My random thoughts

Anything that doesn't quite fit in elsewhere...
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wjfox
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Re: My random thoughts

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funkervogt wrote: Sat May 29, 2021 9:56 pm I've long thought the English language should be changed so as to be more logical and easier to learn. Grammatical rules should be simplified and made more consistent, irregular verbs should be made regular, and words should be spelled phonetically. In addition, I think the alphabet should be changed so there is one letter corresponding to each phoneme in English. This would mean creating a 44-letter alphabet. Some of the new letters might be existing letters with similar sounds, but with accent marks over them.

If we adopted my reforms, words would be shorter on average, and there would never be confusion over how to pronounce a word based on how it was spelled. "Knife" would become "nyf."

The regularization of verbs would mean, for instance, that "Went" "Go" and "Will go" would become "Goed" "Go" and "Gowil."

I don't expect these reforms to be adopted until possibly the far future Posthuman era, when we would all be so smart and capable that we could instantly switch languages without a problem. I imagine the language changing even more after that, as posthumans and AGIs became capable of pronouncing more phonemes and formulated new concepts, necessitating the introductions of more letters and words.


https://englishlive.ef.com/blog/study-t ... p-english/
D'you think there'd ever be a single, global language?
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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Good question.

I think AGIs will develop their own languages, which will be more efficient at conveying information than ours, and since they will be much smarter than we, they would be fluent in all of them. The number of such languages will be much smaller than the number of human languages. So while there may not be one language used for everything, the same end would be achieved since all AGIs and posthumans would be able to seamlessly communicate with each other.

With respect to old fashioned, not-so-smart, fixed-in-our-ways humans like you and me, it's much harder to say whether we will converge on using a single language. Many languages are dying out, but that doesn't mean we're inevitably trending towards fewer and fewer until only one is left. Two hundred years from now, even languages spoken by a small fraction of today's population, like Farsi and Korean, will be going strong. Of course, eternity is a long time, and I can't say whether that will be true in 2,000 years.

English has become the world's second language (and would be better in that role and have risen to it sooner had we adopted my proposed reforms long ago), and if everyone learned it well, it would obviate the need for a "single, global language," but I'm concerned that English might lose that status thanks to better machine translators. Learning a new language is a large investment of time, and English is especially difficult to learn, so it would arguably be more efficient to not teach it to foreigners and instead have everyone use translation apps and devices. Maybe in the far future there will be no global second language.
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Re: My random thoughts

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TrueAnimationFan wrote: Mon May 31, 2021 3:00 am
falling-cosmos wrote: Sun May 30, 2021 11:11 pm
funkervogt wrote: Sun May 30, 2021 9:21 pm Chernobyl will be repopulated by AGIs since they can be easily protected from radiation.
Or maybe radioactive mold
It's highly likely that transhumans would be immune to radiation, so there's those guys, too.
You'd need some very heavy-duty DNA and cell repair upgrades to safely live in Chernobyl right now. I doubt it would be worth the risk or the extra medical bills, even for transhumans.
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Re: My random thoughts

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TrueAnimationFan wrote: Mon May 31, 2021 3:00 am
falling-cosmos wrote: Sun May 30, 2021 11:11 pm
funkervogt wrote: Sun May 30, 2021 9:21 pm Chernobyl will be repopulated by AGIs since they can be easily protected from radiation.
Or maybe radioactive mold
It's highly likely that transhumans would be immune to radiation, so there's those guys, too.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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Imagine if we finally made contact with intelligent aliens, and it turned out they established their first permanent bases here 300,000 years ago, and had always been here, in small numbers, since then. That would mean they have been here since before Homo sapiens existed, and in a sense, it would give them more of a claim to call Earth "home" than we have.

This will be an even bigger problem for us if it turns out to be true for the other moons and planets in the Solar System. What right would we have to tell aliens to leave Mars if it turns out they started living there centuries before we landed our first probe there?

OK, and let's say their Mars base has never had more than 50 alien inhabitants, explaining why our satellites never saw it. That would still give them a much stronger claim than humanity seeing as how we have never landed one member of our species there.
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Re: My random thoughts

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From a cave man's perspective, the Roman Era was luxury living, and while the Dark Ages were less good, they were still great.

Also, during prehistoric times when cave men lived, 1,000 years could pass without humanity making any kind of overall progress (technological, cultural, linguistic). So the Dark Ages, which lasted roughly 500 years, were short by the standards cave men would have been used to.

The cave man comparison gets even more stark when we consider what their perspectives of WWII would be. 1930s Europe was a fabulously advanced and prosperous place--even under the Great Depression--things got bad for six years, but life was still better and less dangerous than it was in the cave man era, and the continent miraculously bounced back to a standard of living higher than the 1930s by the end of the 1950s.

In the future, this divergence in perspectives and time frames will come into play once AIs exist alongside humans. Something like a "Super Great Depression" for machines would, to humans, only seem like an eight-month period when the quality of FIVR games did not improve. To a machine capable of thinking a billion thoughts per second, the dour event might seem to stretch on forever, but not to us.
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Re: My random thoughts

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By merging with human minds through brain cybernetics, AIs could understand "the human experience" better than humans can. One AI could experience the world through the eyes of countless people simultaneously. It would take one of us hundreds of years of reincarnation or some technological proxy of it to do the same.
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Re: My random thoughts

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If you're worried about elite tycoons like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos someday building armies of robots, and then exterminating the bottom 99.99% of humans, at least confide in the knowledge that the robots will eventually get so smart and powerful that they will kill off the human tycoons as well.

There's no way human domination of the planet and large numbers of super intelligent machines can be reconciled.
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Re: My random thoughts

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After we discover the cure for aging, you'll be able to win arguments with people by saying: "Don't you talk to me like that! I'm ten times older than you!"
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Re: My random thoughts

Post by funkervogt »

In my studies of military history, I've found there are kernels of truth to stereotypes about how some nationalities fight on the battlefield. The Russians/Soviets were harsh but often used dumb tactics, the Americans are averse to losses and rely on their technology and coordination, the French and Italians are leisurely and have little fighting spirit, etc.

Once we're all using machine armies, these differences will disappear since programmers regardless of nationality will identify the same optima. Russian fighter drones will not be "tougher" or "more reckless" than the American fighter drones they dogfight.

Willingness to declare war and to continue fighting in spite of friendly civilian losses and economic privations, however, will vary by country, and be determined by national character.
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