That's true, you don't need to be a practitioner of science to live a modern and fulfilling life.
Are you trying to argue that some things I consider valuable were first developed within religion (which I won't argue with, though I think there's more to dig into there than might be immediately obvious), or that I need to personally practice religion to live an ethical and fulfilling life, and I just don't realize it?
Because, if it's the latter, you're again refusing to consider the possibility that I don't need religion. And again, my argument isn't even that that isn't true, though I fervently believe that, it's that telling me that I'm wrong and I need religion even if I don't think I do is a terrible way to convince me that we can find common ground.
the contradiction is with the words - ethical:religion ~ modern:science.
ethics comes from religion. modernity comes from science.
if you say - "I don't need religion to tell me not to kill people"
then i say - "ok. so, why don't you go around killing people?"
you say - "i just don't have the desire to". or "i am compassionate"
i say - "ok. you do you. what about me? I wish to kill people. what's stopping me?"
you say - "consequences. police. law & order"
i say - "so if there was no police in a suburb, or no punishment for killing, I can kill people?"
Your argument falls dead.
Because religion tells us one thing - the law of Karma - there is no place or time in the universe where an action does not have a consequence. Regardless of your belief in God or the soul or spirit or afterlife or past lives.
Almost sounds like newton drew inspiration from the old golden rule - Treat others as you'd like to be treated.
Why? Because every action has an equal and opposite reaction - you WILL be treated exactly as you treated others, whether in this life or the next. Ergo, if you don't want to be killed, don't kill. if you want to be killed, go ahead.
And I can attribute something you enjoy today to a butterfly, flapping its wings on the shore of the Atlantic, seventeen years ago. People love to take a selective view of complex systems (for example, by picking only some nodes in the web of causality to call "attribution"), using biases like "relevance" and "significance" and "a non-omniscient positionality", and many especially love to call other views "ignorant" or "short-sighted".
what if kings attacking and burning down libraries of advanced civilizations (Nalanda, Alexandria) is a way for humans to reset the world's knowledge, because we got bored of our achievements and want to start from scratch ?
I mean, it's most likely because you have an absolute shit load of numbers/contacts in your phone. In the old days people just had rolodexes filled with numbers and if that disappeared they were just as screwed.
I remember a few numbers of my most direct contacts and depend on backups for everything else.
> If AI can do everything and gets everyone out of jobs
Not everything - Many things.
Not everyone - Many ones.
The people who cannot compete fade out, and the ones that are left reap the benefit of the machines.
Just like one farmer reaps the benefit of a tractor that replaced 20 laborers.
The earth population keeps reducing until it is kinda a vacation resort for 100 billionaires + others who work for them + machines.
Then some politician who promises to be a voice for the people uses force/army to kick the billionaires out, redistribute the wealth, and then the population increases and the cycle continues.
This has been happening and will continue to happen until the heat death of the universe. (and then repeat after it gets created again).
Early stages of any major disruptive technology will have hype due to get-rich-quick folks. Dot-com boom & bust of 2000 is similar. But the underlying technology (internet) defined our lives forever.
I don't know why people are comparing the Day-1 of one technology with the Day-1000 of another. Yes, AI is useless in many fields - NOW. But you can't imagine doing any work without in a couple years.
Like the kids used to ask - 'How did they build Google without Google?'
Now their kids will ask - 'How did they build chatGPT without chatGPT'?
ChatGPT has been around for 4 years at this point. Not very long, but I’ve heard of the ‘imagine what it’ll do in one year’ spiel quite a few times by now.
The “Internet” was a DARPA-funded research curiosity initially. It was not crammed down people’s throats like a roll of Oreos while advocates screamed that, “You like this, right‽ This is the future! You have to like this, what is wrong with you?”
Transformers were treated like any other ML technique until Sutskever decided to just go big on training it. That it can look like a compelling simulacrum, I am not arguing, but this thing left the ivory tower of research prematurely and recklessly. We are all going to pay for it.
2 things - it’s not day 1 for AI, and it’s also not dot-com (which dropped the nasdaq 80% btw). It’s the entire American economy right now. When it can’t deliver anything approaching its hype, just like all the data centers that can’t deliver on power, the profit margins that can’t deliver, and the promises of massive 500% revenue increases this fiscal year… sorry, I was raised in a cult and know what the fuck I’m seeing, sadly among a lot of otherwise intelligent people here.
I expect I’ll be using LLMs now and in the future, but the public is far more right about the companies and the people running them than the tech “insiders” here.
My first job was a SQL DBA.
15 years and 5 companies later, this startup I'm at (which got acquired recently), still uses SQL Server. It has stood the test of time.
"I personally don't find science necessary to live a modern and fulfilling life"
(I say, as I type using a computer on the internet)
People love to remove attribution when it suits their short-sighted view.
Just as you can attribute something I enjoy today to science, I can attribute something you enjoy today to religion.
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