039 Uncertainty, Curiosity, AI + more

The Amazing Things & Ideas List

• The Limits of Certainty by William Pepera:
  
  "He told you he’d never leave you, didn’t he?
  
  Then how dare he go off and die like that.
  
  Sure, the cancer wasn’t his fault.
  
  But isn’t there more he could have done? More that I could have done?
  
  We know the world is uncertain. But that is too uncomfortable.
  
  We want declarations and contracts and promises.
  
  We want evidence that today will be just like yesterday, if we want it to be.
  
  We comfort ourselves with the illusion of certainty wherever we can.
  
  And this weakens us. It makes us complacent."
  
  — A Tweet thread by William Pepera
   
• Staci Hetzel on how rules squash creativity:
    

• From chatbot to Siri to THIS?! (AI has come far):
  
  DALL·E 2 (pronounced: "Dahl - E two") is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.
  
  If you input: "An astronaut playing basketball with cats in space as a children's book illustration";
  
  you get this marvelous picture created by artificial intelligence in a matter of seconds:

• 
  That's obviously not where it stops. If you haven't checked out their site yet, just click here and you'll be amazed.
  
  As awesome as it is, it isn't AGI, and not something that will magically extend and evolve into AGI. As David Deutsch writes in The Beginning of Infinity, 
  
  "The field of artificial (general) intelligence has made no progress because there is an unsolved philosophical problem at its heart: we do not understand how creativity works. Once that has been solved, programming it will not be difficult."
  
  For more on that point, read chapter 7 "Artificial Creativity" of the book or this article by David Deutsch.
   
• A mantra to follow from a songs lyrics:
  
  "I live my day as if it was the last
  Live my day as if there was no past"
  
  — Zara Larsson (Lush Life) 

All articles posted on my blog this week:

• "Being Doraemon’s Innovator":
  
  What if you could let the child learn, let the child’s imagination sparkle, let them think about important problems as problem solvers, and let them be innovators, all while letting them watch a cartoon series?
  
  This blog post explains how (among other things creativity related). 

  
  Read it here.

   
• "A marathoner’s prejudice against bad weather":
  
  An excerpt from the blog post:
  
  "Choosing the easy path (to think) may get us the humanly satisfaction to be able to arrive at a conclusion but not the truth."
   

  Read it here.

Thank you for reading.

Onward, 
Arjun

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