Ponder Stibbons

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Anecdotal, but in the UK, in 1986, as a just graduated PhD I bought a 3 bedroom house for less than 4 times my salary. At present a similar house in a similar location, will cost  roughly 10 times a starting PhD salary. House ownership for most young people in the UK is becoming a distant and ever delayed dream.

“Design is much more powerful than evolution since individually useless parts can be developed to create a much more effective whole. Evolution can't flip the retina or reroute the recurrent laryngeal nerve even though those would be easy changes a human engineer could make.”

But directed evolution of a polymeric macromolecule (E.g. repurposing an existing enzyme to process a new substrate) is so much easier practically speaking than designing and making a bespoke macromolecule  to do the same job. Synthesis and testing of many evolutionary candidates is quick and easy, so many design/make/test cycles can be run quickly. This is what is happening at the forefront of the artificial enzyme field. 

So my personal viewpoint (and I could be proved wrong) is that Bing hasn’t the capability to suffer in any meaningful way, but is capable (though not necessarily sentiently capable) of manipulating us into thinking it is suffering. 

Whilst it may be that Bing cannot suffer in the human sense, it doesn’t seem obvious to me that more advanced AI’s, that are still no more than neural nets, cannot suffer in a way analogous to humans. No matter what the physiological cause of human suffering, it surely  has to translate into a pattern of nerve impulses around an architecture of neurons that has most likely been purposed to give rise to the unpleasant sensation of suffering. That architecture of neurons presumably arose for good evolutionary reasons.  The point is that there is no reason an analogous architecture could not  be created within an AI, and could then cause suffering similar to human suffering when presented with an appropriate stimulus.  The open question is whether such an architecture could possibly arise incidentally,  or whether it has to be hardwired in by design. We don’t know enough to answer that but my money is on the latter.

I think this is a very good point.. Evolution has given humans the brain plasticity to create brain connectivity so that a predisposition for morality can be turned into a fully fledged sense of morality. There is, for sure, likely some basic structure in the brain that predisposes us to develop morality but I’d be of the view the crucial basic genes that control this structure are, firstly present in primates, and at least, other mammals, and, secondly, the mutations in these genes required to generate the morally inclined human brain, are far fewer than need be represented by 7.5 MB of information.

One thing both the genome and evolution have taught us is that huge complexity of function and purpose can be generated by a relatively small amount of seed information

A personal anecdote. Many, many moons ago I started my research career at a large multinational organisation in a profitable steady business. I enjoyed the job, the perks were nice, I did the work and did well in the system. Some years later my group were asked to take a training course run by an external organisation. We were set a scenario “Imagine your company has only money for 6 months? What are you going to do about It?” We, cossetted in our big company mindset, thought the question hilarious and ludicrous.

 Fast forward a number of years, the company closed our site down and I went off and joined a start-up, Very soon we all found ourselves in exactly the scenario depicted in the training exercise. We managed to survive. I’ve worked in small/smallish organisations ever since. There have been ups and downs but on the whole I wouldn’t have changed anything. 

This is perhaps slightly tangential, though likely consequential to the Middle Manager Hell the OP describes. The big company environment made it easy for us to be complacent and comfortable, and hard for us to follow up the high risk high/profit ideas that might have made a big difference to the bottom line.

This was a long while ago and since then at least some big companies have tried various initiatives to change  this kind of mindset. So perhaps things have changed in some large multinationals. Can anyone else comment?

    I‘m afraid you’ll have to do more to convince me of the argument that Lavoisierian theory held up the development of chemistry for decades by denying the role of energy. Can you provide some evidence?  Until the discovery of the atomic model, chemistry by necessity had to be an empirical science where practitioners discovered phenomena and linked them together and drew parallels, and progressed in that manner. Great progress was made without a deep underlying theory of how chemistry worked. It was well known that some reactions gave out heat, and some required heat to proceed and not much more was needed as regards the role of “energy”. Alloys and dyes and such were all first discovered without much deep understanding of chemical reaction theory.
      Once quantum theory came along we understood how chemistry works and a lot of observations and linkages made sense. But for a long time quantum theory didn’t help as much as you might expect in pushing chemistry in new directions because the equations were too hard to get any real numbers out. So, much of chemical research carried on quite happily following well tried and tested paths of empirical research (and still does to quite a large extent). It was only really with the advent of computers that we started to make heavy use of calculation to help drive research. 
     You make the very good point that the Phlogistonists didn’t deserve to be pilloried, because they had a theory that was self consistent enough to model the real world as we know it now. But until electrons were actually discovered, it is hard to see how any Phlogistonist could seriously compete with the Lavoisierian point of view. It could scarcely be otherwise.

Interesting example. I think the movie theatre in practice always has value and counts towards wealth, because even if you don’t have time/inclination to use it, you could in principle sell the house to an appropriate movie buff, for more than you could if you didn’t have the theatre, and use the extra money to do more of what you want to do. So the “potential“ argument still works. This argument could also be applied to a heck of a lot of other things we might own but have little use for.  On that basis, EBay is a great wealth generator!

I see “wealth” not as a collection of desirable things but as a potential or a power. An individual who has some wealth has the potential or power to undertake certain things they would like to do, over and above basic survival. An individual with greater wealth has greater choice of the things they can choose to do. Such things might include eating Michelin 3 star food, or driving a Ferrari along the coast. They also might include a simple afternoon walk in the woods. In the latter case the  “wealth“ required to undertake this activity comprises having the leisure time available for the activity, the personal good health that allows for enjoyable walking, clothing of suitable quality for the activity to be pleasurable, and a means of fairly effortlessly getting to the woods in the first place.

It follows that, whilst “wealth” might have a roughly linear relationship to “money”, the amount of surplus money one has to attain a certain “wealth” will be different for everybody, principally because we all different ideas of how we might use our wealth, some of which will cost more than others.  Additionally, some wealth doesn’t necessarily cost any money to create or to acquire. Consider a coder who makes a compelling game and puts it out as open source. The coder has created “wealth” because they have created the potential for others to undertake something they would like to do, namely, play the game.  The coder has used their own time and little else. If the creation of the game was an enjoyable activity for the coder then the wealth has been created at zero cost.

Yes, the lab protocol it actually suggests would likely lead to an explosion and injury to the operator. Mixing sodium metal and a reagent and adding heat does not usually end well unless/even done under an inert atmosphere (nitrogen or argon).. Also there is no mention of a “work-up step,“ which here would usually involves careful quenching with ethanol necessary to remove residual reactive sodium, and then shaking with an aqueous base. 

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