I think this is an excellent point. I believe the possibility of 'computing' a conscious mind is proportional to the capability of computing a meaningful reality for it to exist in.

So you are begging the question: Is it possible to compute a textual, or pure symbolic reality that is complex enough for consciousness to arise within it?

Let's assume yes again.

Finally the theory leads us back to engineering. We can attempt to construct a mind and expose it to our reality, or we can ask "What kind of reality is practically computable? What are the computable realities?"

Perhaps herein lies the challenge of the next decade. LLM training is costly, lots of money poured out into datacenters. All with the dream of giving rise to a (hopefully friendly / obedient) super intelligent mind. But the mind is nothing without a reality to exist in. I think we will find that a meaningfully sophisticated reality is computationally out of reach, even if we knew exactly how to construct one.

Is anybody working on learning? My layman's understanding of AI in the pre-transformers world was centered on learning and the ability to take in new information, put it in context with what I already know, and generate new insights and understanding.

Could there be a future where the AI machine is in a robot that I can have in my home and show it how to pull weeds in my garden, vacuum my floor, wash my dishes, and all the other things I could teach a toddler in an afternoon?

You can show to LLM how you expect your problem to be solved and it will adhere to the example you demonstrated within the context. If it can be done with textual AI I don't see why it shouldn't be possible for emodied ones.

This is where the robotics industry wants to go. Generalist robots that have an intelligence capable of learning through observation without retraining (in the ML sense). Whether and when we'll get there is another question entirely.

It would be great to put Carmack and Moxie in a room to discuss low level software.

To do that we would need society to agree about what the emission cost is.

Making electricity so abundant and efficient is probably more solvable. You can’t solve stu… society

I don’t know why there aren’t full fledged computers in a GPU sized package. Just run windows on your GPU, Linux on your main cpu. There’s some challenges to overcome but I think it would be nice to be able to extend your arm PC with an x86 expansion, or extend your x86 PC with an ARM extension. Ditto for graphics, or other hardware accelerators

There are computers that size, but I guess you mean with a male PCIe plug on them?

If the card is running its own OS, what's the benefit of combining them that way? A high speed networking link will get you similar results and is flexible and cheap.

If the card isn't running its own OS, it's much easier to put all the CPU cores in the same socket. And the demand for both x86 and Arm cores at the same time is not very high.

Yes, with pci-e fingers on the ‘motherboard’ of the daughter computer. Like a pci-e carrier for the RPI compute.

Good point about high speed networking. I guess that’s a lot more straightforward.

You may be interested in SmartNICs/DPUs. They're essentially NICs with an on-board full computer. NVIDIA makes an ARM DPU line, and you can pick up the older gen BlueField 2's on eBay for about $400.

> full fledged computers in a GPU sized package

.. isn't this just a laptop or a NUC? Isn't there a massive disadvantage in having to share a case or god forbid a PCIe bus with another computer?

Very much agree, I first encountered the idea of an engineering team ‘diva’ or ‘prima donna’ on the zipcpu blog. The archetype immediately resonated with me because I could see it in myself and in others, especially the high potential, high talent people. Fortunately I work for a team full of high performers and I can learn a lot from them and get along just fine, because above all we are kind to one another. We also happen to kick ass and ship systems but it’s a lot more fun to do it with a team you can genuinely like working for. I am the team lead but all the important results come from ICs so I work for them, really.

Maybe orange man will abolish the FCC because rules are inefficient

He won't abolish the FCC. It is too efficient at attacking his enemies.

looking at his policy to China and Russia, maybe his enemies are not what we thought

His enemies are Americans that don't bow down.

Suddenly, Microsoft makes perfect sense!

Point 1 is why growth/debt is not a good economic model in the long run. We should have a care & maintenance focused economy and center our macro scale efforts on the overall good of the human race, not perceived wealth of the few.

If we focused on upkeep of older vehicles, re-use of older computers, etc. our landfills would be smaller proportional to 'growth'.

I'm sure there's some game theory construction of the above that shows that it's objectively an inferior strategy to be a conservationist though.

I sometimes wonder how the game theorist would argue with physics.