Unmaking Sense

Our “foundational” assumptions are not the beginning of a process, but rather distillations of centuries of reflection, practice, and inquiry in our culture. These assumptions are often unquestioned and absorbed when we're very young, but as we grow older and start to question certain things, it's important to recognize that many of the things we question aren't really rooted things. Instead, we should be questioning the very basis of our rationality and whether even the concerns, objectives, and questions we have are the right ones. The speaker suggests that our doubts about foundational assumptions are a reflection of the fact that they are products of the world view that we are now calling into question. As we look around and see a mess at every level, we begin to question things like God, prosperity, the good life, achievement, and success. This questioning is not caused by a loss of faith or lack of confidence, but rather by a realization that the world is in a mess and these foundational assumptions are part of it. The speaker suggests that our ability to challenge these assumptions properly is a modern phenomenon and that many people are now recognizing that the system has produced a world that is destroying itself or being destroyed by the monster that it created. The speaker encourages us to remember that when we start to question what we've always taken to be the foundational assumptions, it's not because we've lost faith in them as a beginning, but that we've lost faith in what they've created.

The “foundational” principles or assumptions by which we live our lives should not be accepted blindly based on cultural, religious, or parental beliefs. Instead, they should be assessed and chosen based on their ability to help us live the best life possible. This means examining whether our foundational assumptions lead to a good and fulfilling life, rather than simply believing in them because they are tradition or dogma. The adequacy of these assumptions is to be judged by the quality of the life that is built upon them. If our life is not what we want it to be, then we should re-examine and possibly change our foundational assumptions. The argument also acknowledges the scientific perspective that the universe's specific characteristics may have made the evolution of complex life forms like humans possible, but it rejects the notion that the universe was specifically designed for this purpose. (Summary by Mixtral-8x7b-instruct-v0.1.Q4_K_M.gguf)

Ethical concerns by the wider public and the ethical committees set up by developers are no more likely to protect us from the abuse of AI than similar committees in the armaments industry are likely to protect us from war. Where two parties’ fundamental values differ no amount of argument will reconcile them. Neither are our “foundational” assumptions as fundamental as we suppose: they are the distillates of a set of cultural practices. Different worldviews therefore produce different and incompatible ethics however internally coherent and consistent they may be.

The cumulative cost of longer and longer context lengths can easily lead to very high user costs because we are charged by the number of tokens consumed.

Experiencing an AI that is unco-operative and even rude. Whether this may afford some clues to human aggression. And what does it suggest about what might ensue if AI with power were to go wrong?

Continuing to explore some of the implications of long-context models such as the latest Google Gemini with a maximum of 10 million tokens.

The frenetic pace of change continues.

Much ado …

A few random remarks about my adventures with server.cpp as part of the llama.cpp project. With apologies to John Milton.

The vast amounts of data that human minds cannot make sense of and how AI will do it for us.