I wonder if it’s gonna cost more than Deltarune

May you live in exactly the kind of society you ask for.

You could say the same thing about rewiring a human’s neurons randomly

Can you? One is editing a table of variables, the other is altering a brain by some magic hypothetical. Even if you could, the person you do it to is gonna be cross with you – the programme, meanwhile, is still just a programme. People who’ve had damage to Wernicke’s area are still attempting to communicate meaningful thoughts, just because the signal is scrambled doesn’t mean the intent isn’t still there.

A statistical model strings a sentence together with a great big web of statistical weights, settling onto the next most probable word, one by one. People write with the intent to share a meaning. It is not the same.

That statistical (or “predictive”, if we’re gussying it up) model has no understanding in it - no more than any other programme. It’s a physical chain reaction, a calculation that runs until the sums even out to a state of rest. Wipe the web of statistical weights clean, and re-weigh them so the sums spit out the colour of pixels in a JPEG rather than the content of a .txt document.

Hell, weigh the web at random and have it spit out nonsense numbers. It’ll do that for as long as keep the programme up. It will never ask you why you took the meaning out of its task. The machine makes no distinction between the sort of calculation you run it – people are what project meaning onto the blinking lights.

“AI” in fiction has meant a machine with a mind like what people have. It’s had that meaning for decades. Very recently, there are programmes that do predictive text like what your phone does, but large. You can call the predictive text programme an “AI”, but as the novelty wears off, it’s gonna sound more and more like advertising than a real description.

isn’t it a combination of younger developers not learning to programme under the restrictions of limited memory and cpu speed, on top of employers demanding code as soon as possible rather than code that is elegant or resource efficient or even slightly planned out

Nothing wrong with meditating on a stone all your life, but where does a monk’s meal come from? Who grows the food? Who weaves the cloth? If it were all just charity, that would be one thing…

Before China, Tibet was a feudal society, with the monetary at the top of the hierarchy. They wielded power; religious, political, and physical. The punishment for disobeying a monk was to have your hands cut off. And this wasn’t just some ancient state of affairs, it was happening in the 20th century.

also you can walk into basically any bank and ask for a roll of quaters

Woo! Let’s make this artificial biome that much more inhospitable for the very creatures that build and live in it!

We must imagine Sisyphus fucking miserable! Ants in an anthill made of broken glass and depleted lion batteries!