dhewi.co.uk

In the nineteen-nineties, there was a small chain of shops devoted to men who wished to be, or seem to be (both were catered for), women. I discovered this after reading the autobiography of the transgender owner, part of an exploration that was very important in my life. Visiting the shop in London blew my mind. There’s no doubt in my mind that if things then had been like they have been in the twenty-twenties, I would have gone the whole way down the gender reassignment road, the sheer inevitability carrying me....

Wrestling with the theory of Artificial Intelligence is not a new thing. Two books have occupied space in my head for many years now that still have some of the best questions, at least – The Emperor’s New Mind Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid What they have in common is that they attempt to deal with consciousness, and they take Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem as a basis for it....

Dusk is later than it was, And, waiting on the path outside karate, It isn’t dark, just getting grey. As we wait, the air is full of shrieks, Cries and clouds of shapes around the tallest trees. The rooks are busy, noisy, crowded, And possibly the tree above us is their pub, With all the noise their sharing of the week. I have no clue what any rooks are doing....

If you like, feel free to abandon this post and read this instead: Beyond Elon Don’t worry, the title is basically clickbait, but the essay itself is very good, and says what I’d like to say myself, very well. If you’re still here, or have come back … When I was at school, the teachers loved me. I was the kind of child they went into the career for. I came from nowhere, a family with no expectations that had nobody with a university background, and I picked up pretty much everything effortlessly....

We humans think we’re great. We also think that what humans are good at must be most important, and overestimate how good we are. When evolution arrived as a theory, it had a tough job convincing everybody, as is well known. Scepticism runs deep about it even now, partly because it’s deeply unintuitive. Looking at the world, we see that it’s full of amazingly functional things working together. Considering that we, as humans, spend a lot of our time trying to create functional things, it’s very difficult not to imagine that what we see is deliberately designed to do what it does....