@freudiandip Wait. What is sápmi? Quick Google search and it sounds like it’s a hybrid language you eternal winter people use but I’m probably wrong. Never heard of it until now.

@myfuckinggod Thank you. I just checked Urban Dictionary. You learn something new every day.

He meant to say ‘sweety’. I love posts like these where one word turns the whole thing into a total train rack.

God must be pleased because ‘Turkey Baster Boob Virgin Mother with Burrito Wrapped Child’ is about as far from realism as humanity can get.

Thank you for helping me start my diet today. I imagined my food screaming at me while I cooked it and decided to have a light salad instead.

Only children are the meanest. They never had siblings to help them develop their clapback immune systems so when teased they don’t rib playfully, they tear jugulars ferociously.

I was thinking the same thing. It seems Newton did it because he was interested in understanding vision, optics and color. Sticking the needle (or bodkin, as the device was called) into areas around his eyeball allowed him to push on it, distort his vision, and see various effects. A Czech scientist named Purkyne did a similar experiment and saw ‘phosphenes’, those weird fractals you see when you rub your eyes too hard. He later went on to be called one of the founding fathers of neuroscience. Fun articles about both here: (1) https://jsaulburton.com/2014/07/27/isaac-newton-his-eye-and-his-bodkin/; (2) https://psmag.com/social-justice/newtons-needle-scientific-self-experimentation-86583

@guest_ Trust me. Fear has everything to do with it for me. I would vastly prefer the option that you mentioned where an advanced machine follows programmed orders versus sentient AI for the time being (or even a long time) until we figure out how to deal with the singularity if and when it comes.

@guest_ But here’s the thing for me: The upside of ‘machines might not even have physical bodies or might treat us with the same casual indifference as we do to animals’ doesn’t even come close to the downside of ‘machines might create very physical if not invulnerable war-machine bodies for themselves and treat humans with the same hostility as we do to animals’. We don’t know, good or bad, what happens after the singularity but, in my mind, the negative outcomes seem to far outweigh the positive ones. I don’t know if preventive measures are being (or even can be) put in place for downside protection. I have no issues with using AI to, say, solve energy problems or help us travel through space. But a sentient AI that’s infinitely smarter than its creator - a creator whose very history is defined by the strong killing off the weak - seems like nothing but bad news.

*electronically hugs @bethorien* Its not much, but I hope it helps until you actually do.