Even at the individual level, yes. I read somewhere recently, can't remember where, that the concept of "I" may have occurred as a consequence of developing the concept of "you", "us" and "them". So being able to have virtual humans in your brain inevitably makes you reserve one of them to represent yourself, and it starts to feel special.
A counterfeit $100 bill may be indistinguishable from a real one. A stolen $100 bill may be indistinguishable from a real one.
The measurable physical mechanics of rape may be indistinguishable from consensual sex. The King of England is indistinguishable from a normal human. In each of these cases, the specialness of the item is culturally constructed by humans.
And in each of these cases, it would be catastrophic to humans if we disregarded that construct.
The consequences of treating an information construct as an entity with rights and moral standing would be so terrible that I hope people who yearn for it lose their rights.
You do realize that your line of examples can easily be extended with e.g. "A negro may be nigh indistinguishable from a normal human, and yet..."?
> The consequences of treating an information construct as an entity with rights and moral standing would be so terrible that I hope people who yearn for it lose their rights.
"The consequences of treating Jews as people with the same rights and moral standing than normal upstanding citizens would be so terrible that the people who advocate for it should, by all fairness, lose their own rights for suggesting such an atrocity".
But you indeed point to an important reason why pursuing the human-like AGI may be immoral: the purpose of all machines, automata, computer programs, etc. is, after all, is to be the perfect slaves for us, convenient, subservient and disposable. For things that are undeniably non-sentient, this is fine. But if we ever manage to make truly conscious AI, well. Either we'll engage in essentially slavery on a global, industrialized scale never seen before, or we would grant them equal rights — which defeats the whole raison d'être of inventing them.
Apparently, asking ChatGPT for a meal plan is now the first step toward abandoning friendship, craft, parenthood, and the sacred wobbliness of the human soul.
When I start thinking we programmers are the most pedantic people around, I just look at some writers and feel a little better.
For me the Year of the Linux Desktop is every year since around 2000.
I dual booted Windows since 95, also tried Mac OSX on $job but nothing comes close to the peace of mind of using Linux.
I have lived through spotty hardware support (fixed), install editing too many files (fixed), no games (fixed) and several other problems, but even in the worst of times it is a software that respects you as a user.
I know Github stars are not the best way to measure the importance of a project, but 675 seems a little too low for what seems like the main property testing library on Java.
Maybe it's because property testing is not that popular?
Let's hope that hitting a scaling wall and less money to spend will begin redirecting efforts to optimize inference and get the same results with less compute.
Boomer comparison, but I remember the 8 bit computer era when the hardware was what it was so the later games of that era used hardware better than previous ones.
Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
Also they used languages with dynamic typing like Python & JS. In my experience a statically typed codebase is easier to maintain for humans so maybe it is also for agents.
When using Codex/Claude Code with Go code I cannot count the times the agent does some change, runs a build to check for errors, find some and fix them.
It's crazy to me that people think of Python as dynamically typed by default. Strong static typing has been an option in Python for years now, and it should just be the default.
"The Python runtime does not enforce function and variable type annotations. They can be used by third party tools such as type checkers, IDEs, linters, etc."
Which third-party enforcement mechanism do you propose become the default?
The python type hints are useful for static analysis (and yes, should be the default) but it’s a joke compared to the utility of types in a language like Haskell.
Typing with tools like Pyright doesn't come close to providing what a good statically typechecked language provides.
There are many reasons for this. A big one is that many libraries are only partially typed at best, and dynamic types tend to propagate, weakening the guarantees you get from type checking.
Dynamic idioms in general, including something as common as string-indexed dictionaries, negate type checking. Runtime metaprogramming is the same. All of these things have equivalents in a good statically checked language, but Python doesn't follow those models.
Fundamentally, in Python static typing is an optional analysis layer over a dynamic language, and the consequences of that can't be fully mitigated. The result is a big difference in what types can guarantee.
TypeScript had this _exact_ same problem when it started out. As more libraries add annotations, the ecosystem will become stronger, and it will eventually be about as good as a "real" statically typed language.
> Dynamic idioms in general, including something as common as string-indexed dictionaries, negate type checking.
Do you have any proof of this? It hasn't been a problem in TypeScript, and I doubt it's an issue in Python
Go read some books from The Culture, better series than the Dune.
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