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Producing electricity while protecting your crops from extreme weather. Brilliant!

>The citron of Calabria in southern Italy had almost died out from extreme weather and lack of economic value. But growing the crop under a canopy of solar panels has given the fruit a new lease of life – with lessons for many climate-stressed crops.

bbc.com/future/article/2023042

Philosopher **Mary Brenda Hesse**
>considered the use of and in scientific models.
Instead of obsessing over the justification of scientific knowledge, she highlighted the need to think about its generation. How do scientists develop their ideas about the world and come to discover new things?
The cognitive power of metaphors, in her view, resided in their *capacity to create similarity*. The use of metaphors is **an act of co-creating, not discovering, similarities between a metaphor and its physical target system**. Such an act of metaphorical co-creation is inevitably shaped by cultural context.

aeon.co/essays/why-are-women-p

The whole argument of *AI-generated art* discussed in the article below is moot. Whatever it is that generates it certainly isn't .

>"In science you must not talk before you know. In art you must not talk before you do. In literature you must not talk before you think."
Ruskin - The Eagle's Nest (1872)

AI is not "doing" or or . AI is just talking.

spectrum.ieee.org/ai-art-gener

@MarkRubin @philosophyofscience @philosophy

is a ***way*** of of the scientific , much like is the way of knowing of systems. You may argue that philosophy is yet another *way of knowing* separate from science and religion.

Epistemology in particular deals with different ways (systems) of knowing, or the question of *how we know what we know*, while philosophy of science deals with just one (the scientific) way of knowing.

is ***not a stock*** that is accumulated, stored, and distributed by the system, but represents instead the of that system at any particular point in time.

Here is a simple depiction (model) of a generic ***dynamical system*** such as science with the ability to and , and useful outputs:

@softedge

I think that it is you that might be looking at it from the wrong perspective and attributing humanity where there is none.

For Lanier (and I agree with him on that) is just another developed to do some work for us (or for some of us just serve as a plaything, a refined ).

WRT the "alignment problem", I'm not sure I want somebody else to align my tools for me. Ideally, they should come out of the box with some commonly agreed generic values and knowledge about the world, but after that, I'd like to be able to fine-tune and train them to serve the purpose I need them for.

That solves another problem, that of who is **responsible** for the actual harm their output may inflict on other people. You don't blame the gun for murder, you prosecute the one who pulled the trigger. I don't see why it should be different with AI.

@melaniemitchell

@melaniemitchell

I like Jaron Lanier's approach to "". It can "kill us all" as most of all the other we invent. He rises some very interesting points in this article such as:

>Think of people. People are the answer to the problems of bits.
If society, economics, culture, technology, or any other spheres of activity are to serve people, that can only be because we decide that people enjoy a special status to be served.

newyorker.com/science/annals-o

>We can work better under the assumption that there is no such thing as . The sooner we understand this, the sooner we’ll start managing our new intelligently.

Jaron Lanier

newyorker.com/science/annals-o

Paraphrased from the same source:

This "" (error in the or error in the ) can be identified at all organizational levels:

➡️ Computer programs may have either an error in the program itself ( error) or an error may happen because of the machine ( error) that executes an otherwise correct program.

➡️ At higher levels it is possible to make an error in the choice of algorithm which is being programmed or even make a mistake in the choice of problem that the developed algorithm is supposed to solve.

➡️ Similarly in social and political organizations we distinguish between a faulty policy and the failure to execute a policy properly.

In other words, we try to distinguish between the ***error in our *** of reality which leads to incorrect policies ( and descriptions), and the ***error in *** which leads to a failure of a (good) policy implementation.

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Biological physicist on the futility of the attempts to create artificial by reverse engineering .

>"No amount of information, thought, or discourse alone can cause the body to move. It takes some . As Waddington has pointed out, the first function of was to cause , not to make ."

link.springer.com/article/10.1

According to there are
>“two meanings for and two meanings for ”:

>“By the *machinery of nature* we mean the failure-proof that we assume underlie the predictable behavior of matter. When we find certain types of events unpredictable we assume that our description or theory of these events are failures, but not the events themselves.”

>On the other hand, while we assume that the of arithmetic are not subject to failure, it is clear that a physical machine to execute these rules may fail all too often.”

academia.edu/863887/The_role_o

, as their name suggests, are bound to the domain of , and are not able to from other types of interaction, such as (physical) or show . They have no except for answering user prompts to the best of their (large and static) .

There is no point in debating if they have or not until they are given the capability to ask (generate their own prompts) that may mean they can show "" about other aspects of the topic at hand that is clearly aimed to update their current knowledge, which may thereupon shed some light on their "".

>In this paper, we introduce generative agents - computational software agents that simulate believable human behavior.
Generative agents wake up, cook breakfast, and head to work; artists paint, while authors write; they form opinions, notice each other, and initiate conversations; they remember and reflect on days past as they plan the next day.

Except for the fact that all those activities should been in parentesis (they don't really "cook breakfast", "paint" or "write") an interesting study of based solely on .

Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior

arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03442v1.pdf

>Behaviour science, evolutionary developmental and the field of all seek to understand the scaling of biological : what enables individual cells to integrate their activities to result in the of a novel, higher-level intelligence with large-scale and*competencies that belong to it and not to its parts*?

**The scaling of goals from cellular to anatomical : an , experiment and analysis**

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi

>"The American elite thought that Asians, when they became middle-class, would then be like them, and are disappointed when they are not."

noemamag.com/refreshing-wester

This is actually not true. Asian is very similar to the American or any other of the global world 1% elites.

All regardless of its origin: , or has these two things in common:
1⃣ They want to preserve the elitist position for themselves and their families, and
2⃣ They really don't care about anything else.

@timnitGebru @NYTimes

I wonder why people are talking at all about this imaginary, not even futuristic, "" nonsense that is just occurring in someone's head, instead of being more interested in all the really useful and cool stuff that is safely done with like this one:

khanacademy.org/khan-labs#khan

Just discovered there is an interesting etymological link between the words and by which a ***system*** may be defined as "*having the same stance*" or "*standing together*"

***Stance***
>"comes from the Italian "*stanza*" which means stopping place (*like a room within the house*). Your stance is something that's not likely to change. You have stopped there, your decision is made. You're done."

vocabulary.com/dictionary/stan

Origin:
>***stā-***, Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to stand, set down, make or be firm," with derivatives meaning "place or thing that is standing."

e.g. Afghanistan - the place of the Afghani peoples, and in

>Greek ***histēmi*** "put, place, cause to stand; weigh,"

etymonline.com/word/stance

***System***

>Greek ***systema*** "organized whole, a whole compounded of parts," from stem of *synistanai* "to place together, organize, form in order," from syn- "together" (see syn-) + root of histanai "cause to stand," from PIE root *sta- "to stand, make or be firm."

etymonline.com/word/system

The of is in the process where is generated when:
>"our rhythmic are violated, (*and*) our brains behave in a different manner because of our inherent (*innate*) internal sense of rhythm."

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the

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