. Edit: I know all this because it was my grandfather's hobby for half his life, and then computer genealogical databases made it all trivial. But some of the stories are _fantastic._ Everyone should check out their ancestry, just to see if you can find the stupid stuff your family's gotten up to over the centuries. Warcabbit fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Jul 25, 2014 |
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Jul 25, 2014 03:50
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Rhesus Pieces posted:Wow, you are toilet-bowl white! And nerdy.
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Jul 25, 2014 04:37
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Pornographic Memory posted:Well she's also somebody who thinks aristocrats were actually better people, as opposed to people as good as anybody else who just happened to be distant descendants of some guy who was buddies with a king or something at one time. Try 'able to yell more loudly' and 'able to convince three of his buddies that going and stealing some other guy's horses was a brilliant idea.' TLM3101 posted:The thing is, back in the day there actually was a need for butlers, chambermaids, nursemaids, governesses, scullery-maids, cooks, gardeners, under-gardeners, bootblacks, footmen, drivers, etc. Wealth was largely tied up in land, or physical resources that required management, and with the upper-classes also being required to go to war and in many respects being the political class ( for a given value of politics, anyway ), they genuinely did need people to take care of all the day-to-day menial tasks that needed doing. Of course, it was also a way to signify wealth and status. In the continuing antics of my family, we have a cousin who ran off and left her first husband to go with Joseph Smith out west. She did well for herself, but the relevant point is that she was an ardent feminist, to the point she ran for Senate, though it was illegal, and was a correspondent with Susan B. Anthony and the like. A real, honest to goodness social revolutionary and suffragette. She was also a huge proponent of polygamy. Why? Because the second wife could take care of the household, freeing up the first wife for intellectual pursuits and effort. That's the kind of thing that changed _everything_ once mechanical assistants like the washer and dryer or vacuum cleaner popped up. We owe a lot to freedom from toil, and every so often it's worth reflecting on it. A few simple mechanical devices set half the world free. Main Paineframe posted:Sadly, this actually is a thing in certain tech circles (mostly extreme SV bubble universes) where people have actually managed to convince themselves that coders and engineers are literally the smartest people on the planet who are good at literally everything, and that the world would be so much better if we booted out all those politicians and bankers and businessmen and put programmers and software engineers in charge instead. We'd have to end democracy, of course, to prevent the enlightened coder-kings from being overruled by the dumb masses who are too stupid or lazy to even learn Node.js, let alone govern a country. It descends from Plato's dream of wise philosopher-kings, the only people whose wisdom is great enough to have true ideas, being the only ones truly fit to rule a state, except that SV types have substituted themselves for the philosophers because all that money they have clearly shows they're smarter than philosophers and all their ~disruption~ shows that they're the ones with true ideas now. This has all happened before and it will all happen again. Reminds me of Heinlein's 'The Roads Must Roll.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll I suppose it's the key difference between his Functionalism in the book and actual Technocracy. Warcabbit fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Jul 26, 2014 |
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Jul 26, 2014 17:14
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Augustin Iturbide posted:Tech industry big-wig hitting us with the real concerns of today: Well, if you think over aeons, it's basically not that unsurprising a concept - it's a lot easier to send unmanned probes everywhere, and I suspect AI-containing probes are how we'd explore the galaxy at some point. Sublight ones. It's not so much a concern as something to consider.
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Aug 6, 2014 01:43
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Yeah, it's not a thing to be worried about so much as 'they're probably going to be what outlives humanity and colonizes the stars' because of various things like human meat puppets requiring things like air and food. I'm actually very interested in the evolutionary patterns and behavior of AI, because it won't have the underlying urges of the human / mammal / lizard / whatever brain stem. Unless it's a scanned human brain that all AI is based on. (I am making no predictions.) Honestly, my opinion on AI is that sooner or later, we're going to have systems that we can socialize with and work with and not be able to tell they're not human. Will those be true AI? I don't know. Will they be 'for all intents and purposes' AI? I'd guess so.
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Aug 6, 2014 15:19
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Pope Guilty posted:There's only one known kind of intelligent mind so far, so suggesting that another would be very similar to that isn't too outre. Not enough information to make a judgement, really. That being said, personally, I don't think the first AI will be entirely a planned thing, but rather an emergent behavior of multiple half-assed networked systems. http://www.zdnet.com/cias-amazon-cloud-goes-live-firewalled-and-private-7000032314/ ... okay, we're hosed.
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Aug 6, 2014 20:06
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