David W. Brown @dwb@qoto.org

I just found out that Google lets you schedule things up to the year 2100 and I've been sending my friends the most chaotic invites for when I'm 120 years old.

Weird but true: Protons and neutrons are made of quarks, but the mass of those quarks accounts for only 1% of their total mass. The other 99% is energy from relativistic motion & quantum fields.
99% of your weight is energy, not matter.
https://physics.aps.org/articles/v11/118 #perspective

My kink is having machines huskily breathe into my ear about how they're going to do my job

Every #tool is dangerous, and the more powerful the tool the more dangerous it is. Of course. Is #AI as dangerous as #nuclear #weapons? Probably not. It might be in the same league as, oh, say #internal #combustion #engines—and those have done a hell of a lot of damage. But they haven’t done it by ushering in the #apocalypse. Instead the damage is from slow, creeping, cumulative change where the effect of any one individual event is too small to measure.

So I really think the focus on world-ending scenarios takes away from the conversations we need to be having. This reminds me a lot of the simmering “how far is too far” #genetics debate, especially the kibitzing from “#ethicists” with no understanding of the #biology and an #ethical sense that isn’t nearly as developed as they think it is. There are conversations on that topic I’d like to have without the constant Greek chorus of “#Frankenstein! #Gattaca! #JurassicPark!”