But as the more enduring sci-fi novelist JG Ballard said in 1971, “what the writers of modern science fiction invent today, you and I will do tomorrow”.
— Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in
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Because HomeKit is designed to be the secure all-encompassing platform for IoT devices for iPhone users, there’s no way Apple will ever include other standards because, by their definition, they’re stupid and insecure. This forces you, your family members, house guests, and anyone else in your home to commit to a phone platform for the long haul — an unreasonable ask.
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Even Apple can’t make the Internet of Things tolerable
Of course, paying for usage by data disclosure in the Google ecosystem is entirely reasonable.
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This is crazy for many reasons, in no small part because millions of people, including myself, have an Airport router lying around that’s better suited for the job. Other home device makers, like Samsung’s SmartThings, have “hub” devices that take care of all of this for a reasonable price — spending an additional $149 for an Apple TV is not reasonable.
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Even Apple can’t make the Internet of Things tolerable
- Airport does not speak Bluetooth, which you need for some HomeKit devices
- The SmartThings hub retails for USD 99. I get the sentiment, but you’re splurging on connected devices and whinge at a USD 50 delta?
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the China 2025 plan means that a much wider range of Western businesses will face the same kind of government-backed competition that has already transformed the solar industry.
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Under a plan called Made in China 2025, China hopes to become largely self-sufficient within seven years in a long list of industries, including aircraft, high-speed trains, computer chips and robots. The plan echoes the solar-panel and wind-turbine buildup a decade ago, but with a larger checkbook. Made in China 2025 calls for roughly $300 billion in financial backing: inexpensive loans from state-owned banks, investment funds to acquire foreign technologies, and extensive research subsidies.
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China is now home to two-thirds of the world’s solar-production capacity. The efficiency with which its products convert sunlight into electricity is increasingly close to that of panels made by American, German and South Korean companies. Because China also buys half of the world’s new solar panels, it now effectively controls the market.
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Many isolated islands in Micronesia made their first contact with the outside world during World War II. Alien gods flew over their skies in noisy birds, dropped food and goods on their islands, and never returned. Religious cults sprang up on the islands praying to the gods to return and drop more cargo. Even now, fifty years later, many still wait for the cargo to return. It is possible that superhuman AI could turn out to be another cargo cult. A century from now, people may look back to this time as the moment when believers began to expect a superhuman AI to appear at any moment and deliver them goods of unimaginable value. Decade after decade they wait for the superhuman AI to appear, certain that it must arrive soon with its cargo.
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The idea of a superhuman AI Singularity, now that it has been birthed, will never go away either. But we should recognize that it is a religious idea at this moment and not a scientific one. If we inspect the evidence we have so far about intelligence, artificial and natural, we can only conclude that our speculations about a mythical superhuman AI god are just that: myths.
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simulations and models can only be faster than their subjects because they leave something out.
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Therefore when we imagine an “intelligence explosion,” we should imagine it not as a cascading boom but rather as a scattering exfoliation of new varieties. A Cambrian explosion rather than a nuclear explosion.
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Therefore when we imagine an “intelligence explosion,” we should imagine it not as a cascading boom but rather as a scattering exfoliation of new varieties.
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Part of this belief in maximum general-purpose thinking comes from the concept of universal computation. Formally described as the Church-Turing hypothesis in 1950, this conjecture states that all computation that meets a certain threshold is equivalent. Therefore there is a universal core to all computation, whether it occurs in one machine with many fast parts, or slow parts, or even if it occurs in a biological brain, it is the same logical process. Which means that you should be able to emulate any computational process (thinking) in any machine that can do “universal” computation.
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I think a useful model of AI is to think of it as alien intelligence (or artificial aliens). Its alienness will be its chief asset.
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In the future, we will invent whole new modes of cognition that don’t exist in us and don’t exist anywhere in biology. When we invented artificial flying we were inspired by biological modes of flying, primarily flapping wings. But the flying we invented — propellers bolted to a wide fixed wing — was a new mode of flying unknown in our biological world. It is alien flying.
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Human minds are societies of minds, in the words of Marvin Minsky. We run on ecosystems of thinking. We contain multiple species of cognition that do many types of thinking: deduction, induction, symbolic reasoning, emotional intelligence, spacial logic, short-term memory, and long-term memory. The entire nervous system in our gut is also a type of brain with its own mode of cognition. We don’t really think with just our brain; rather, we think with our whole bodies.