> Humans being manipulated is not, in and of itself, a hint that things are going wrong.
If a car can be stolen, should it be stolen ?
If a dog can be beaten, should it be beaten ?
I don’t think because something is fragile that it should be broken, on the contrary. We should recognize the delicacy of our species and design around it. That’d be a sign of evolved behaviour , I’d reckon.
> the #1 enemy of most people is their own mind
Again, define the « mind ». Is it really the mental space people live in that is the problem or the culture, teachings, bullyings and programmings that have been thrown at them since birth that are maladaptive ? I’d argue that the mind is fine, given what it can do and that it is just a tool. It is what we do with it that matters and since birth, we’ve been hijacked to fit in society.
> The result is most applications were severely dumbed down to work on a smartphone.
Good point, and it could be argued the user soon followed that dumbification, with youngest generations not even understanding the file/folder analogy.
I think we can go dumber ! Why need an analogy at all ? It will all be there, up in your face and you can just talk to it !
The content and services provided by AI still needs those humans behind. Maybe when it’s all AI agents talking to themselves, this would make sense, but before that, someone has to write, edit and choose that content.
I feel the call of the Muse, and always try to negotiate because, well, I need money to live.
To me, creativity feels like a laser I can point in any chosen direction.
Want to make a SAAS ? Sure ! Here are a dozen ideas !
Want to write a Sci-fi short story ? There you go, have your pick between those !
Want to make a video game ? Oh boy, have I got the concepts for you !
Then, it's the execution part. The one I never really got right...How could I focus on just one thing ? One thing to make, when the excitement is long gone ?Until I noticed that if I choose a good project, good in the sense that it feeds my soul, helps my fellow human beings and sadly, not necessarily that it will make me money...It's easier to stick to it.
In the end, the Muse wins. So I just stick with them, and who knows ! Maybe I can buy a beer or two with their fruits :)
Agnes Varda [1] taught me about the cycle of inspiration-creational effort-showing your work. Nowdays I book an expositional space every year in November and somehow all the work needed is done until then.
I think the key for me, a lifelong messy person, was to find out what I like or don't.
Like :
-Taking notes on the fly for capturing fleeting ideas.
-When working on a project, embracing the mess by having as many documents/spreadsheets as possible.
-When a project is over, putting everything in a folder and letting it there.
Don't like :
-Using fancy tools like Notion, Obsidian and the likes.
-Getting stuck on rigid systems, and even worse : tied to a subscription.
-Being forced to use a specific device.
My solution ?
Upnote.
Proton Drive.
A messy desktop.
Am I the most "optimized" I could be ? No. But I can quickly find out everything I need fast, and when I'm working on a project, I know what to do.
Postulate 1: The music is created by the radio in the form of sound waves, the end.
Postulate 2: The music was played by a band in the form of sound waves, some time in the past. The band recorded their music on to some storage medium so that it could be transmitted to the future. In the present, the storage medium is connected up to a piece of equipment that turns the recorded signal into some invisible power transmission that spreads throughout space in a way you can't experience directly with any of your natural senses. The radio however can sense these invisible power transmissions and can turn them back into audio that sounds like what the band played in the past. So we're saying that it is possible to create music in the form of sound waves (that's what the band did), and it is possible for the radio to output sound waves that sound like music (that's what the radio does), but the radio is curiously not the thing that is producing music and instead we have an enormous system of technology transmitting the music across space and time.
You'd need an awful lot of evidence to convince me that postulate 2 is true and postulate 1 is false.
On the one hand you have "consciousness can be created, and it is created by the brain". On the other hand you have "consciousness can be created, and it is created somewhere, but it's not created by the brain, instead it is created somewhere else and there is a system of consciousness transmission that gets it into the brain".
There's just no reason to prefer the second explanation. It is a more complicated story.
And despite looking for them intensely, we have never found any evidence of the existence of radio waves, or been able to send a signal to a radio ourselves.
Yes, it must be the tea and the coffee, not the lack of fat, corn and other sugars, the daily physical activity, the community or even the geographic settings.
Well it's herbal tea, so there's something to that. But I think it's the high amount of wild greens. No chemicals, just natural greens they pick from around the island. Pretty healthy stuff!
Well…if you present stories, for sure we gonna make chapters out of it. Or beats, even.
I wonder what the results would have been if people were showed documentary footage with no narration ? But my suspicion is that just like we sometimes see human faces in places they clearly don’t belong, structuring information in a story format (beginning, middle, end with rises and falls in between) is an intrinsic part of how we process.
Maybe it’s not so much that we like stories, but that we see stories everywhere and the more information takes this digest form, the more we feel at ease ?
We always predict as well we can - that's just how the brain works. Even without narration we'll be subconsciously comparing what we're seeing to past experiences and using those experiences to predict what comes next at various levels of abstraction.
I highly doubt we have any intrinsic bias towards perceiving things as following a story template, since our DNA has been shaped by nature, not stories. The major bias we do have, encoded in the way that our brain works, is just that nature is largely predictable on various scales - next time will be the same as last time - and this bias is what causes us to predict and perceive/segment current experience based on past experience.
>our DNA has been shaped by nature, not stories.
Interesting point, I believe the opposite. Or, let's say, that stories have much more impact that DNA on our behaviour/thinking models.
Religion, money, appartenance to a tribe outside of immediate family, all of that are stories that we adhere to.
Hell, look at kamikazes : a group of people willingly destroying themselves (and therefore, their DNA) for the perceived well-being of a larger imaginary group, "their countrymen".
No, I believe animals can and do predict their environment, but we differ because we can adhere to a layer of information that is on top of what we can observe : call it collective subconscious or myths, but this is information that helps us do more.
> Or, let's say, that stories have much more impact that DNA on our behaviour/thinking models
FWIW I think we agree - we don't have a genetic bias to perceive everything according to a cultural story template, but, having been exposed to enough of the genre we'll naturally be predicting/perceiving that in contexts where that is expected.
Note that there are many differing storytelling structures, so this really has to be learnt/cultural.
> Humans being manipulated is not, in and of itself, a hint that things are going wrong. If a car can be stolen, should it be stolen ? If a dog can be beaten, should it be beaten ? I don’t think because something is fragile that it should be broken, on the contrary. We should recognize the delicacy of our species and design around it. That’d be a sign of evolved behaviour , I’d reckon.
> the #1 enemy of most people is their own mind Again, define the « mind ». Is it really the mental space people live in that is the problem or the culture, teachings, bullyings and programmings that have been thrown at them since birth that are maladaptive ? I’d argue that the mind is fine, given what it can do and that it is just a tool. It is what we do with it that matters and since birth, we’ve been hijacked to fit in society.