On the Origins of Posthuman Speciation

July 8, 2022 1:49 AM

Histography: Timeline of History - "Histography is an interactive timeline that spans across 14 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to 2015. The site draws historical events from Wikipedia and self-updates daily with new recorded events. The interface allows for users to view between decades to millions of years. The viewer can choose to watch a variety of events which have happened in a particular period or to target a specific event in time. For example you can look at the past century within the categories of war and inventions."[1,2,3] (via)

also btw...

• Emma Willard's Maps of Time - "In the 21st-century, infographics are everywhere. In the classroom, in the newspaper, in government reports, these concise visual representations of complicated information have changed the way we imagine our world. Susan Schulten explores the pioneering work of Emma Willard (1787–1870), a leading feminist educator whose innovative maps of time laid the groundwork for the charts and graphics of today." (via, previously)
• Interview: James Poskett on Reframing the History of Science - "In 'Horizons,' a historian of science highlights the crucial achievements of non-Western scientists and thinkers."
• Do we need a new theory of evolution? - "A new wave of scientists argues that mainstream evolutionary theory needs an urgent overhaul. Their opponents have dismissed them as misguided careerists – and the conflict may determine the future of biology."[4]
• Genetic Screening Now Lets Parents Pick the Healthiest Embryos - "People using IVF can see which embryo is least likely to develop cancer and other diseases. But can protecting your child slip into playing God?"[5,6,7]
• 'Critical Mass' by Peter Watts - "He returns his attention to the workbench, blinks: sometime in the past few minutes he's sliced the diatom in half around the equator. The glistening cross-section mesmerizes, like a circuit diagram embedded in a geode. An iris. An eye."[8]
• Creating ART with MIDJOURNEY A.I. - "i think what's happening is that we don't have much time in this life to create all the ideas that we have in our minds, so what this stuff is doing is just showing us a sneak peek of what we have in our minds, and that's quite addictive because you want to keep pushing and seeing what else can you throw there, so for people that are highly creative, or in general people, it's just a feeling that we have never had before."[9]
• Demis Hassabis: DeepMind - AI, Superintelligence & the Future of Humanity - "To experience things we could never experience before and improve the the overall human condition and humanity overall, you know, get radical abundance, solve many scientific problems, solve disease, so i think this is the amazing era i think we're heading into if we do it right, but we've got to be careful."[10]
• Deepmind's New AI May Be Better at Distributing Society's Resources Than Humans Are - "The problem of how humans should redistribute the wealth they create has plagued philosophers, economists, and political scientists for years."[11,12,13]
• The Last Human – A Glimpse Into The Far Future - "Because of the potential size of the future, the most important thing about our actions today might be their impact on future generations. This simple-sounding idea has some surprising moral implications."[14]
• On the Most Ambitious Literary Podcast in the History of the World - "How does Doug Metzger manage to do it?" (previously)

Was this it, then…? The end?

No! No matter the difficulties, Literature and History is “central to my life,” he told me, and thanked me for the “nudge.” So on May 8th, still spending hours each day in the ICU, Metzger released episode 97: two hours and thirty three minutes on the endless Dionysiaca, which in some grating, exasperated hours he had described in his notebook as “a bunch of normal and harmless easterners having a bad acid trip during which they’re attacked by extremely violent Wiccans and berserk hippies playing fucking pan flutes,” but went on to valorize as an expression of the energy and vitality springing from the “fruitfuil commingly of Christianity and paganism.”

The audience sighed and cheered. “Everything’s right with the world again,” a relieved member of the audience wrote on Facebook. “I was beginning to think I could make some major headway” thanks to the pause, wrote another. “At least I am past the Greeks.”

Not just refusing to quit, Metzger has plans to expand the podcast’s scope even more. If everything goes according to plan, next year he should be finally approaching the Anglo-Saxon era (future episode 115,) the place where conventional histories of Anglophone literature start.

posted by kliuless (5 comments total)

Oh thank goodness...I'd tried reading that piece on resource distribution in Nature Human Behavior the other day ("Human-centred mechanism design with Democratic AI") and didn't understand a word of it. I'm glad to have a summary.
posted by mittens at 4:08 AM on July 8, 2022

Sorry. Your mobile device is not supported yet.

:(
posted by Thorzdad at 4:45 AM on July 8, 2022

That's a nice interview with Demis Hassabis. I don't really know much about him, other than he's the co-founder of DeepMind, and he comes off as about as grounded as you could hope, considering the amount of influence he has.

I wish Lex Fridman could just focus on his... good guests, because he's a competent interviewer and has a lot of pull. I can't in good conscious subscribe to his podcast though, knowing Sam Harris and Joe Rogan might queue up at any moment.
posted by Alex404 at 7:29 AM on July 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

[Hassabis] comes off as about as grounded as you could hope, considering the amount of influence he has.
It is slightly ominous that the most successful game from his own studio was Evil Genius though...
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 11:24 AM on July 8, 2022

Sorry. Your mobile device is not supported yet.

If you switch to Desktop View it seems to work on my Android.
posted by NailsTheCat at 3:25 PM on July 8, 2022