Jesus those things are big!

> It was unreasonably heavy and made of cheap wood, with a neck like a carved baseball bat.

Guitar necks need to withstand the tension of the strings, and any Russian-educated engineer tasked by the politburo with making a guitar out of fiberboard[^2], will plug tension plus safety margins into the secant formula[^1] and immediately realize that some steel rods from Magnitogorsk for reinforcement are in order, and promptly discover that they only have 1/2'' ones. Oh well.

[^1]: http://www.engineeringcorecourses.com/solidmechanics2/C5-buc...

[^2]: Not that there's anything wrong with fiberboard for guitars; see Danelectro. In fact, if you own a laser cutter and want to make something cool with it, an electric guitar is a great project.

A lot of those Soviet guitars didn't have truss rods. Maybe none of them did. Some of them look cool but the quality is terrible.

"Constructing a solid tower" from first principles is already super-human level. Sure, you can theorize a tower (sans the "solid") from first principles; there's a software architect at my job that does it every day. But the "solid" bit is where things get tricky, because "solid" implies "firm" and "well anchored", and that implies experimental grounds, experimental verification all the way, and final measurable impact. And I'm not even talking particle physics or software engineering; even folding a piece of paper can give you surprising mismatches between theory and results.

Even the realm of pure mathematics and elegant physic theories, where you are supposed to take a set of axioms ("first principles") and build something with it, has cautionary tales such as the Russel paradox or the non-measure of Feymann path integrals, and let's not talk about string theory.

I'm eagerly awaiting for the return of handwriting and fingerprints on paper from ink-smeared fingers. Even have a box of nice paper and a few fountain pens ready :p .

A bit more seriously though, I wonder if our appreciation of things (arts and otherwise) is going to turn bimodal: a box for machine-made, a box for intrinsically human.

You jest, but when I do interviews, I have prospectives write out a python program that ingests yaml ON THE WHITEBOARD. They don't have to be perfect. Their code doesn't have to compile. But, how closely they can hit this mark tells me if they have even a sliver of an idea what's going on in code.

Where does the machine begin and end? Even a fountain pen is a highly advanced mechanism which we owe to countless generations of preceding, inventive toolmakers.

Fountain pen is still more or less the same tool as the lowly stick left partially in the campfire. It is just packaged more cleanly perhaps. It is not drawing for you or writing for you.

Connoisseurs of calligraphy may disagree.

My point was that humans are very connected to and identify deeply with their tools. Probabilistic autocomplete we are so excited about these days is just another slab on a deep stack of abstractions humans use to interact with the world.

A stick and the campfire are also tools that do not pre-exist. Just try to make a campfire without a matches or try to make a stick without a cutting tool. Also try to write the next great novel using a stick and a campfire instead or a fountain pen. Tools that are available become the defining factor of the great works a generation can produce. Nothing is different this time.

Ever worried that ChatGPT would rattle you to the authorities because there is such a thing as thought crime? For that reason, there is a vast, unexplored territory where abhorrent ideas and pornographic vulgarity combine with literary prose (or convoluted, defective, god-awful prose, like the one I'm using right now) and entertaining story-telling that will remain human-only for a while. May we all find a next read that we love. Also, we all may need to (re-)learn to draw phalli.

Following your argument, another solution would be simply to enact measures to revert that "certain level of intelligence and awareness", and it seems that some countries are doing just that, if not exactly for the sake of reproduction :-) . So there's hope for population growth I guess?

> Now that I think of it, maybe the problem is that human societies grew too big too fast and our brains didn't adapt. We're capable of self-sacrifice, just in a group of max 20, not 20 million. We need a completely new paradigm of organizing the society.

This however is something I agree with, fully.

Look, I'm very negative about this AI thing. I think there is a great chance it will lead to something terrible and we will all die, or worse. But on the other hand, we are all going to die anyway. Some of us, the lucky ones, will die of a heart attack and will learn of our imminent demise in the second it happens, or not at all. The rest of us will have it worse. It has always been like that, and it has only gotten more devastating since we started wearing clothes and stopped being eaten alive by a savanna crocodile or freezing to death during the first snowfall of winter.

But if AI keeps getting better at code, it will produce entire in-silico simulation workflows to test new drugs or even to design synthetic life (which, again, could make us all die, or worse). Yet there is a tiny, tiny chance we will use it to fix some of the darkest aspects of human existence. I will take that.

A lot of very silly people have convinced themselves and you of this, but it is not true, was never true, and is never going to be true.

We have a lot of actual problems to deal with that aren't telling ghost stories about sand. Focus on those.

That's stupid. If you genuinely think that there's a great chance AI will kill us all, you wouldn't spin the wheel just for some small vague chance that it doesn't and something good (what exactly, nobody knows) will happen

> As someone well past "peak" fluid intelligence at this point, I always hate reading research like this. "Crystallized intelligence" and "emotional intelligence" are the consolation prizes no one really wants.

At the end, I agree with you, but for a different reason. My fluid intelligence is still doing well, but my newly acquired “crystallized” and “emotional” intelligence are just good to let me understand why people want to write existential horror stories. Hell, I now realize that some of the dark stuff I didn’t want to touch with a long pole three years ago are in fact escapism to a rosier parallel universe. I liked myself better when I was sixteen years old and I couldn’t understand that boy one year older than me who said he despised our prisons of flesh. May you be doing well Y.P., and if you happen to stumble upon this paragraph, know it took me 25 years to see what you saw so clearly.

Are we gonna get a cure for cancer and other devastating ailments? Because if AI gives us that, I'll let it destroy the workplace and boil the oceans. If not, I may be part of the crowd that goes to arson the data centers and hang the barons, when that day comes.

> but also child assassins and bombs right now

Yes, "interesting" is the right word. The government is talking about suspending cell phones for kids in connection to that. But honestly, what's really scary right now is how many kids and young adults seem to be "zombified" (for lack of a better word), and how bad this turns out later in the job market. Tomorrow I need to have a serious talk with my boss about how we should not hire a prospect because of total lack of in-person interactivity. Immigrants from war and poverty-stricken countries are over-represented in our "successful hires" pool because they still know how to speak.

> Corollary: our brains are basically the dumbest possible solution evolution could find that can host general intelligence.

I agree. But there's a very strong incentive to not to; you can't simply erase hundreds of millennia of religion and culture (that sets humans in a singular place in the cosmic order) in the short few years after discovering something that approaches (maybe only a tiny bit) general intelligence. Hell, even the century from Darwin to now has barely made a dent :-( . Buy yeah, our intelligence is a question of scale and training, not some unreachable miracle.