I will not pretend to have read and understood the whole thing - dang, Venkat, you’re still in a league of your own when it comes to pattern recognition and creative naming of those - but I really appreciate the Vinge and Liu references and the links to the strange and insightful writings you’ve read, remembered and connected here.
And I truly resonate with the omnious and yet also exilerating “extraordinary times” notion.
One question: Have you done - or are you considering - a long-read like this regarding superorganism/world brain transformation, along the lines of Peter Russells The Global Brain and Olaf Stapledons Star Maker (to name a few)?
I got into this back when I read Vinge a decade ago and find the evolutionary perspective fascinating and terrifying.
A great read as usual. As it turned out, I read Mark Andreessen's essay "Let Chaos Reign, and Then Rein In Chaos" soon after this one, where he talks about building “agent habitats” where chaos gets reined in. It will be interesting to see how the human desire for legibility and control will interact with the strange forest as you describe.
One new trend which is relevant to this is that with their increasing prowess in math/proofs AI can be used to dramatically expand the use of Formal Verification in software. Having correctness proofs for software is kind of like a different form of “hardness” that does not depend on crypto computational assumptions.
I will not pretend to have read and understood the whole thing - dang, Venkat, you’re still in a league of your own when it comes to pattern recognition and creative naming of those - but I really appreciate the Vinge and Liu references and the links to the strange and insightful writings you’ve read, remembered and connected here.
And I truly resonate with the omnious and yet also exilerating “extraordinary times” notion.
One question: Have you done - or are you considering - a long-read like this regarding superorganism/world brain transformation, along the lines of Peter Russells The Global Brain and Olaf Stapledons Star Maker (to name a few)?
I got into this back when I read Vinge a decade ago and find the evolutionary perspective fascinating and terrifying.
I would love to read your take on this
A great read as usual. As it turned out, I read Mark Andreessen's essay "Let Chaos Reign, and Then Rein In Chaos" soon after this one, where he talks about building “agent habitats” where chaos gets reined in. It will be interesting to see how the human desire for legibility and control will interact with the strange forest as you describe.
One new trend which is relevant to this is that with their increasing prowess in math/proofs AI can be used to dramatically expand the use of Formal Verification in software. Having correctness proofs for software is kind of like a different form of “hardness” that does not depend on crypto computational assumptions.