English is not my first language; my native language has 28 letters & 6 variations of each letter. That gave my old culture more room to capture different types of thinking patterns, though they were mostly spiritual/metaphysical due to the influence of religion early on the language. That culture was too masculine for example, so they didn't really have many words for complex emotions, unlike French & German.
French & German do have a wide range of emotional language. You can literally express dozens of complex emotional states in 1 word where it would take 2 sentences to express in English. Still, the french/german words invented so far to express emotional states are fairly primitive compared to the actual emotional states we go through each day. There are still hundreds no mapped out, many have no word in any language. Imagine if English had no such word as Grit, Obsession or passion, would you really be able to consider someone speaking English emotionally intelligent?!
An Ai therapist app for example can't really do a good job when many of the emotions the patient feels do not have a word associated with them! which is why a human therapist is still kicking as due to her intuitive detection of that emotional state that needs 2 sentences to describe.
This is just 1 example. Language itself is the #1 limiting factor for how intelligent something can be (artificial or not)! What we call intelligence is the abstract ability to find new patterns in a given environment. An ai playing an alien game is unlikely to win if it were only allowed to define %50 of the objects in the game. Same with humans, if our ancestors didn't map all of the possible objects/emotions/items in the world into language, we can't ever pretend that a digital intelligence can navigate it, it literally has no access to %90 of it.
If we had a language with 50 letters for example, the 2 sentences needed to describe each emotional state (made of a dozen different individual emotions that we have a word for, and some we didn't map yet) would need only 1 word to describe them laser accurate it makes the reader feel the emotion without needing to experience it firsthand.
In a world where a 50-letter language is wildly used by agents, where the digital intelligence is literally able to remember an unlimited number of words - there wouldn't be a need to distort the truth by oversimplifying the thinking process to save memory or to consume less calories.
-We can have a word for every type of American to "grand grandparent career" level, not just call someone black American or white American.
-We can have a different word for every type of attraction, not call all Love. There is "you make me feel good love", "I like your apartment love", "you can be my future wife love"...e.t.c
-We can have a different word for each new startup; a "$5 million ARR startup" is different from a "50M 2-year-old startup".
-Each employee would have 1 word that describes their entire career right away to the HR Ai.
I was reading Machiavelli where he argues that "freedom in a republic literally needs class conflict". Which is of course completely true no matter how much our current culture hates it to be.
There are huge differences between founders and employees for example, founders don't really care about comfort whereas suits life goal is comfort (which is why you shouldn't even fund a founder who cares about restaurant/car/hotel like you do).
Same in society, the elites want power/legacy above all, but the middle class just wants to add a little more comfort to their life. You can see that in the eyes of anyone you talk to, what their end goal is just as easily as you can see it in the eyes if a particular animal is a wolf or a sheep.
If the middle class won the cultural war, our society will certainly be better short term. There will be more resources spent on welfare, less on the military. For sure you will have basic UBI for everyone.
The problem with this type of future scenario is that it's almost guaranteed the countries where this happens will end up poorer and less advanced. This happened to every single civilization that got lazy, and it will happen to yours just as easily if you let comfort win.
Let's imagine a future 100 years from now where most humans are using a Neuralink to live in a virtual social media sh*thole where AIs are made to be the servant class. The humans are not all equal in that world, because the more compute you can acquire the more power you have & the more you can innovate. Some people will own shares in the system (trillionaires), others will have lots of compute at their disposal (elites), while others will only have the basic amount of compute necessary to survive and have some fun (they are kind of comfortable playing simulations tbh).
Let's compare that reality to our own:
Bits: vHumans have almost unlimited health insurance, luxurious houses, the unlimited food/drinks.
Atoms: The wealthiest nations are barely able to keep people out of the streets, even Norway is not wealthy enough to distribute $10k/m to everyone.
Bits: VHs can easily acquire more compute if they would just stop playing in the simulation (which, let's be honest, is not easy. I can barely stop myself from playing a 2014 game)
Atoms: Humans need VC money and years of living on noodles (putting it nicely) to have %10 chance at most to move from the middle class up. Many billionaires even had to spend a couple of years on the streets, if that doesn't prove it, I don't know what will.
Atoms: Private equity is very hard to measure, track and keep accountable.
Bits: You can see how much compute everyone has on your dashboard, playing in the shadows is much harder.
I am know you consider yourself a pragmatist but zoom out a little and think about it again.....these idiotic humans built a couple of 1T companies with a stupid genAi algorithm in less than 50 year. in 2100, very high chance they will do 10T
even if they were able to keep pace, with time and with more powerful corporations lobbying, the government will not be the same. I really hate writing this, but by all accounts, it seems the future will include million not billions of sapiens.
I am a Palestinian in the West Bank who wrote book about the conflict that us unique. I ran a camping last week, and I made 6.6$ for every 1$ spent.
The problem is that I don't have any marketing budget, and I don't even have a bank account to receive the money that I sell. If you have some free time & a bit of money, we can join forces which will allow me to focus entirely on making the product 10 times better.
I know it's silly, but it does bother me, from hacker news to cofounder-matching to the actual application, it's so hard to scroll between the YC different subdomains.
If anyone on the inside sees this, do a browse tab within hacker news, or change the favicon of different products to different colors.
French & German do have a wide range of emotional language. You can literally express dozens of complex emotional states in 1 word where it would take 2 sentences to express in English. Still, the french/german words invented so far to express emotional states are fairly primitive compared to the actual emotional states we go through each day. There are still hundreds no mapped out, many have no word in any language. Imagine if English had no such word as Grit, Obsession or passion, would you really be able to consider someone speaking English emotionally intelligent?!
An Ai therapist app for example can't really do a good job when many of the emotions the patient feels do not have a word associated with them! which is why a human therapist is still kicking as due to her intuitive detection of that emotional state that needs 2 sentences to describe.
This is just 1 example. Language itself is the #1 limiting factor for how intelligent something can be (artificial or not)! What we call intelligence is the abstract ability to find new patterns in a given environment. An ai playing an alien game is unlikely to win if it were only allowed to define %50 of the objects in the game. Same with humans, if our ancestors didn't map all of the possible objects/emotions/items in the world into language, we can't ever pretend that a digital intelligence can navigate it, it literally has no access to %90 of it.
If we had a language with 50 letters for example, the 2 sentences needed to describe each emotional state (made of a dozen different individual emotions that we have a word for, and some we didn't map yet) would need only 1 word to describe them laser accurate it makes the reader feel the emotion without needing to experience it firsthand.
In a world where a 50-letter language is wildly used by agents, where the digital intelligence is literally able to remember an unlimited number of words - there wouldn't be a need to distort the truth by oversimplifying the thinking process to save memory or to consume less calories. -We can have a word for every type of American to "grand grandparent career" level, not just call someone black American or white American. -We can have a different word for every type of attraction, not call all Love. There is "you make me feel good love", "I like your apartment love", "you can be my future wife love"...e.t.c -We can have a different word for each new startup; a "$5 million ARR startup" is different from a "50M 2-year-old startup". -Each employee would have 1 word that describes their entire career right away to the HR Ai.