George Strakhov's Telescopic Essays

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.

出る杭は打たれる — the stake that sticks out gets hammered down. — Japanese proverb Every culture has a version of this sentence.

(Nyads and Dryads — Walter Crane, watercolour, date unknown) In his book "Superintelligence" (2014), Nick Bostrom outlined four likely "castes" or "species" of ASIs (artificial superintelligences): Tools, Oracles, Genies and Sovereigns.

"No man is a hero to his valet." — Anne-Marie Bigot de Cornuel There are two ways to read the phrase "android privacy," and both of them should keep you up at night.

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." — Carl Sagan Most mornings I make a cheese sandwich.

"Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..."

"The tools we use have a profound (and devious!)

"A city is not a tree." — Christopher Alexander My grandmother's garden in the countryside had no rows.

"My voice will go with you." — Milton Erickson There is a word I keep coming back to, mostly because it is ugly.

"The road up and the road down are one and the same." — Heraclitus Someone showed me the trick when I was about seven.

"You may be an ambassador to England or France... but you're gonna have to serve somebody." — Bob Dylan Three words that have been printed on hoodies, tattooed on forearms, spray-painted on overpasses, and used as the title of a mediocre gospel album by a…

"Precious metals and collectibles have an unforgeable scarcity due to the costliness of their creation." — Nick Szabo, "Bit Gold" (2005) I have spent most of the last decade rolling my eyes at Bitcoin.

or the gospel for those out of distribution If you were born in pre-modern times, the last thing you wanted to be was weird.

Artificial Intelligence is here.

Physics spent decades fighting over whether light was a wave or a particle.

An Etiological Framework of Biological and Cognitive Aging "How did you go bankrupt?"

The AI discourse is currently drowning in its own intellectual masturbation.

or why you should allow your LLM to get punched in the mouth The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard Feynman There is a difference between sounding smart and being smart.

I have no idea what the longer-term future of AI, software, humans, robots, and the world at large has in store.

I remember the first time I was truly hungry.

on the origin of a good line, two ways of creativity and how to make LLMs better at writing Part 1 (poetic): The soil and the sword How does a powerful line emerge?

In 1776, a group of rebellious colonists declared their independence from the British crown.

a proposed architecture for Freudian Agents Current agentic patterns: the assembly line, the org chart, the parliament Most agentic approaches and frameworks today are following the same basic pattern: Give LLM some goals and some tools.

In the beginning was the button.

The seemingly random string of nonsense words that we instinctively dismiss could be the key to understanding where human language ends and machine language begins.

There are two ways of dealing with the wind.

The most interesting things in life are not built, but born.

I find the best non-fiction writing to be fractal, or telescopic.

What happened to cells 541 million years ago is happening to software today.

A microconsciously independent digital organism (MIDO) lives in a datasphere, but is separated from it.

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them" Alfred Whitehead As I write these words – or rather, as an AI assistant collaborates with a human author to write these words – we're…

Is falling on our faces the only way of moving forward?

a thought experiment in playful living Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day - Ray Bradbury 1.

If you are interested in understanding the structural stability of any society, one useful question to ask is this: What is the unspoken agreement that the silent majority has with those in power?

There are many challenges on the path towards creating a generally intelligent society of mind (GISOM), which is the only viable AGI destination I can see.

While it's been a year since ChatGPT launch, the technology has actually been around for much longer.

There are lots of skeletons in the cupboard of civilisation.

Will our AIs stop believing in us if we give them the fire of free will?

Your own personal Jesus.

why the AI revolution will send us back to where we belong Once upon a time, about 150,000 years ago, something weird happened in the genes of our common grandmother, and she went a little cuckoo.

You are a gardener of letters, pixels, sounds, moves, bits, atoms, agents and ideas Creative fruit will grow in your garden if you allow the garden to grow it with you Your job is not to imagine the perfect Fruit and will it into existence Your job is to…

“My muse is not a horse and I am in no horse race and if indeed she was, still I would not harness her to this tumbrel — this bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes.

problems and principles of designing artificial decision-makers "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing.

Everything that you buy regularly today, you will keep buying indefinitely, unless an external force acts upon you.

Conflict, creativity and the function of art in times of crisis "While art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all. [...]

For Ecem, Christian and The Circuit, 020220104 Saying what you actually want to say is the hardest thing in the world.

For June, 020220103 I am inviting you to take a point of view at the world that I find both useful and amusing.

For Gavin, 020210703 There are at least two kinds of magic.