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Wrestling with the theory of Artificial Intelligence is not a new thing. Two books have occupied space in my head for many years now that still have some of the best questions, at least – The Emperor’s New Mind Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid What they have in common is that they attempt to deal with consciousness, and they take Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem as a basis for it....

Dusk is later than it was, And, waiting on the path outside karate, It isn’t dark, just getting grey. As we wait, the air is full of shrieks, Cries and clouds of shapes around the tallest trees. The rooks are busy, noisy, crowded, And possibly the tree above us is their pub, With all the noise their sharing of the week. I have no clue what any rooks are doing....

If you like, feel free to abandon this post and read this instead: Beyond Elon Don’t worry, the title is basically clickbait, but the essay itself is very good, and says what I’d like to say myself, very well. If you’re still here, or have come back … When I was at school, the teachers loved me. I was the kind of child they went into the career for. I came from nowhere, a family with no expectations that had nobody with a university background, and I picked up pretty much everything effortlessly....

We humans think we’re great. We also think that what humans are good at must be most important, and overestimate how good we are. When evolution arrived as a theory, it had a tough job convincing everybody, as is well known. Scepticism runs deep about it even now, partly because it’s deeply unintuitive. Looking at the world, we see that it’s full of amazingly functional things working together. Considering that we, as humans, spend a lot of our time trying to create functional things, it’s very difficult not to imagine that what we see is deliberately designed to do what it does....

Bear with me, we’re going on a little thought experiment journey. You may, at some points, feel disoriented or wish to get out. The exits are there, there and there. Ready? We start inside your head, at this very instant. You are you, you are here, this is now. If you’re like most people, you have a very strong sense that you have a self, and that instant is part of a flow that self is experiencing in time, with a past and a future....