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There's some sort of good analogy in here about how the modern-day search for "AI" is akin to the search for an alchemist recipe for gold. In the search, many i

There's some sort of good analogy in here about how the modern-day search for "AI" is akin to the search for an alchemist recipe for gold. In the search, many interesting substitutes are created and many other useful discoveries made. Those proclaiming to have general AI that solves everything are charlatans like the man in the article professing to have a way to create gold, but they create investment into research which leads to other useful knowledge, processes, and artifacts.

Natsu 6y ago
The irony here is that we can transmute other metals into gold nowadays, it's just absurdly uneconomical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#Gold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...
ChainOfFools 6y ago
I have used this analogy for cryptocurrency, which in almost every respect is such a close fit for alchemy that word swapping the terms leaves papers discussing these phenomena almost entirely unchanged. both trying to create scarce money out of not-scarce not-money. both slavishly grinding away at technical attacks as solutions to the irreconcilable structural flaws in their basic assumptions, rather than reexamining the validity of those assumptions. Both utterly infested with corrupting motives, con men (and women) and charlatans who pretend to ideology but are merely opportunistic scroungers who mastered just enough technical hype-speak (or as it was expressed in Faust, "warmed up stuff") to bamboozle other, less sophisticated pretend ideologues into propping up their scam. both ending up incidentally furthering technology which will go on to do interesting things unrelated to philosopher's stones/blockchains. They even have strikingly similar origin stories in a fictionalized, pseudononymous creator-ideologue (hermes trismegistus/Satoshi nakamoto) who proposed the outline of their respective magnum opus processes on a color-coded sacred text (emerald tablet/white paper)

Natsu 6y ago

The irony here is that we can transmute other metals into gold nowadays, it's just absurdly uneconomical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#Gold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...

ChainOfFools 6y ago

I have used this analogy for cryptocurrency, which in almost every respect is such a close fit for alchemy that word swapping the terms leaves papers discussing these phenomena almost entirely unchanged. both trying to create scarce money out of not-scarce not-money. both slavishly grinding away at technical attacks as solutions to the irreconcilable structural flaws in their basic assumptions, rather than reexamining the validity of those assumptions. Both utterly infested with corrupting motives, con men (and women) and charlatans who pretend to ideology but are merely opportunistic scroungers who mastered just enough technical hype-speak (or as it was expressed in Faust, "warmed up stuff") to bamboozle other, less sophisticated pretend ideologues into propping up their scam. both ending up incidentally furthering technology which will go on to do interesting things unrelated to philosopher's stones/blockchains. They even have strikingly similar origin stories in a fictionalized, pseudononymous creator-ideologue (hermes trismegistus/Satoshi nakamoto) who proposed the outline of their respective magnum opus processes on a color-coded sacred text (emerald tablet/white paper)