Notes on what happened with Google's efforts are here . "Utopians" tend to assume massive political change. Another popular thread is that the crazy pace of technological innovation will get us to Utopia. It's worth noting that the most famous technical company with infinitely deep pockets has written the effort off as a "learning exercise." Here, the IPCC models and forecasts of catastrophe are more or less taken for granted. The entire piece relies on IPCC assumptions and models. The problem is, actually trying to reduce GHG turns out to be complicated (duh). In summary: We’re glad that Google tried something ambitious with the RE<C initiative, and we’re proud to have been part of the project. But with 20/20 hindsight, we see that it didn’t go far enough, and that truly disruptive technologies are what our planet needs. To reverse climate change, our society requires something beyond today’s renewable energy technologies. Fortunately, new discoveries a...

A tornado made of sharks crashing into a skyscraper.  Painting in the style of abstract cubism. The above "painting" was made by  Google Parti from the caption . In 1969, I won my Master's degree with a project in "good old-fashioned AI" and I've been following the field in detail ever since. For the most part, what people now mean by "AI" is "deep learning", which is sophisticated pattern recognition - handy if you want to make a self-driving car or a phone that accepts your face to unlock. "Deep learning" was around in 1969 but needed vastly more computer power to make it work, plus a "tweak" to feedback results back into the decision matrix (you can think of this as a "guess" or "recognition"). Other than that, it's all very impressive but not fundamentally new. This is something different.  It shows more "creativity" than what you see in 99% of commercial graphic art; It shows deep...

What is the "self"? Among proponents of mindfulness and Zen, it is common to say that the "self" is an illusion - that the "self" does not really exist. Such talk leads us immediately into paradox, but Zen loves paradox. Vast amounts of ink are spilled in discussions about how, if the self doesn't exist, who or what it is that knows it doesn't exist. The self seems to be a matter of daily experience. Saying it's an illusion is little more than an attention-getting opinion or a device to sell books. To me, the problem seems to be a shortcoming of language. I just read a treatment of this issue that purported to solve it all by claiming that the self is a verb not a noun . This poor individual was trying to tackle one of the hardest problems in the world using his tenuous grip on the grammar he learned in school. He dimly perceives that the "self" is not an ordinary "thing", so he concludes it must be the only other kind of g...