People smoke for different reasons, and have different experiences.
Separating medicinal use from recreational is far from trivial.
I can pretty much assure you that someone who smokes every day is not having the same experience as you, judging their life based on your experience makes no sense.
Yeah, I'll definitely figure it out. I'm actually a fairly positive person. It's just that the brain chemicals distort my thinking, unfortunately. I'm working on a few things, and going through exercises to retrain my brain. My main issue is lack of direction. Lately, I've been happy making generative art and building things in Blender. But, I'm not sure how to turn that into something that's useful or productive.
I would say to hell with useful, being useful is for tools, focus on happy/excited and that will eventually lead to the right place.
Feeling that you have a role to play, a unique contribution to society that is appreciated, is not really the same thing as useful. But it's where you want to aim. And that includes figuring out what you are supposed to do, which is where joy/excitement plays an important role as a guide.
Letting other people's expectations define your life will never work, enough people have tried and failed by now.
That might be part of the trouble. I have a similar drive to always be productive. I'm not sure how to describe it other than I get depressed when I have nothing to accomplish. Maybe making generative art in itself is good enough but if you need a goal, maybe turn it into some kind of charity exercise.
Maybe go back to your appalachian roots and chop some wood or whittle some sticks. I've found it therapeutic.
This is probably one of the things that you can and should take a lot of time with. Being suicidal is not an entirely rational place, so you cannot completely rely on your own thoughts and feelings, that's why it can be so difficult to deal with. If you are a "better version of yourself" today than yesterday, or improving other people's lives even if it's just one more person's overall, you are already making a positive difference!
It's definitely part of what cognition is, hallucinogens/meditation/etc allows anyone to verify that much.
Intuitively cognition is several systems running in tandem, supervising and cross checking answers, likely iteratively until some threshold is reached.
Wouldn't surprise me if expert/rule systems are up for some kind of comeback; I feel like we need both, tightly integrated.
There's also dreams, and the role they play in awareness, some kind of self reflective work is probably crucial.
That being said, I'm 100% sure there is something in self awareness that is not part of the system and can't be replicated.
I can observe myself from the outside, actions and reactions, thoughts and feelings; which begs the question: who is acting and reacting, thinking and feeling, and what am I if not that?
Not the same technology at all, until recently at least.
EDIT: Looks like I hurt someone's feelings by killing their unicorn. It was going to happen sooner or later, and pretending isn't very constructive. In fact, pretending this technology is reliable is a very risky thing to do.
Building the software is usually like 10% of the actual job, we could do a better job of teaching that.
The other 90% is mostly mushy human stuff, fleshing out the problem, setting expectations etc. Helping a group of people reach a solution everyone is happy with has little to do with technology.
Mostly agree. Until ChatGPT, I'd have agreed with all of that.
> Helping a group of people reach a solution everyone is happy with has little to do with technology.
This one specific thing, is actually something that ChatGPT can help with.
It's not as good as the best human, or even a middling human with 5 year's business experience, but rather it's useful because it's good enough at so many different domains that it can be used to clarify thoughts and explain the boundaries of the possible — Google Translate for business jargon, though like Google Translate it is also still often wrong — the ultimate "jack of all trades, master of none".
We're currently in the shiny toy stage, once the flaws are thoroughly explored and accepted by all as fundamental I suspect interest will fade rapidly.
There's no substance to be found, no added information; it's just repeating what came before, badly, which is exactly the kind of software that would be better off not written if you ask me.
The plan to rebuild society on top of this crap is right up there with basing our economy on manipulating people into buying shit they don't need and won't last so they have to keep buying more. Because money.
The worry I have is that the net value will become great enough that we’ll simply ignore the flaws, and probabilistic good-enough tools will become the new normal. Consider how many ads the average person wades through to scroll an Insta feed for hours - “we’ve” accepted a degraded experience in order to access some new technology that benefits us in some way.
To paraphrase comedian Mark Normand: “Capitalism!”
To extent I agree, I think that's true for all tech since the plough, fire, axles.
But I would otherwise say that most (though not all*) AI researchers seem to be deeply concerned about the set of all potential negative consequences, including mutually incompatible outcomes where we don't know which one we're even heading towards yet.
* And not just Yann LeCun — though, given his position, it would still be pretty bad even if it was just him dismissing the possibility of anything going wrong
Separating medicinal use from recreational is far from trivial.
I can pretty much assure you that someone who smokes every day is not having the same experience as you, judging their life based on your experience makes no sense.
reply