It's a Terrible Beauty We've Made

[mundens]

Spandau Ballet's Through the Barricades just happens to be one of my favourite songs. Maybe because it makes me think of my first love, and the problems we had with her family and living in what, for a little white boy like me, was a war-zone. You saw 8 Mile? That coulda been something like me if the family hadn't moved from Porirua. At that time

Comments

[exiledinpn]

Finally, do people remember L. Sprague Du Camp & Fletcher Pratt's humourous The Mathematics of Magic, in which mathematically capable psychologists at a private psychiatric hospital in 1940s Middle America discover how to adjust reality via symbolic logic?

Yes - I have the complete collection somewhere around here, though its horribly dated. As for the idea, Lovecraft toyed with it as well (in e.g. Dreams in the Witch House), and I prefer his version.

[drowninghail]

If there's interest I may dig out a photo from that period so you can see just how uncool I looked.

There is interest. Bring out the photos! :-)

[ferrouswheel]

I suspect a "pre-Turing" test for human-like AI's will become "Can this creation experience a humour response?", or in different words, "Can this creation experience pleasure at a surprising pattern recognition result?"

I suspect that something better than the Turing test for testing an AI would be an AI that'd make people laugh. It wouldn't be too difficult to get an AI to experience "pleasure" from detecting patterns.