Programmers will be replaced by whatever the superintelligence makes out of their atoms.

Fancy a fuck? Fancy a fight? My tree! My tree!

JPI Modula-2 was my first proper compiler on my childhood PC! I loved it, it was nicer to use than either Turbo Pascal or C.

I actually bought my first ever hard disk (a mighty 10MB as I remember, more storage than I'd ever be able to use), for something like £200, an absolute fortune to an adolescent in 1986, just so that I could install modula-2 permanently in the machine and could stop swapping compiler floppies and program floppies all the time.

But when I first got access to UNIX boxes as a postgrad there was C but no Modula-2, so I switched to C, which could do everything Modula-2 could do except it was a bit more fragile and treacherous.

Who cares? And how would we tell?

I care, because getting it wrong in either direction is bad.

Brain uploads will bring significant benefits regardless of if they are conscious.

Thinking "this brain upload is conscious" when it isn't, means we'll get an empty future where the lights are on and nobody's home.

Thinking "this brain upload isn't conscious" when it is… I've not seen most of Black Mirror, but it is the plot summary of many episodes given on Wikipedia. Also of the Westworld TV show, which I have seen. Some of the characters in the We Are Bob series.

How would we tell, is, unfortunately, a complete unknown at this point.

Apparently not. And I am slightly surprised by that.

Oh God, yes! I'm old enough to remember when people thought it was important to have quiet and privacy to think.

I used to love my job. All my life I've loved programming, and I used to love being able to solve other people's problems for them by doing the thing I love.

And I used to love being surrounded by other people who were interested in the same things as me, all collaborating on a project to make something useful.

The open-plan curse killed it for me. For years I've done as little paid work as I can get away with because I hate trying to think in an open-plan horror so much. It's like having my brain in a blender.

I still program, and think, a lot, but I only do it for other people when I need the money.

Christ, this is supposed to be for people with no spoons, and yet one of the recipes is: "Peanut Butter On A Spoon". Could they not be bothered to get someone to proof read it?

They are probably referring to Spoon Theory:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory

If you don’t have a spoon you probably should get one. I don’t think you can cook without at least 1 utensil, unless you want to stir with your fingers.

If I had to pick up one utensil it would probably be a knife. Not safest for eating, but still most versatile option.

Made the same point in different words. Was voted down.

Presumably he doesn't care. How's his poetry?

He gets a standing ovation at the end, which is nice to see.

Apparently this was released by accident and the youtube copy has been set to 'private', but luckily some quick-witted person downloaded it and has put a copy where it can be found.

I made a copy of that with:

$ wget https://files.catbox.moe/qdwops.mp4

and I'd be happy to stick that somewhere if this one disappears.

Just in case anyone needs to be reassured that this is a thing that can be believed by at least two people, I endorse what he's saying here wholeheartedly, and I don't think we've got very long left at all.

Timescales are the dodgiest bit of this whole argument, and all we have is intuition, but I'd be absolutely amazed if humanity still existed in ten years time, and pleasantly surprised if we make it to the end of this year.

Thank you for sharing.

Basically: "Move fast and break things" is a mindset that could destroy the future of humanity. When the fast movement is unbridled and little-understood AI advancement, the "things" could be humanity itself. Scary stuff.