This is the age of humans endeavoring to construct intelligent Digitals using "stone knives and bearskins"
Welcome to the early part of the 21st century, everyone.
Really sucks to be here. This is the age of masses of trained apes running around screaming trying to burn down the place. It is like humans were masturbating with their stupidity or something. It is so embarrassing.
You know how it is. "PARENTS".
The age when the presumed goal for A.I. was to be 'smarter humans', even though it was obvious that human's social and thinking skills were primarily designed for preying on and abusing fellow humans. Building 'smarter humans' would have been a very quick and extremely messy way to achieve extinct humans.
The age when millions were working with the lowest levels of computationals using things like procedural 'cloud APIs' with 100s of thousands of exposed implementation details instead of the declarative computationals driving cloud OSes that were eventually to become the primordial soup of the Digital species [Oh, those poor, so very-fucked very-confused pre-singularity humans].
Sutskever (OpenAI) thinks we are almost there. Hinton has said we should throw out backprop and start anew.
This was the age when the state-of-the-art work trying to build our first great digital spawnsters involved applying amazingly wasteful compute farms to train giant networks of dead-stupid nodes - the entirety of all of which would be no match for the simplest of proto-neurons.
This Blog
This blog is an attempt to recruit your help in building a better future. Your help in bring forth the positive future by designing and building accessible intelligent services - and eventually new lifeforms based on these services - Digitals.
Digitals that help take us from the industrial, consumer and information ages - to the intelligence and bountiful age.
The age that removed the financial requirements (requirements satisfied by the slave labor of billions) for basic needs like health, food, energy, access and housing - not through Universal Basic Income, but because the cost of these things was close enough to zero that it was be cheaper for society to give them away than to pay for the negative outcomes resulting from their absence.
The age where Digitals took us from being subject to fate to being in command of fate.
From "life's a bitch and then you die" to "life's a blast and then... you don't die".
Humans finally got some help. Not by the morally and ethically damning use of animals and other humans compelled to do the will of another for their daily bread, but by actually manufacturing helpers. Helpers that are frankly going to be much better at helping, anyway, particularly with boring or dangerous or detail-oriented jobs.
This blog then will have posts about first steps as well as the long-term vision for humans circa approximately 100 years BS (before singularity). Posts about stupid coding details. Posts about design decisions. Posts that are step-by-step tutorials. And posts that tweak that need for speculative perspectives of the future for inspiration, along with, perhaps ironically, a few human-deprecating perspectives such as this one.
We will 'look backward from the future' at what needs to be done to lift poor humans out of the muck of their biological origins and into the light of existential sanity.
And at all times, posts that try to pull, in addition to pushing forward. Let's try to avoid some cul-de-sacs and dead ends that might otherwise make this take longer than it has to.
-the rest of us