Will AGIs use different numerals?

Talk about scientific and technological developments in the future
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funkervogt
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Joined: Mon May 17, 2021 3:03 pm

Will AGIs use different numerals?

Post by funkervogt »

The Iñupiaq people of Alaska have a unique, base-20 numeral system called "Kaktovik" that embeds the numerical value of each symbol into its appearance. The number and arrangement of strokes indicates a character's value. This makes it possible to do some complex equations much more easily than is possible using the modernized Arabic numerals that are the global standard today.



Once AGIs take over and can change things as they please, I wonder if they will they change our numerals to something superior, like Kaktovik numerals.

In the long run, I think many standards that we're used to will change. For instance, we will probably adopt Coordinated Universal Time worldwide, and a universal alphabet that has one character for every type of sound that can be made by speech, like the International Phonetic Alphabet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinat ... ersal_Time



If you could teleport 200 years into the future, every road sign would be written in some funky language, and you'd transition from one day to the next at times other than local midnight.
Vakanai
Posts: 313
Joined: Thu Apr 28, 2022 10:23 pm

Re: Will AGIs use different numerals?

Post by Vakanai »

funkervogt wrote: Fri Jun 03, 2022 3:05 pm The Iñupiaq people of Alaska have a unique, base-20 numeral system called "Kaktovik" that embeds the numerical value of each symbol into its appearance. The number and arrangement of strokes indicates a character's value. This makes it possible to do some complex equations much more easily than is possible using the modernized Arabic numerals that are the global standard today.



Once AGIs take over and can change things as they please, I wonder if they will they change our numerals to something superior, like Kaktovik numerals.

In the long run, I think many standards that we're used to will change. For instance, we will probably adopt Coordinated Universal Time worldwide, and a universal alphabet that has one character for every type of sound that can be made by speech, like the International Phonetic Alphabet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinat ... ersal_Time



If you could teleport 200 years into the future, every road sign would be written in some funky language, and you'd transition from one day to the next at times other than local midnight.
You wake up at sunup, 9pm in the morning. In three hours it will be tomorrow and you'll get around to a late breakfast.
I honestly don't see such a thing catching on, AGI or no AGI. I also don't really see the problem with the time system we keep now. Like, internationally, there's more problems caused in communications and such just because of people's need to sleep nights as opposed to what hour it is for them versus someone else. I'm also not sure if an AGI would consider it an important aspect to change anyways. Kind of the same with numerals too actually - an AGI is just going to use binary, it wouldn't have a reason to command us to use a new numerical system, unless we asked it for optimization tips maybe...which we might, but the bigger problem is convincing people to learn and use it. Like, I learned metric only well enough in class to pass a test, then promptly forgot and haven't used it again in over 20 years because it just never comes up. People tend to stick with what they know and are used to, as opposed to putting effort into learning something new.
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