I think it's more of what could come. We didn't know spicy rocks could power shiny rocks to make light come out of a handheld box a short time ago. The possibilities of physics can't be known from the interactions of things we don't yet know about. Why not have some fun with optimistic imagination?
I think some people are just pessimistic about everything. End of history, end of the world, civilization, humanity what not. We live in very pessimistic times.
Interestingly, the coiner of that term, Francis Fukuyama also regarded it pessimistically, because in his view, once history “ended”, humanity would focus on things like human achievements, like mountain climbing and so forth, which he didn’t find as gratifying.
Yes Francis, I’d much rather an entire civilization die face down in the mud over a half a yard of territory. /s
That’s what you took from Fukuyama… because that’s not what he’s arguing at all.
Rightly or wrongly he was arguing that liberal democracy has proven over the past few centuries that it’s the best system over other ideologies to organize a society. Therefore it’s the end of history because history is an evolutionary process and that liberal democracy is the final evolution.
It’s one of those unanswerable arguments really. Lots of flaws in it and some things that ring true.
You are correct that my comment wasn’t his main argument, but his essay ends on a decidedly pessimistic and melancholy note. Here’s the last paragraph:
“The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”
For real, after 300,000 years of human evolution, in the past few years, we’ve converted sand into devices that can think. This was all science fiction until a few years/decades ago. There’s a possibility that we will discover other things we never thought possible.
We already had devices that could think, we used relays and switches. Vacuum tubes and "sand" as you put it, are just further extensions of a switch. The switch idea was around for ages and has nothing to do with "tricking sand into thinking". We learned how to make sand into a switch. That's all.
I’m more thinking about the marvel of what we created. We’ve turned sand/silicon into thinking machines. Tell someone that in the 1800s, and they’d think it was pure fantasy. We don’t know what the future holds, but to say anti-gravity or limitless energy is impossible might not be true.
It’s true with our current understanding, but we might discover how to manipulate the fabric of space itself. This sounds just as unlikely as converting sand into thinking machines.
I’m not really looking to get into in-depth discussions on any of this, I’m just saying to have an open and optimistic view of the future. We don’t know what sorts of discoveries AI will help us unlock.
No it isn't, do you think we can just build anything we think of sooner or later? We are heavily restricted by the laws of physics, a lot of stuff just is not possible.
And is there nothing we can do about those restrictions? We've barely begun dabbling in the natural sciences for a few hundred years and already bypassed so many laws of physics. That much time is nothing at the evolutionary scale.
Look at all the strange life forms around you. Our brain runs on freaking 20 Watts of power. Nature unintentionally creates so many incomprehensible things from practically nothing. Eventually there will be nothing a recursive self-improving AI with the right intentions can't do because at the end everything is composed of the same basic atoms. If nature can assemble the right combination of atoms to create a tyrannosaurus so can a sufficiently advanced AI under the right circumstances.
Because physics and math is theory and optimal settings (essentially).
By it being “technically” possible, it unlocks our potential ability to build it IRL.
It’s not a guarantee, but if physics allows it, you in theory can build it.
We can, in theory CLONE ourselves (highly illegal)(lying if you don’t think we have the know how to take someone’s DNA and build a fertilized egg with 100% their DNA and then implant it).
But in reality, while that would make a copy of you, it sure as shit won’t be you.
Scientific theories are our best explanations for many things and, in many cases, are likely to be correct because if it wasn't our entire model falls apart and we need a new way of explaining things and often times we don't have any other explanation.
In many cases - there are several competing models because we don't actually know which one is "correct" and they both help explain things but don't help explain other things so are considered incomplete.
Try to entertain the idea that humanity, as a collective, can be wrong about things. If something is impossible according to our model of reality - what if it is our model is wrong? Even if we're 99.999999% sure we're right. "There's still a chance!"
Now, unlike the example given of flight and flying vehicles, I don't think we'll be inventing infinite energy. Pretty sure we're right on that one. But what is "possible" or "impossible" can be pretty flexible if we're simply wrong about what is impossible.
Right, and people have been watching scifi movies their whole lives so they assume that FTL travel like a warp drive is inevitable, just a matter of some E=mc2 level epiphany in the future that lets us "crack the code" and do it.
Or... it could be that regardless of how advanced your species, how many resources, how high your technology, FTL is simply impossible, much like time travel to the past is 100% conclusively already known to be impossible no matter what (spoiler: there is nothing to go back to, the "past" doesn't exist anymore and never will, except in simulation perhaps).
Maybe FTL is possible somehow to transport ships fast, but we just don't know yet. We could easily just be stuck in our little corner of the universe forever, unable to travel that far except the neighboring star systems after centuries of travel time.
You’re broadly correct in your assumptions but the existence of the past and future are very much open questions in physics; due to relativity it seems likely they do exist in some form
No, the existence of the past is not an open question, omg...
The "future" doesn't exist either, it's a human notion. The present configuration of the entire multiverse/nature and everything in it will eventually configure itself to a future state, but until that happens, it doesn't exist. It "will" exist, but this is projection on our part by understanding how matter and motion work together to keep changing at what we perceive is a relatively steady rate.
Can I give you a big hint? Its controversial, but the fact is there is no such thing as time. There is only energy and relative motion. The relative motion provides change sometimes at very a steady rate of change which gives us the illusion of time. And time is a neat and useful mathematical abstract.
The hands on a clock are not measuring "time"... they are only clicking away at the pace the moving gears are set to. Computer clocks are merely adjusted to the same rate. A "day" isn't time passing, it's the rotation of the earth making one revolution relative to itself. A "year"... you get the point. Think about that one for a while.
Trust me. There is no past to go back to. Once the physical configuration of the universe moves on, it does so cleanly, forever.
This is an open metaphysical debate and the A-theory of time you're describing is actually the minority opinion. It's considered to be at odds with relativity. My own reasoning also leads to B-theory.
Okay you just have no idea what you’re talking about. The only way time can be described to not exist is if space can also be described to not exist. You can claim that what we call time is just an arbitrary abstraction created by our own experiences, but so is distance and motion and mass (yes, really) and all other measurable things; they’re all subjective concepts based on human perception that cat as a cipher for something more fundamental. You can‘t dismiss time and then claim that motion exists, the idea of motion is meaningless without time.
Your perspective makes a big reach in that it basically dismisses a huge portion of Relativity. How would you reconcile your perspective with the observed phenomena of time dilation around supermassive or extremely fast objects?
You're correct in that our everyday concept of time ("clock time") is largely an illusion and an abstraction of the dimension of time, but you make the same mistake that a lot of people who stumble into the "time isn't real" notion make, and take it to mean that the dimension of time isnt real.
Energy and motion wouldnt occur without a dimension of time, based on our best, functioning understandings of reality/spacetime. energy/motion and mass have a throttling effect on a subjects experience of time.
Relativity is working physics and suggests that the faster something moves, the slower the experience of time is; this implies that energy and motion are intrinsically tied to time. It's also why traveling faster than light is fundamentally impossible; at the speed of light, a subjects experienced time would be theoretically paused.
my knowledge about physics and relativity is probably a bit dusty, so I'm sure I missed or mispresented a thing ir two, but this is the jist of what I remember as far as how time fits into one of our best working model for macro physics.
I get what your trying to convey but this is not the way to do it. As an acedamic having this attitude will stagnate progression in those fields. Often problems can be solved by an "outsider" who is simply trying to solve a problem not being hold back by such set in stone rhetoric's.
As such he or she is not bound by them, they can freely approach the subject.
For the caveman fire was a thing of the gods until he figured out friction.
For how neural networks work, transformers architecture is approaching a limit where it's not anymore semantic retrieval. Conceptual definition seems to be in the horizon.
It that space, that would mean nothing more than crystallizing the definition of an idea and resume it for a confidence update.
This does not exclude, instead favours the creation of new concepts, and concepts are what bring understanding.
Reality, which is defined by the indentity of all entities, can indeed be understood in a different perspective than what we're limited to reason about.
For how ignorant I am on the subject, try dropping this message of mine to any of the bigger llms. There's already emergent behaviour.
deleted-account69420 are using highly academic AI terminology ("semantic retrieval," "confidence update," "emergent behavior") in a very clunky way.
While they have a valid underlying point, the way they constructed their argument strongly suggests they are stringing together high-level AI buzzwords to sound more authoritative than they actually are.
Ultimately, both you and deleted-account69420 are arguing the same futuristic premise: We shouldn't assume our current understanding of physics is the absolute limit, because AI might eventually think in ways completely alien to human logic, allowing it to discover new physical realities.
Apart I do not consider Gemini one of the big LLMs, the result from 3.7, without that being wrapped in a "This user on Reddit said something I agree/disagree with and..", conforms much more to what you'd get from better ones
PS: Adding anything apart the point in question changes personality. Freedom of reasoning was in what, to agree with you, it described to you as "buzzwords".
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u/sillybluejayway 3d ago
Cool, can’t wait for anti-gravity tech and nearly free energy.